Oslo

Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…

The call for papers for the 16th annual Instructional Technology Institute is now available online at http://itinstitute.usu.edu/. This year’s program is titled “Reusable media, social software, and openness in education.” Keynote speakers include Larry Lessig, Stephen Downes, and Paul Kirscher. If you’re faculty or a government employee, registration is only $135 for the three day conference, which includes meals! Please spread the word and I hope to see you at the conference in September!

I’m linking to a paper (half-paper, really, since I’ll be leading a discussion using it as springboard) including notes I will use to lead a discussion at the “Supporting student autonomy: students’ creation and reuse of learning objects” event at the University of Strathclyde later today. The focus is on social interaction around open content, from self-organizing and game theoretic perspectives. Thoughts welcome and appreciated.

I can’t make a “formal announcement” yet, as we’re still working on the official name (probably Open Sustainable Education) and other details, but I can safely say that we now have administrative approval and pilot funding in place for an OpenCourseWare type project (ala MIT) at USU. The USU collection will be specifically strong in agriculture (i.e., irrigation engineering, orchard development, etc. – Go Aggies!) but include resources from other university courses as well. Formal announcement coming soon… ...

Hot on the heels of news about Lessig, Stephen Downes has accepted our invitation to provide the opening keynote for the 16th annual Utah State Univeristy Instructional Technology Institute, ?Reusable media, social networks, and openness in education.? Remember, the conference dates are September 1-3, 2004. We’re hoping to see many of you there!

Planning is underway for the 16th annual Utah State Univeristy Instructional Technology Institute, “Reusable media, social networks, and openness in education.” As program chair, I’m very happy to announce that Larry Lessig will be the closing keynote for the conference which will run W-F, September 1-3, 2004. More information coming soon…

rtsp://barboursville.ed.usu.edu/oslo.sdp in your QuickTime player Also, jump on chat and send in your questions. iChat as educommons@mac.com or MSN as educommons@hotmail.com

Below is the rest of the info for the Friday meetings. We will spend the majority of the meeting on OLS, our MIT/OCW partnership. The Quicktime stream will be available at rtsp://barboursville.ed.usu.edu/oslo.sdp starting around 9:00am MST. I will be logged into iChat as educommons@mac.com and into MSN as educommons@hotmail.com to facilitate question asking by folks at a distance. If you need some other chat client, please let me know ASAP! Agenda below. ...

Due to the great response we had with people wanting to attend the meetings we’re holding this Friday, we will be broadcasting the meetings live via QuickTime. You can watch and listen to the meetings from the comfort of your own office and drop questions / comments to the moderator via iChat (or other IM) who will bring them up for discussion in the group. If you intend on participating, please drop a comment below and let me know what IM client you’ll be using so we can prepare appropriately. Preparatory documents will be available Wednesday.

In three parts: First, what are OLS and EduCommons? Second, what is the status of the projects? And third, what is the purpose of the January meetings? ...