Stephen shared this video today on OLDaily. It’s a sad spoof of the impending collapse of the public school system in California. Hot for Teachers w/ Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green from Megan Fox I reblogged this video with the title “Stephen Gets His Wish” (with mostly humorous intent) based on his recent post, We Learn. In the post, Stephen describes the manner in which educational institutions are severely damaging children’s learning: ...
In response to an article about the death of instructional design, Stephen says… “there is not a (practical) sub-discipline that is (strictly) the design of instructional materials.” There are many parenthetical caveats in this statement, but it is still wrong. Stephen’s evidence for the argument that there is no discipline of instructional design? The success of sites like Common Craft, designed with an apparent indifference to instructional design principles (“The Lefevre’s have no instructional design background at all,” writes Schlenker) seems to me to be evidence of that. ...
Stephen links to some responses to the day-long pre-conference “event” we held in Vancouver. I was always befuddled that people wanted to come sit in on the conversation, but 50 or so did. Many more apparently watched the stream from a distance. David Porter seems writes, with surprise and disappointment: Watched the screencast this morning of the Wiley Downes Dialogue from OpenEd09. Couldn’t help thinking phase change when the discussion crisscrossed terrain that has been traveled many times before at various conferences, forums and meetings since about 2000. “It’s deja vu all over again,” as Yogi Berra said when describing repeated back-to-back home runs by Mantle and Maris in the early 60s. But it was more like veja du for me – I know I’ve been a party to these conversations countless times before. The discussions/arguments continue to hover around definitions, clarifications of terms, and wishful thinking about an education system that is what it is…. ...
Stephen recently suggested that the two of us sit down for a day-long conversation. I thought it was a brilliant idea. So on August 11, as a pre-conference event at this year’s Open Education 2009 in Vancouver, Stephen and I will sit down for a full day of conversation about anything and everything open education. We’ll open the conversation to the public, but this will be a serious conversation - don’t come looking for pot-shots and cheap one-liners. We’ll be transcribing the day’s conversation and publishing it as a book afterward. ...
Stephen says, “My argument is that if you require a letter of suipport from publishers, then publishers will immediately turn this into a cartel, which would mean that prices would not drop at all. You do not address this line of reasoning at all.” I’ll happily address it here, but Stephen’s comment also ignores my main point. First, let me deal with the suggestion that price will not drop at all. A content-complete openly licensed version of the book online is all the price control that is needed. The existence of this version controls price by providing an alternate mechanism for accessing the content. If you really want a printed version, and you can purchase one for $25, you’ll purchase one. If you really want a printed version, but you can only buy one for $75, you’ll just print out all the pages at Kinko’s and put them in a three-ring binder. More than one person will create and distribute (legally) a PDF that makes printing for your three ring binder really easy, and no one will purchase the $75 version from the publisher. The same is true for an audio version, etc. So the existence of the free version provides price control all by itself. If the publisher wants to sell books, those books have to satisfy Wiley’s magic formula of open book sales: ...
In this response I sample from Stephen’s latest contribution to our conversation about the noncommercial clause of CC licenses, Open Content, Enclosure and Conversion, simply because a complete line-by-line response would take too long. I will rely on Stephen to call me out if I have sampled in a manner that misrepresents him, which I have made an honest effort not to do. I use Stephen’s subheadings throughout to break up my response and help the reader find the corresponding material in Stephen’s original post. ...
Marc has recently done a great essay called Philanthropy on the Commons. Quoting part of the article: The funny thing is, Michael Edwards seems to think that the commons and business are at odds. “The problem is that these approaches are absent from the philanthrocapitalist menu”, he says. The facts say otherwise. Who are the top funders of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite. Who funds the creative commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high-tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu. ...