November 2007
Open Ed at NCETC
Posted by karen on November 27, 2007 in Uncategorized
Tomorrow and Thurs. are the debuts of the new session on Open Ed in K-12 at NCETC. In just talking to a few people who’ve been in my workshops this week, there is a lot of interest in this.
If you’re in Greensboro, here are the times:
Wed., 4:30-5:30, Auditorium 2, Free Content + Open Tools + Massive Collaboration = Learning for All
and repeated at
Thurs.,10:15-11:15, Auditorium 2, Free Content + Open Tools + Massive Collaboration = Learning for All
If you’re not in Greensboro, the wiki for the presentation is here.
I’m also presenting on using mobile technology to differentiate instruction, podcasting, and using and creating mobile video. It will be two very full days! Stop by and say hi.
Tags: ncetc07 | awareness
OpenEd-Week 13-The Future of Open Education
Posted by karen on November 24, 2007 in Uncategorized
QUESTIONS: What will the future of higher education look like? What impact will the open education movement have? How will we get there from here? What will be the effects of open education movement upon K-12 education? (alessandro giorni)
First, thanks to Alex for the addition of the question about K-12.
I’ve given this question a lot of thought and don’t have a clear vision. I can think of many idealistic scenarios I wish would come true (open resources change the face of education; mass collaboration triumphs; transparency and competency-based education leads to a wholesale turnover in teaching practice; educational publishers are forced to change completely or die; students learn more as a result of all this) and a few nightmarish scenarios I fear could happen (the engineers and technocrats continue dominate OER discussions; instructors don’t embrace it; the whole thing implodes in a cloud of PDFs, license debates, and system specifications).
What will really happen? Unfortunately, education, both K-12 and higher ed, is a vastly bureaucratic and slow moving beast. The industrial-education complex, as I like to call it, resists change like no other institutional group I know. Most likely, OER will have no noticeable impact on formal education.
However, the realm of informal education is another matter entirely.
Informal education in the United States is alive and well. There are many educational opportunities available for lifelong learners, including state- or other agency-provided resources, libraries, and perhaps most importantly, the Internet. OER presents the opportunity to increase dramatically all of these resources, both in terms of quantity and quality.
Even if the “formal” OER community (higher ed courseware projects, Hewlett funded projects, etc.) implode under their own weight, there are a number of other open efforts that cannot be stopped. These include Wikipedia and all of its associated projects (Wikibooks, Wikiversity, etc.); other wikis such as Wikispaces, WikiEducator, etc.; user-generated content sites like YouTube, TeacherTube, MySpace, Facebook, and countless others; and a plethora of other brilliant web sites. These sites will continue to multiply, build strong communities, and improve in quality. This will be a huge boon for lifelong learners.
One question I have is whether all of these resources and the learning opportunities they present will at some point decrease the value of a traditional higher education degree? Especially as formal education gets even more removed from truly relevant content (critical thinking, collaborative skills, higher order thinking), will industry realize that a solid informal education and demonstration of real-world competencies outweighs a piece of paper from a university? I’d be interested in others’ thoughts on this.
In the developing world, the situation is different. Currently, informal educational opportunities are much more limited. This is the case for a number of reasons, including low literacy, low primary and secondary education rates, and low access to Internet connectivity. Current circumstances and OER together offer an opportunity to change all of this.
Foremost, Internet connectivity will dramatically increase in the developing world. Most likely, this will happen through mobile devices not desktops or laptops. And when the content flood starts, learning opportunities will explode. (A critical presupposition here is that early learning resources will be available, increasing literacy rates to be almost universal. Technology will bypass government bureacracies and other obstacles. I believe this will happen. It’s too important not to, and it isn’t that difficult especially with a open model.) Then will follow the dramatic expansion of user-generated content. What an empowered Africa and Asia will contribute to the world will make MySpace and Wikipedia look like baby steps.
There are many more people in the developing world than in the developed world, and those trends are accelerating. It is essential to the future peace and prosperity of the world that learning opportunities be expanded and that we finally achieve the long-espoused goal of universal education. Fortunately, it’s not necessary that this be done through formal educational institutions since they’ve proven unable to accomplish much. The wave of connectivity and informal learning won’t be stopped by anything, and the world will benefit as a result.
So I guess I have an optimistic outlook after all. :)
OpenEd - Spreading the word about OER
Posted by karen on November 20, 2007 in Uncategorized
In order to help spread the word about the benefits of OER and the wealth of resources available (as well as to try to increase the size of the contributing community), I’ve put together a short overview of Open Ed here.
(Any comments or suggestions are welcome.)
This will be used at a series of presentations I’ll be doing on Open Ed at various K-12 ed tech conferences. I know that this information will benefit the audiences I present to, and I hope that some of them will join the OER community and provide benefits there as well.
Tags: creative commons | oer | awareness
New OER course on CNX
Posted by karen on November 19, 2007 in Uncategorized
Here’s a new course on the in’s and out’s of OER put together by OER Commons and hosted on Connexions.
Free-Reading
Posted by karen on November 13, 2007 in Uncategorized
One of the most exciting OERs I’ve seen was recently launched: Free-Reading.net. This resource from the well-respected Wireless Generation (a for-profit company) is a collection of resources for early literacy skills development licensed under CC BY SA license.
The reasons I think this is notable are many. First, it is a resource targeted at primary education, an area almost wholly neglected by OER to date. Secondly, it is a very solid collection of research-based tools that are immediately usable to any early literacy teachers. In visiting this site, it is immediately obvious that the content has been developed by knowledgeable educators. It features student-directed activities and includes multimedia audio and video.
Another interesting thing about this site is that the Florida Instructional Materials Adoption Committee for K-3 Supplemental Reading Programs has recommended that this be adopted. This would be the first time an OER has been officially adopted by a government agency here in the US. (Note, however, that the requirements and surrounding politics for supplemental programs is much different than that for core materials. Still, this is a first step.)
Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger says “Schools still spend a huge chunk of their budgets – nationally, approximately 7 to 8 billion dollars per year — on textbooks and instructional materials. That leaves a much smaller pie that schools must stretch to purchase formative assessment, professional development, and other initiatives that help teachers do their jobs well. Free-Reading.net is a step toward changing these economics and freeing up funding for things that improve teaching and learning.”
FreeReading has also done an interesting job of moderating wiki collaboration and community building with the need for solid “quality-assured” content. While there are many places that visitors can add ideas of their own, everything is not editable. The core of research-driven content that has been written by educational experts is not open to visitor editing.
I think that this is essential for resources that are going to be used in public education. The potential for occasional senseless vandalism and the harsh consequences that educators (not to mention kids) could face as a result of inappropriate content is just too high. There are ways to moderate this, and Free-Reading provides a good model for this.
Tags: oer | reading
OpenEd-Week 11-Learning Objects Part 2
Posted by karen on November 11, 2007 in Uncategorized
The one part of the readings on learning objects that resonated with me was the talk of the “engineer invasion” of standards, metadata, taxonomies, systems, etc. The bottom line is that there is too much focus on structure, technology, and systems and not enough attention on learning, learners, and content.
Unfortunately, this problem is not unique to learning objects, but seems to be just as prevalent in OER.
In OER, there are more discussions about licenses, standards, and metadata than there are about content, learners, and outcomes. I believe that this needs to change if the OER is to be successful in fulfilling its enormous potential.
How can we change this? I am still looking for answers to this. Please post any ideas.
I work in K-12 education, and in that area, I think that a part of the solution is to build awareness. Very few primary and secondary educators know about Open Ed. We need to involve more classroom teachers that really know content, learners, and effective pedagogy. To do this, we need to increase the awareness for the OER movement and its potential. I think that if more educators know about OER, they will participate both as consumers and as producers.
Tags: b | oer | openedcourse2007week11
OpenEd-Week 11-Learning Objects Part 1
Posted by karen on November 11, 2007 in Uncategorized
QUESTIONS: Some people believe that open educational resources “fix” many of the problems experienced by those who work with learning objects. Why do you think they would say this? Do you agree? Why or why not?
After doing the reading for this week on learning objects, I am struggling to find something meaningful to say.
My primary thought after doing this reading is that if all the time spent discussing arcane definitions of learning objects and complex formulations of common sense observations was instead spent developing some useful educational resources, the world would be a better place. But then I never was much for academia.
As nearly as I can tell, learning objects are any reusable learning resources, which would include every textbook, lecture, video, web page, piece of software, etc. that any of us have ever used in a classroom or in an informal learning setting. I don’t see OERs to be fundamentally different except that they are open and sharable. How then would OERs “fix” the problems that people have experienced with learning objects? I don’t see any basis for this. Perhaps others in the class will shed light for me.
In my own work, I have created a library of what I suppose could be called “learning objects.” They are items like ebooks, mini-movies, audio recordings, activities, assessments, etc. for K-12 students. Some are licensed under open licenses; most are not. I don’t think their licensing has much bearing on their instructional value. I can see how the ability to customize learning objects can affect their value; however, in my work, we permit (and even facilitate) this regardless of how materials are licensed.
The reality is that 98% of instructors I have worked with choose not to customize materials even if they are given the option of having the work done for them. I think this is unfortunate, but it was been proven true over and over again in my experience.
I’m curious if any research has been done on to what degree existing OERs are actually modified for reuse. My suspicion is that not many are. In informal interviews with several experts in this area, I have heard several times that the overriding problem with most OERs is that they are not reused much at all.
Beyond this, I don’t believe that problems like a lack of common terms, the technical nature of specifications and standards, the lack of attention to pedagogy, and irrelevance of much of this to education are solved by OER. To the contrary, I think that the OER movement suffers from many of these same problems. More on that in the next post.
Tags: oer | openedcourse2007week11
OpenEd-Judy Breck article
Posted by karen on November 2, 2007 in Uncategorized
This is a good article on OER in education. It is interesting in that it ties into several of the books on the Open Ed reading list.
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