Openness and the Future of Higher Education- Call for Papers

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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David Wiley, via iterating toward openness, issued an invitation to contribute papers for the upcoming special issue of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) entitled “Openness and the Future of Higher Education.”

The projected publication date is October 2009. The Guest Editors are Dr. David Wiley and John Hilton.

The aim of this Special Issue is to further our understanding of the manner in which the open source, open access, and open education movements are now and will impact higher education organizations, learners, and other stakeholders in the future.

Our intent is to stimulate critical debate, encourage collection and analyses of relevant data, and add to the theoretical foundations used in policy and planning discussions related to openness within institutions of higher education. Special consideration will be given to articles that present analyses and interpretations of empirical data, but rigorous theoretical submissions will also be considered.

All submissions will be peer reviewed. Those submissions accepted for publication will be published under Creative Commons license in www.irrodl.org.

DEADLINE: Submission Proposals: January 15, 2009

Google to Shut Down Its Virtual World

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Jeffrey Young, via Wired Campus- The Chrnoicle, highlighted Google’s recent move to shutdown its virtual world known as Lively:

Some colleges and professors have been enthusiastic early adopters of virtual worlds, 3-D online environments that attempt to simulate some of the visual social cues of face-to-face interaction. They’ll soon have one fewer online playground to experiment with.

Thousands of Arizona State University students had served as the early testers of the online environment before it was publicly unveiled in July. But some scholars studying virtual worlds had been critical of Google’s strategy, especially its decision not to let average users freely create new online spaces in the world, as another popular system, Second Life, does.

Open Access and Developing Countries

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Peter Binfield, via PLoS, posted an interview he had with Niyaz Ahmed, PLoS ONE Section Editor for Microbiology and Genomics, who shared his opinion, inter alia, on significance of open access to developing countries. (Thanks to Open Access News) Snippet:

Developing countries are in great need of Open Access. The fruits of the scientific and technological revolution are not reaching them because they have to pay to receive the content. In an Indian case scenario, while the library budgets are dwindling, internet access has become affordable for masses, thanks to our technology driven economy. And that is where OA comes to enhance research productivity as well as the pace of discovery. Finally, I will say, that knowledge should not be kept bound. Knowledge is created to be open. It’s a free world! …

Digital Tipping Point- a Documentary on Free Culture Movements

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Cameron Parkins, via Creative Commons, draws attention to a documentary entitled The Digital Tipping Point, which explores how “the culture of sharing is spilling from the world of Free Open Source Software into the broader global culture.” The documentary posted over 80 digitized hours of  CC BY-SA licensed footage of “leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world.” The footage is available for free at their archive.org page:

The DTP crew describes their project as a Point-of-View (POV) documentary film about the rapidly growing global shift to open source software, and the effects that massive wave of technological change will have on literacy, art, and culture around the world.

The DTP crew says their project will be the first feature length documentary about free open source software to be built in an open source fashion out of video submitted to the Internet Archive….

The DTP crew invites you to take their video and rip, mix and burn it however you like, for whatever purpose you like. You can even use the footage for your own commercial film, as long as you release your final product under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.

Home Schooling goes Mainstream

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Milton Gaither, via Education Next, wrote a feature story about the growing popularity and contribution of home schooling in the education sphere. (Thanks to elearnspace) Snippets:

From 1999 to 2003, the number of home-schooled children grew by 29 percent; among minorities, home-schooled children increased by 20 percent despite a modest decrease in home schooling among Hispanics.

Home Education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement.

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of
minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies

A 2004 study of the home-school admissions policies of 72 colleges and universities found  that home schoolers were generally happy with the way they were evaluated and universities were happy with the performance and graduation rates of the home schoolers they admitted.

National Library of China joined World Digital Library

Published November 21, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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National Library of China and Library of Congress sign World Digital Library Agreement. (Thanks to Open Access News) Snippets from the press release:

The Library of Congress and the National Library of China have concluded an agreement to cooperate in developing the World Digital Library….

The two libraries agreed to provide content to the World Digital Library and to cooperate in such areas as the development and maintenance of the Chinese-language interface, the convening of international working groups to plan and develop the project, and the formation of an advisory committee of leading scholars and curators to recommend important collections about the culture and history of China for inclusion in the World Digital Library.

The Web-based World Digital Library, slated to launch in April 2009, is an initiative of the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions around the world in cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Other institutions participating in the project include major libraries from Brazil, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Russia, Serbia, and Sweden, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the John Carter Brown Library, and the libraries of Brown and Yale Universities….

The project will digitize and make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials of many cultures, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings and other materials of interest both to scholars and the general public.

Europeana Launched

Published November 20, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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The European Digital Library Foundation launched Europeana, the OA digital library of European literature, art, history, and culture.  (Thanks to Open Access News) Excerpts from the announcement:

…Internet users around the world can now access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the EU’s 27 Member States….[A]nyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema will have free and fast access to Europe’s greatest collections and masterpieces in a single virtual library through a web portal available in all EU languages. But this is just the beginning. In 2010, Europeana will give access to millions of items representing Europe’s rich cultural diversity and will have interactive zones such as communities for special interests….

Europeana was initiated by the Commission in 2005 and brought to fruition in close cooperation with national libraries and other cultural bodies of the Member States as well as with the strong support of the European Parliament. Europeana is run by the European Digital Library Foundation, which brings together Europe’s major associations of libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives and cultural institutions. Europeana is hosted by the Dutch national library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

Over 1,000 cultural organisations from across Europe have provided material for Europeana. … National libraries all over Europe have contributed printed and manuscript material, including digitised copies of the great books that brought new ideas into the world….

Reflections on Open Content

Published November 19, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Chris, via Ruminate, deliberated on diverse contentious topics with respect to open content.  He went about his argument by reacting to specfic assumptions/propositions in the area. Snippets:

Proposition: Institutions focused on creating content are operating as if they still exist in an era of information scarcity
The point here is well-taken– there is a lot of content out there to be Googled and linked and embedded, and creation of content may not be the most effective way forward for some (this is the concern at the heart of the whole discussion). But again, a lot of the good stuff is locked away in walled gardens and other silos precisely because institutions that believe in perpetuating the artificial scarcity that they believe is a required part of their value proposition aren’t participating in open content initiatives at all. And, to be sure, even those that do share aren’t necessarily stepping too far away from that archaic notion. Sharing by itself is just a small part of the open education philosophy.

Assertion: open content initiatives are producing lightweight, shallow, shovelware.
Some are. Maybe many are. But if you believe, as I and apparently many people that are part of this conversation do, that producing content is different from practice of education (see below), then it seems inescapable that you must recognize there is no single “good” kind of content. The practice of education involves individuals creating a context for and of learning, each of which is unique and each of which will have its own needs. I’ve decried the relative lack of significant, full materials at OCW archives like the one created by MIT, but I– like many educators– have also made significant use of some of the most minimal materials from that same source. Sometimes– maybe even most of the time– what I find myself needing is something as simple as a reading list, a single activity idea, a unit for enrichment. At those times, that often-disparaged content is pure gold. There’s a place for that lighter, shorter, smaller content… one place among many. Our own goals, like others, may be to do something different, but that’s not to diminish the importance of other approaches, both in content and as a philosophical statement.

Foregrounding process, sharing context, opening up the classroom, distributing curriculum and content, facilitating the ongoing conversation– it’s all good. But it’s also potentially all part of a non-zero-sum game in which pursuing one end can enhance the others… potentially, if we can avoid alienating and creating competition with each other along the way!

Cultural and Orgnaizational Drivers of Open Educational Content

Published November 18, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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A new book entitled “The Tower and the Cloud – Higher Education in the age of Cloud Computing” has been released in both eBook and hard copy format. The book is edited by Richard N Katz, and contains, inter alia, a chapter entitled “Cultural and orgnaizational drivers of open educational content,” written by Malcom Read. (Thanks to JISC) Snippet from the chapter:

The purpose of this essay is to consider the cultural and orgnizational issues behind the creation of open educaitonal content. In it I argue that there are many benefits to the individual, to the educational institution and to society at large from open educational content, and further, that such educational content has to be part of a wider context of open resources across the research, education, and cultural domains.

Reflections on OERs

Published November 17, 2008 Uncategorized 0 Comments
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Brian Lamb, via Abject Learning, reflects on whether information scarcity should still be the driving force for OER, and grapples with what the OER movement should emphasize to remain relevant:

… higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce when we now live in an era of unprecedented information abundance. That we in the institutions can endlessly discuss what content we deign to share via our clunky platforms, while Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, TED Talks, the blogs and other networked media just get on with it… That I might not be able to legally reproduce much of the copyrighted media on the web, but I can link to it, maybe embed it, or simply tell students to search for it. This is not to suggest that sharing more of the presumably high quality content that higher education produces would not enrich the store of available information… but that the world is not waiting for us to get our act together and become a relevant force on the web. The world is moving on without us.

Brian’s post generated many comments. Here are a couple of them:

D’Arcy Norman: … Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.

Great content IS important, but only if there is also a functioning and active community working together to learn, create and share. Otherwise, all that takes place is content dissemination. And that’s not education, open or otherwise.

Alan Levine: I’d push back on that question- even if we are in an era of Information Abundance, I’d argue you can never have too much. Or taking it another way, since people have been creating music for thousands of years, do we stop and say, “we have enough music, there is no need to create new or re-interpret.”

And one might look at what you are calling “content” or “information”- at some atomic level, we can now and even in ways coming cannot imagine, be creating new “musical” interpretations or mixes of info.

… I see no conflict of recognizing the growing abundance of information– is higher ed really tapping into it? Why is more content/info not a desirable goal?

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