Tony Bates gave a keynote at the Fijian workshop I was at. It was, as always, good value as he covered changes in technology and their implications. I was in broad agreement with him but one element had me questioning him afterwards.

He repeatedly stated that if he were doing this presentation as a set of OERs he would chunk it up, stop at certain points and introduce a learning activity. He’d set it out with learning objectives at the start. In his advice he suggested that educators shouldn’t do it themselves (‘you’ll get hurt’, he joked) and should seek support from instructional designers and technical staff.

These two things seemed wrapped up in a particular view of OERs to me. In my question I argued that his don’t do it yourself advice rather precluded a bottom-up approach to OER generation, which was in my view, the best way to go. He gave a robust defence, arguing that we need both, but to maintain quality people should seek help and support.

Reflecting on this made me appreciate that I have come to a particular view around OERs, without really stating it. There is some of it in my Little OER and big OER post, but for clarity (and for you to knock down), it goes something like this. I like OERs that:

• are not explicit learning content – they do not have to be generated with the aim of being used for learning;
• do not specify the learning that will occur – I like Zittrain’s concept of generativity, that a system will have unpredicted outputs when you allow a level of creativity. I want a ‘system’ that is generative with respect to learning, and thus specifying learning outcomes or activities restricts this;
• are easily aggregated into a pathway or framework which is created by the educator. This is where I see the educator coming into the system, they pull together many different resources, and add context, activities, extra material and interpretation.

One question then is ‘are these OERs at all then, or just ‘stuff on the web’?’ I’m not going to answer that on the grounds that it sounds like the interminable ‘what is a learning object?’ debate that I gave too much of my life to a few years back.

This seems to me another possible interpretation of the principle I suggested in another post that ‘complexity resides in the network, not the application’ (I repeat this to myself twenty times every morning as a mantra). The reason I felt uncomfortable with Tony Bates’ approach was that it was pushing that complexity back in to the app (or the resource).

An upshot of all this is that I think the emphasis in much of the OER movement is on the adaptation of OERs. This is because they are Big OER, with the complexity built in to them. The Little OERs I prefer aren’t adapted, they’re aggregated, and you add stuff around them. If I was ‘World OER Leader’, then shifting the emphasis to aggregation would be my first and only decision, before I resigned and let David Wiley do the job because he’d be better at it.

This is the first in a trio of OER related posts. I’m in Fiji currently, for the final meeting of the Sidecap project which has been looking at OER use in developing countries/regions (specifically in this project, Mauritius, West Indies and South Pacific).

I’m sure many of you will know this story, it's the kind of thing that gets passed around on email, but it was new to me (I checked and it’s true, not an urban myth). This is the common account, from Hoax Slayer:

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

It’s usually taken to demonstrate that we don’t stop and appreciate what is around us, and in our busy lives we can pass by things of beauty and value. But I’m going to interpret it from an OER perspective.

It has two lessons here: the first is that people don’t value free things, or are suspicious of free. We have become accustomed to roughly equating monetary price with value or quality. Free is therefore obviously low quality or suspicious at least. My colleague Patrick McAndrew has related how many people are dubious or uncertain when they encounter openlearn. Their concern is that it isn’t free, that they can’t ‘just take it’, and often need a lot of reassurance that this indeed the case. So the violinist’s story reinforces the message that getting people to value free is still an issue.

The second lesson is about context. When they hear this story many people are critical of the commuters who passed him by, declaring that they would have stopped and listened, or it’s an American thing (or a Washington thing). I’m pretty sure I would have walked by also. Why? Because I’m in an underground station, which is an unpleasant place to be, I want to get out of it as fast as possible; Because I’m probably on my way somewhere and I like to be punctual; Because I’m not expecting to encounter classical music there and so have a different mindset in place; etc.

If we transport the scenario to the lunchtime and he is playing in the sunshine in the park, then my guess is that the outcome would have been different. The stunt was set up by The Washington Post, and they obviously wanted the outcome they got, so chose the conditions least likely to favour people stopping. From an OER perspective context is highly significant – the context of the learner when they encounter the OER. For example if it is being pushed in their face when they’re trying to do something else online, then they’ll ignore it, as commuters ignored the violinist because it interfered with their primary task. If you catch them at a more leisurely online time, or when they are actively seeking learning, then the reaction will be different. This would suggest that ‘build it and they will come’ is not sufficient alone as a strategy – this is equivalent to the violinist playing the concert hall. Sure it may be full but you will only reach certain people. Going out to learners in the right spaces and the right times is the key, and like our violinist, I’m not sure I have the answer to that one.

One of the challenges I’ve set myself this year is to write some sort of book about Yahoo Pipes. Reading Presentation Zen three or four weeks ago, I started to imagine the form such a book might take. What I aspired to was something uncluttered, something that would contrast with the typical confusion of words and ideas that tend to end up being dumped into OUseful.info; something like an artistic recipe book, perhaps, or an art gallery catalogue; the form should be decomposable, allowing sections to be removed or updated without too many side effects on the rest of the work; and the authoring environment should complement the the publication environment, enforcing constraints of the medium the book would be published into.

In short, something like Powerpoint done well, but for print rather than screen.

It seems (of course!) that Tim O’Reilly had already executed a similar idea in the form of the Twitter Book, as John Naughton pointed out to me a couple of days later.

You can read more about O’Reilly’s take on the philosophy behind this sort of representation in Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web.

Anyway, I spent a weekend doodling ideas, and then left it a couple of weeks. Now I’m looking at it again, and I’d appreciate your comments on whether this sort of presentation works for you, (and if not, why not?), how it might be improved, how it might be simplified (but remain accessible to a novice) and so on. The numbering scheme used is not related to pages – instead, each “point” I make has a number, and these are referred to from the index (I drew inspiration for this sort of numbering from The Pengin Cookery Book). Comments on the level at which the technical content is presented, and the way in which I have started trying to develop a narrative, will also be appreciated.

I originally thought that the “book” should be printed in an A4 landscape form, but then I started to wonder whether two landscape A4 pages could be combined into a portrait A4 page. The font size is problematic, and the I don’t think the same layout works for the landscape vs. portrait view, at least, not as it currently stands.

Anyway, here are the landscape and portrait versions. I don’t think they work as embedded content, which is a shame, but they weren’t written for that sort of medium, so it’s to be expected.

(If you are reading this in a feed reader, you will probably need to click through to the original post in order to see the embedded documents.)

Please bear in mind, too, that I’m not a designer (this much will be be obvious), but that I do think design could play a large part in making this approach usable.

Please feel free to add your comments below:-)

Although I subscribe to a lot of online app blogs, I don’t subscribe to them all, instead relying on twitter and subscriptions to other commentator blogs to do some of the filtering for me. This isn’t always reliable, of course, and sometimes I rely on “new” flags to alert me to new features in some of the apps I use regularly.

Like this one:

A ‘browse these bookmarks” feature in delicious (original announcement).

Pick a user, one or more tags, or any combination thereof, and you can click through a preview of the bookmarked websites using something they’re calling the browsebar:

If you look at the top of the screenshot you should see the browsebar – it lets you click through the links one at a time, in the order they were bookmarked. So if you’re giving a presentation based around demoing a series of websites, this is a handy way of doing it.

And this is where my unprediction comes from, either from April 2006, or maybe somewhen in 2005, depending on whether you trust me or not…;-) deliShow, aka the Feedshow Link presenter

At it’s simplest, Feedshow would take and RSS feed and present the links in a window in much the same way that the delicious browsebar works:

I also added tools to splash a shortcode for the presentation (and maybe in a later tweak, the currently displayed bookmark?), so that viewers could also click through the slideshow in their own browser, and started working on feedshow synching facility so that remote viewers could synch the current state of the presentation to that of the person leading the presentation.

Unfortunately, the code behind feedshow appears to have rotted (maybe I should redo it at Dev8D?)

Of course, if we give delicious a year or two, they might implement something similar themselves? ;-)

PS I wonder if they’ll release a DeliTV app too, to allow users to use delicious to programme their Boxee TV viewing?;-) (More on that in the next couple of weeks….)

A couple of days ago I came across the phrase search mechanic in a post on US IT Spending:

The budget request calls for launching a new tracking tool with daily updates that would provide the public with the ability to see aggregate spending by agency and also by geographic area as an effort to increase transparency. Obama also wants a new search mechanic [my emphasis] to allow the public to “mash” data by location, agency and timeframe.

By this, I take it to mean search mechanic in the sense of game mechanics, that is, something like the way the rules/architecture of the game (or ‘code‘ in the sense Lessig uses it) determine the game play and the user’s interaction with the game. (If you’re interested in how games and the business of games works, why not sign up to my Digital Worlds course?;-)

So for example, one different search mechanic might be a different user experience, such as displaying results on a map or timeline rather than as a list, or another might be a different way of determining (or ranking) and presenting the results based on user profiling; topically, using social search for example (e.g. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, and Search is getting more social).

Anyway, for a long time I’ve been looking for a phrase to describe what I think is likely to be a core skill for librarians, namely, the ability to generate effective search queries over a range of systems, from popular search engines, to traditional subscription databases (in the sense of things like Lexis Nexis or EBSCO), to ‘proper’ databases and even Linked Data stores (how’s your SQL and SPARQL?)

So I wonder – is there a role for search mechanics (like car mechanics) and search engineers? The search mechanics might be there to help you get your search query working on the one hand, or fix the ranking algorithm in your search engine on the other, whereas the search engineer might be more interested in working at a different level, figuring out effective search strategies, or how to use search in a particular situation?

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the difficulties of integrating reflection as practice into education. We know being reflective generally makes for a good practitioner, but it's difficult to force people to be reflective. Schon's observations could be result of correlation, not causality, ie good practitioners tend to be reflective, but making someone reflective won't necessarily make them a good practitioner.

Anyway, there was much furore at the time about bankers and their bonuses. In much of the discussion that followed and particularly the types of statements that came from bankers and their bosses, it struck me that reflection is almost the key attribute they lack. Schon makes the distinction between reflection in action - they obviously failed to exhibit this when creating a global pyramid selling scheme, and reflection on action - they have failed to exhibit this since the downfall and the suggestion that massive bonuses are necessary to their function is an example of this.

I think it is this latter failure, that to truly accept and reflect on how badly things went wrong, and thus make the requisite adjustments that is truly terrifying. Bankers often project this attitude that the rest of us are over-reacting, and no major changes are required, just some tinkering. They are akin to a serial murderer who has been caught because they were speeding, but still protests they weren't really going over the speed limit.

'The reflective banker' has become an oxymoron, and it seems to me one of the challenges that society faces (since, let's face it the financial industry won't do it), is how to inject reflection as common practice into the banking industry, both at the individual and institutional level. A reflective banker/bank would continually ask:

i) Is what I am doing harmful for society?

ii) Am I being paid too much? (because contrary to belief it is possible to be paid too much, because it leads to next point)

iii) Is this mode of operation unsustainable?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes' (or even 'maybe') then big sirens should automatically sound in every household in the country.

One of the problems with extreme financial success is that it creates a bubble - we see it with footballer's also. Only those within the bubble are perceived as truly understanding what is going on (they are holders of some truth) and thus communication only happens within the bubble. And reflection is akin to criticism which is a potential bubble-burster, and thus is explicitly (through reward structures and punishment for speaking out) and implicitly (through social norms) outlawed. If truth is the first casualty of war, then reflection is the first casualty of runaway financial success.

As I started out saying it's difficult to force people to be reflective and when you do it quickly boils down to fake-reflection and game-playing. But you can provide a context within which it is encouraged. This can be through interaction with people outside of the bubble (even the dopiest celebrity is forced to reflect on their shallowness when they visit poor nations for charity), through answering criticism fairly (people who say 'I never read the papers' should be made to), and perhaps, just maybe, through education.

If various governments really want to prevent another financial crisis (which is inevitable given the paucity of real solutions to the last one), then making reflection a virtue in the sector would be a good place to start.

As part of the digital scholarship which I'm heading up at the OU, we have a small pilot project called 'podstars'. We've asked for volunteers across the university, who might be interested in exploring new methods of output. We've got thirteen of these, and yesterday we had our kick-off meeting. We gave each of them a Flip camera, showed them how it worked and discussed some ideas.

I gave a brief project overview, and there was an activity, which is in the slidecast below if anyone is interested.

It's a pilot project so what we want to find out is:

1. Do people go off and create new stuff or does nothing much happen?
2. Are there issues that operate as specific barriers?
3. What type of output do academics create? (are there disciplinary differences for example?)
4. What are the support issues?
5. What is their experience and how does it relate to their 'normal' output?

It was interesting that people had a variety of reasons for participating: some had a specific project in mind; others were keen to make their blogs more engaging; others wanted to use it in teaching.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is running a similar project, and I'll post up any interesting contributions we get.

Coverage at:

• Welcoming Cathy Casserly to the Creative Commons board of directors
• Open Education Resources Get a Big Boost: Cathy Casserly Joins Creative Commons Board

(via augmented.org)

Hewlett made over $16 million in grants last year that were 100% OER focused… In 2009 alone, foundations such as Gates, Lumina, MacArthur and many others pumped over $10 million of investments into OER focused projects. VCs made a couple of forays into OER… And a number of governments made their first investments in OER. In all 2009 was a record year both in the amount and diversity of OER funding, which is amazing considering most other things in the world collapse financially.

So from Vic’s point of view, the field of OER is in transition, and definitely for the better! This is a great perspective that I’m happy to hear.

Vic also writes, “Just to put a a stop to the rumors, Hewlett is not shutting down OER, and it is very much a part of what the education program is doing moving forward.” I re-read my previous post and I don’t think I implied anywhere that Hewlett was shutting down its OER program – just that funding seems to have slowed down. Vic indicates that Hewlett’s and other foundations’s endowments are down 40%, so that makes sense.

Vic’s perspective of what’s happening as the field transitions is good news for everyone who cares about OER.

Short notice, but then, if I gave more notice there’d have been all sorts of calendar negotiations over a week or two then we’d have rescheduled anyway…

Presentation trailer

Many OU folk will have already spent an hour or two at the Learn About fair (fayre?) on that day, so you might as well as right the whole day off in terms of doing “proper work”…;-)

New Smart Devices for Learning

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

(via Learning with ‘e’s)

Related: TEKRI is organizing a social media conference April 25-26 if you’re in Edmonton…

(via fscklog)

A couple of weeks ago, whilst dozing to the ITConversations podcast channel, I started daydreaming around the conversation that was going on in the Mitch Ratcliffe /Booksahead.com episode of Phil Windley’s Technometria podcast.

The discussion was on the topic of the future of the book, particularly with respect to annotating books and ebooks (in a manner similar to the way we support paragraph level comments in WriteToReply).

Annotating text with text (such as comments) requires quite a lot of effort on the part of the reader/annotator, and is perhaps one reason why it can be quite hard getting folk to engage with commenting static documents (I’m sure there are lots of other factors, too! ;-)

So if we think of things like the Community Engagement Pyramid:

or the Social Technographics Ladder of Participation:

then we see that there are various levels of engagement by – and participatory effort required from – visitors to a web site.

If we consider documents published on WriteToReply, one of the things we hope to facilitate is discussion around particular areas of the document. Lively discussions – lots of comments on a particular paragraph, or section – is one way of generating a signal that highlights “interesting” areas of a document. Web traffic analytics showing large amounts of traffic to, and reasonable dwell times on, particular pages provides another source of “interestingness” information; and so on.

But are we missing a trick?

Way back in the days when I used to print out lots of reading material, I used to skim read documents (even then!) and mark paragraphs that were somehow important with a vertical line in the margin so that I could easily return to them, or fold a page corner to “bookmark” a particular page or section. Occasionally, I would also scrawl notes in the margin, or underline particular paragraphs. But the turned page corners and the lines in the margin were the most efficient ways (for me) of marking the important parts of a text so that I could then refer to them in detail at a later time.

The commenting came later…

So what might a corollary be in WriteToReply? Each paragraph has a unique URI, so it would be possible to bookmark interesting paragraphs either within the browser, or using a social bookmarking tool such as delicious. Hovering over the linked paragraph number raises a pop up containing the text of the paragraph and a link to it (Note to self: clicking in the link box should automatically select all the text???)

Clicking through on a bookmarked link takes you to the page the paragraph exists on with the bookmarked paragrah highlighted:

If single item RSS/JSON feeds for each uniquely identified paragraph are enabled, it is straightforward (in Javascript at least) to render a page containing just the content from a list of the bookmarked paragraphs.

But what other low effort routes to engagement are there that might help an individual keep track of areas of a document they may want to return to, or that might allow the crowd sourced discovery of “interesting” areas of a document? How about ratings? How about a complement to the paragraph level commenting that the digress.it WordPress theme we use on WriteToReply offers that offers paragraph level ratings?

And in the same way that digress.it is capable of generating comment streams for each commenter, how about a similar facility that would allow me to look at all the paragraphs, sections or pages that I have commented, sorted either in the order they appear in the document, or additionally by the number of stars I have rated them?

When I read long documents, I do it in an iterative fashion. At the moment, we don’t necessarily make that very easy to do – or obvious how to do it. Maybe a ratings based approach would help?

PS the source code for the digress.it theme is available from the digress.it: WordPress plugins page under a GPL version 2 license. If you fancy creating a complementary “skim.it” theme using ratings rather that comments, post a comment here ;-)

Stephen has written some valuable comments on my ‘Defining OEP’ blog post. Couple of minor things in my defence and then some more subtaintive points to discuss!  Clearly my choice of picture to show the meeting was not a good one given Stephen’s reaction!

…but a conference session consisting of standing in a circle around flip-chart sheets would send me running and screaming into the nearest woods, never to be found again. So, please, let’s not make that an open education practice

 Ooops!

Actually the meeting was excellent with a nice mix of different types of group work, use of flip charts, illustrative art drawings to capture key points, images on flckr etc. I found this a great mix and much better than the usual sit round in boardroom style meetings with one person dominating the meeting. Maybe we could have used more technology during the meeting but actually I think the face to face interactions were a key part of us connecting as a consortium at this point in the project.

Stephen critiques my initial starter for ten diagram which articulates the 4 different types of stakeholders involved in OER/OEP arguing that

…so, I’m not sure I like a model where ‘policy-makers’ (also called ’stakeholders’) are distinct from ‘creators’ and ‘users’ - people who create and use should make the policy, in my view.

Clearly the diagram isn’t quite right yet, my intention was never to suggest that the four roles were distinct and separate, rather that they are four aspects which have different agendas and interests. A ‘learner’ could very easily be involved in all four, but at each stage – when they are looking at creating, using, managing or ‘policy-making’ OER they will have a different focus of attention and it was this that I really wanted to bring out and explore.

Good to have some early feedback on this – I think there is a lot to trash out in terms of exactly what OEP is. I am reminded of some work I did a few years ago as part of the NSF/JISC DIalogPlus project. The aim (a naïve one now I admit) was to create a learning design guidance toolkit that would take practitioners through the process of creating learning activities. It would provide guidance and advice on pedagogical approaches, what technologies can be used when and why and a process of mapping learning outcomes, topics, activities and assessment tasks. The toolkit is still around if you want to play. Near the beginning of the work I thought ‘hang on a minute – what exactly do we mean by a learning activity anyway?’ A seemingly simple question… which turned into a mammoth amount of work and a very detailed taxonomy articulating the different components that make up a learning activity! More on the details of this are available in a chapter on the Handbook of Learning Design and Learning Objects by Lockyer et al. (Conole, G. 2008). I have a funny feeling something similar might happen with OEP – i.e. it seems obvious what it is, and easy to articulate it, but I suspect in reality the task will be much more complex.

Reference

Conole, G., 2008. Capturing practice, the role of mediating artefacts in learning design. In In L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinhi and B. Harper Handbook of learning designs and learning objects.  IGI Global.

A month or two ago, I posted on the topic of Google/Feedburner Link Pollution, observing how URIs contained in RSS feed link elements run through Feedburner end up with Google Analytics tracking codes appended to them.

Well, it seems as if WordPress.com occasionally does a little bit of rewriting of links you might have carefully placed in your blog posts if you are using the free plan, dynamically rewriting those links and sending clicks through go2.wordpress.com.

A reply to the WordPress forum post “Link redirection through go2.wordpress.com” states:

[R]edirection is related to the ads that sometimes are placed on WordPress.com blogs … [P]urchasing the No Ads Upgrade will stop the redirection.

Now I know that ads are sometimes presented on my blog to unsigned in visitors, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been told that links may also get rewritten? One of the dangers of using a free hosted service, of course.

As to why do I use a free service? I don’t want the hassle of backups, updates, and doing sys admin things if the site ever gets hacked. And In return, I pay nothing, live with certain constraints (e.g. restrictions on layout, embedding, inability to run Google Analytics, etc.) and visitors who aren’t WordPress users may occasionally suffer from ad displays.

But things are getting so that I now need to regularly spend time looking for ways in which the “free” services I use are polluting my content.

So do I pay to upgrade to paid for services on WordPress.com, host a blog myself, or use a more enlightened (but more expensive) commercial provider such as Squarespace?

(Stephen – no need to say “I told you so”…;-)

Okay, maybe it's not an Obama moment in history, but, as you may have heard, the OU has adopted Google Apps for education for its students, and I think this may be a significant move in educational technology. Niall announced it and Tony has given his reaction. We're by no means the first to do it, but I think the OU's adoption is significant for a number of reasons:

1. It ain't Microsoft - there will have been strong lobbying to adopt an MS solution, so the move to Google marks a shift in the power base or at least the default assumption that it's MS who do enterprise solutions.
2.  It's the cloud - a lot of other universities use the OU as a benchmark I think. I know that when we adopted Moodle, that made the decision to go with open source easier for other institutions. A kind of 'well, if the OU is doing it, then it has to be reliable' argument can be put forward. So, just as Moodle acted as a seal of approval on open source VLEs, so Google Apps signifies a reliability of cloud based solutions. 
3. It puts powerful collaborative tools in the hands of students - I commented on twitter that Google Docs might end being the most significant educational technology around. Not because it's fantastic, but because it's there and it's easy to use. Or maybe it'll be chat. Or large email storage. Whatever it is, I think students (and tutors) will start to use the technology in ways that we don't predict or demand, but because it makes their lives easier. We have struggled to crack collaborative learning for distance students for ages - maybe Google Apps will do it in one move.
4. They are not education specific tools - although it's packaged as Google Apps for education, it is really just standard Google Apps. Like a lot of ed tech people I have argued that our role is no longer to develop bespoke educational applications, but rather to take existing tools and see how these can be used in education. Google Apps reinforces that view and makes you ask the question, 'why do I need a Virtual Learning Environment, and not just a virtual environment we use for learning?'

Oh, and the pretentious title is really just an excuse to embed this song from the Low Anthem:

	The Low Anthem - To The Ghosts Who Write History Books
	Found at skreemr.com

Since then, I’ve determined that Pavlov and Skinner would be proud of how well the designers integrated behaviourist feedback and intermittent reward to draw users in.

Foursquare is a simple service that lets you share where you are with your network. You get points for checkins and badges after you’ve visited a certain number of places. But that is hardly the real impact. I’m comfortable stating that foursquare will be as big as twitter…but with greater potential impact. Why? Foursquare blends virtual and physical worlds – combining social networks and offering new geography-based connections. Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model yet. Foursquare does – once people identify where they are, what their interests are, sales and marketing services as a step away. And it’s starting already: newspapers are using the service. Have a look at Metro – an interesting blend of news, marketing, and community. Something quite significant is emerging here. Watch Foursquare. But stay out of my coffee shops. I need my mayoral badges.

Yet more signs that Google is losing the plot… Whilst putting together a quick Yahoo Pipes demo, I called up the Blogs search option from the More menu item in Google websearch in order to pull an RSS feed of blog search results from it… But there was no feed option?

Strange, because blogsearch.google.com does offer a feed option for blogsearch results?

So what we have here is a case of similar branding but different sidebar options. That is:

http://www.google.com/search?tbo=1&tbs=blg:1&q=%22yahoo+pipes%22

does not give the same sidebar options – or the autodiscoverable feed option – that this does:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=%22yahoo+pipes%22

But the top left corner branding of each site is the same?

Just six words…

Don’t you think Google looks tired?

It’s all very well using a Google spreadsheet as a database, but sometimes you just want to provide a simple form to let people run a particular query. Here’s a quick way of doing that within a Spreadsheet…

So for example: Can you help me crowd source a solution?. The problem is as follows:

Students will make five choices from a list of over 200 projects that have been anonymised… We will give each project a code, and have already entered all the details into an excel sheet so we can tie the project code to the supervisor.

We need a solution that will enable students to enter their project code and then have the title of the project displayed as a check to make sure they have entered the code correctly. The list of projects is just too long for a drop down list, even when split by department (around 50 in each).

Does anyone have any suggestions of tools that we can use for students to submit this type of information, so that we get it in a format that we can use, and they get confirmation of the project titles they have chosen? A simple google form isn’t going to hack it!

Here’s one way…

Create a “form” – the text entry cell can be highlighted by setting the background colour from the spreadsheet toolbar:

Construct a query. In this case, I need to select three results columns (H, I and J) from another sheet (‘Sheet1′, the one that acts as the database and contains the project codes) so the query will be of the form “select H,I,J where H contains “BIOCHEM”; the search term (“BIOCHEM”) is pulled in from the query form show above:

=concatenate(“select H,I,J where H contains ‘”,B2,”‘”)

(As a rule of thumb, if you want your query to select cells A, D, AC, the range set in the first part of the query that defines the database should span the first to the last column in the select range (Sheet1!A:AC, for example).)

By using the contains relation, this query will generate a set of results that are, in effect, a list of auto-complete suggestions as the result of a searching on a partially stated query term.

Assuming I have placed the query in cell A4, I can automatically get the results from the query as follows:

Note that it would be possible to hide the query generator (the contents of cell A4) in another sheet and just have the search box and the results displayed in the user interface sheet.

If the original spreadsheet database was published as a public document, we could also grab the results as an HTML table via an API using a URI of the form:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:html
&tq=select%20H%2CI%2CJ%20where%20H%20contains%20%22SEARCHTERM%22
&key=SPREADSHEETKEY

Setting out:csv would return the results in comma separated variable format, so we could create a Yahoo pipes interface to query the form, for example:

Here’s how:

What would be really useful would be if the Google/Yahoo widget options for the feed respected the form elements, rather than just generating a widget that displays the feed corresponding to the current Run of the pipe with the provided search terms.

Building such a widget is something I need to put on my to do list, I guess?! Sigh…

Today, we read of another “merger” of programs – and top leadership exit – at Creative Commons:

We’ve decided that we can best support the open education and OER communities by focusing our resources and support where we are strongest and provide the most unique value… Such changes mean that some of the activities and, sadly, personnel cannot be integrated successfully with the new structure… In this current transition, Ahrash Bissell, the Executive Director of CC Learn, has left the organization.

Has left – past tense. Apparently, surpassing their year end public fundraising goal (with $533,898) wasn’t enough resource to keep ccLearn going.

I know some well-known ed tech bloggers will comment “good riddance,” claiming that organizations are inherently evil anyway, and that the space is better off without them “investing in” and “supporting” the work of open education (which is best done by a lone individual living off-grid on a rural Appalachian subsistence farm). But does no one else see an “interesting” pattern here?

This dissertation is the first piece of empirical work I am aware of that demonstrates clearly that a distance learning program can simultaneously (1) provide a significant public good by publishing opencourseware and (2) be revenue positive while doing it. In other words, Justin’s study not only demonstrates that it is possible to publish opencourseware without requesting donations from users or foundations, it goes further and demonstrates that it is possible to make money publishing opencourseware. And if you can make money publishing opencourseware, you can continue publishing opencourseware for a very long time. This capacity is also known as sustainability.

Congratulations to Dr. Johansen!

P.S. John Hilton will be defending his dissertation, which applies a similar methodology to examine the impact of giving away free e-books on the sales of printed books, February 11!

Last week I attended the kick off meeting for an exciting new EU-funded project, OPAL, from the website:

The Open Educational Quality Initiative will focus on provision of innovative open educational practices and promote quality, innovation and transparency in higher and adult education. Beginning in January 2010, the two-year OPAL Initiative is a partnership between seven organizations including ICDE, UNESCO and ICDE member institution, the Open University UK, and will be coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The project is part funded by the European Commission Education and Training Lifelong Learning Programme.

As you can see the project has a strong consortium with some significant players/representatives from across the EU. It is also an important and timely project given the increasing focus and interest in Open Educational Resources (OER).

For us at the OU it builds nicely on two stands of related work – our work on OER (through the development of the OpenLearn site and more recently the Olnet initiative) and the OU Learning Design Initiative.

At the kick off meeting we trashed out the details of the vision behind the project, with its focus on enhancing quality and innovation through clearer articulation and support of Open Educational Practices (OEP). For me a key first task in the coming months is going to be to try and really unpack what we actually mean by OEP, what are its dimensions, how can we expose existing OEP and from this translate this into a set of useful guidelines to help facilitate better OEP? These are important questions that we will be addressing in work packages 3 and 4 of the project.  We will begin by undertaking a state of the art review of the field and then a more extensive quantitative survey. This will be followed by four in-depth studies exploring how recognised leading institutions in the development and use of OER have instantiated good practice in OEP. These findings will then translate into four guidelines – for learners, educational professionals, managers and policy makers.

So what do we mean by Open Educational Practices (OEP)? The detailed discussions from the kick off meeting are currently being written up and distilled but here is my started for ten to stimulate debate:

Open Educational Practices (OEP) are the set of activities and support around the creation, use and repurposing of Open Educational Resources. It also includes the contextual settings within which these practices occur. Therefore there are three importance dimensions to this:

1. The stakeholders engaged with creating, using or supporting the use of OER. These can be further sub-divided into two types: those involved in ‘creation and use’ of OER and those involved in ‘policy and management’ aspects of OER. Creators: create the OER, and could be either ‘teachers’ or ‘learners’. Users: Use the OER, and could be either ‘teachers or ‘learners’. Managers: Provide the infrastructure to support the OER (technical and organisational) and the tools/support to create/use OER. Policy makers: embed OER into relevant policy.
2. The range of mediating artefacts that can be used to create and support the use of OER. These include tools and resources to help guide the creation and use of OER, as well as the technologies to support the hosting and management of them.
3. The contextual factors which impact on the creation, use or support of OER.

Does this definition make sense? Can we provide a finer grained set of indicators for each of these three dimensions? What existing research and development work in this area should we be looking at to develop these concepts further?

This is going to be an exciting and challenging project, I look forward to working more with other members of the consortium on this over the next two years. A number of people will be involved from the OU – in particular researchers from the Olnet team (led by Patrick McAndrew), but also drawing on expertise from the OULDI team. Paul Mundin has taken on the role of project manager for the OU aspects of the work.

The technology paradox

A paradox exists in terms of harnessing new technologies in education.  Despite the fact that there is now a wealth of free tools and resources available that could be used to support learning and teaching, in reality technologies are not used extensively in education. Indeed teachers and learners are bewildered by the variety and lack the time and necessary skills to harness them effectively. The focus of this paper is to present Learning Design as a potential solution and in particular to describe the work we are doing as part of the Open University Learning Design Initiative (OULDI), which is developing a suite of tools and resources to support teachers to make more effective design decisions and better use of technologies in the creation of learning activities and resources for their students. The paper will highlight current research on Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and Open Educational Resources (OER) and will suggest that together these three areas provide a possible solution to the mismatch between the potential of new technologies and use in practice. It will conclude with an illustrative example being developed as part of a new initiative, Olnet, which is a global network to support users and researchers of OER.

Redefining openness

I argue in this paper that we need to expand the notion of openness, to take account of the affordances of new technologies and the new patterns of user behaviour we are seeing emerge. There has been a growth in recent years in activities around the Open source movement and the development of open tools and services, also the open educational resource movement (Iiyoshi & Kumar 2008). These have a common set of principles and practices: free, shared, collaborative, cumulatively better. The next logical step is a more “open” approach to design (Open Design) – where the inherent designs within learning activities and resources are made more explicit to learners and to other teachers; so that they can be picked up discussed and adapted.

 I argue in this paper that education is now facing a number of new challenges, precipitating by new technologies. Education today, operates in a context that is increasingly open and abundant:

·      Open – In terms of free resources and in terms of public gauze/scrutiny and can no longer ignore this.

·      Abundant - There are now a wealth of tools, services and resources available to support education. If tools and resources are freely available, what is the purpose of formal educational institutions?

Examples of openness include the growth of the open source moment in general and, more specifically in education, the phenomenal success of the open source Moodle tool. Moodle is now a major Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learner Management System (LMS) around the world, with a large community of active developers collectively improving the core code and adding extensions and plug-ins. There are increasingly sophisticated free generic tools available - Google apps, Gmail, free blog and wiki services, communication tools such as Skype to Twitter. New products are emerging all the time, introducing new concepts and patters of user behaviour – the latest being Google Wave, which is being hyped as the next generation communication tool, a combination of email, discussion forums and wikis – enabling both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

There has been a noticeable shift in the last few years in terms of the use of technologies. We now have near ubiquitous access with wifi-enabled Internet on demand. New generation phones such as iPhone make mobile learning genuinely feasible. The number and variety of applications for the iphone is truly mind blowing; the variety of applications for learning staggering, from mindmapping tools, through digital books and dictionaries to interactive learning tutorials. More and more material for learning is available for free on the Internet. This has been accelerated by the growth of the OER movement, which believes that education should be free and is a basic right. The OER movement has powerful supporters, especially the Hewlett foundation and UNESCO and include big international players such as MIT. The OpenCourseWare consortium has over 200 worldwide members. A range of different types of OERs and models are available which differ in terms of level of granularity, format and media richness, and type of pedagogy. The Open University launched Openlearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) in 2006 with funded from the William and Flora Hewlett foundation.

Today’s students have grown up surrounded by a technologically mediated world. Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners’ use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, forthcoming). They provide a summary of recent research looking at the learner perspective and in particular how learners are using technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010). It is evident that today’s learners are immersed in a technologically rich learning environment. They see technologies as an essential part of their tools for learning. They appropriate technologies to suit their own learning styles and use them to support all aspects of their learning. However despite having grown up in a technological environment, not all students are able to use technologies effectively in an academic context. For example they may be comfortable using Google, but not competent at critically evaluating different resources and using them for their learning. Indeed for the weaker students the complexity of the range of digital tools and resources available to them means they are more likely to get confused and lost.

Good sources of further information on current technology trends and the ways in which technologies are being used in education include: Review of learning 2.0 (Ala-Mutka, 2009), Learner experience work (Conole, De Laat et al., 2008), NSF cyberlearning task force report (NSF, 2008), and a review of OER movement (Atkins et al., 2007)

Education for free

Theoretically one can now put together totally free course offerings using free tools and resources. George Siemens and Stephen Downes created an ambitious course and delivered it for the first time in 2009 – not only were the tools and resources they used in the course free, but so was the expertise! See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=182 for a reflection on the experiment by George Siemens. The twelve-week course was called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course’.[1]  They described the course as a MOOG (Massive Open Online Course). The content, delivery and support for the course was totally free, anyone could join and an impressive 2400 did, although the actual number of very active participants was smaller (ca. 200). The course provides a nice example of an extension of the open movement, moving a step beyond the Open Educational Resource movement to providing a totally free course. Siemens reflecting on the course said the follow:

Did we change the world? No. Not yet. But we (and I mean all course participants, not just Stephen and I) managed to explore what is possible online. People self-organized in their preferred spaces. They etched away at the hallowed plaque of “what it means to be an expert”. They learned in transparent environments, and in the process, became teachers to others. Those that observed (or lurked as is the more common term), hopefully found value in the course as well. Perhaps life circumstances, personal schedule, motivation for participating, confidence, familiarity with the online environment, or numerous other factors, impacted their ability to contribute. While we can’t “measure them” the way I’ve tried to do with blog and moodle participants, their continued subscription to The Daily and the comments encountered in F2F conferences suggest they also found some value in the course.

 George Siemens and Martin Weller delivered something similar in the form of an ‘un-course’ conference (“From Courses to Dis-Course (yes/no? Am I being too cute-sy?”). See http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/futurecourse/ for further information. Such courses are becoming more commonplace, the immediacy of the Internet and the variety of free tools for creating content and for communicating with others, means these courses can be set up very quickly with an international team designing and delivering. What kind of impact will such courses have on traditional educational offerings? Will they sit alongside them or ultimately replace them?

Implications and the hidden conundrum

Clearly all this has profound implications for educational institutions and the provision of formal education (Grainne Conole 2009). For students in terms of the skills and experiences they come with and their expectations in terms of technologies (Sharpe & Beetham 2010)(G. Conole et al. 2008). For teachers in terms of how they design courses for students. For institutions in terms of how they support and assess students. New technologies give rise to a range of questions: To what extent have all these free tools and resources impacted on mainstream education? To what extent are the majority of teachers capitalising on these? How much are mainstream courses changing as a result?

The reality is that despite the enormous potential new technologies seem to offer for learning, uptake of them and utilisation of free resources has been slow.  Indeed there has been very little impact on mainstream education. Where technolgoies are used a lot of the use mirrors existing face-to-face practice, rather than harnessing the powerful affordances associated with them. There is little evidence of major innovations or new forms of pedagogy.

The reasons for the lack of impact of these new technologies are complex and multifaceted. But one of the key ones is that teachers lack the time and expertise to make best use of new tools and resources. Faced with a new tool – say a wiki or twitter - there are a number of questions a teacher (or indeed a learner) needs to consider: What are the special features of the tool? How can it be used to support learning? How have others used the tool? What are the implications in terms of designing and delivering a learning activity using this tool – for the teacher, for the student? Similarly just having freely available OERs is not enough, a series of similar questions arise: What is the quality of the resource? How has it been used elsewhere? How can it be incorporated into my teaching context? Am I able to adapt it; how much do I need to change to suit my teaching context? All of these are non-trivial and time-consuming questions.

Mediating artefacts to support design

Teachers need guidance in understanding how they can appropriate technologies in their teaching. This guidance can be in the form of a range of ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I draw on socio-cultural perspectives (Vygotsky 1978;  Cole et al. 1997; Engeström et al. 1999; Daniels et al. 2007), in terms of the use of the term ‘Mediating Artefacts’ (MAs). I believe the concept of mediating artefacts can help us describe and understand how technologies are being used in mediating our practice. A user intent on achieve a particular goal has a range of mediating artefacts they can draw on; both in terms of ‘information’ and mechanisms for ‘communication’. Alongside the established communication channels of the telephone, email, forums and texting, the emergence of web 2.0 technologies in recent years has added blogging (and microblogging), wikis, social networking sites and virtual worlds but also free internet-based Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and in particular popular tools such as Skype which enable virtually free, internet-based communication. Similarly information can now be distributed in multiple locations, and packaged and presented using a range of different multimedia and visual representations. Sophisticated repositories now exist for everything from shopping categories to repositories of good practice and free resources. RSS feeds and email alerts enable users to filter and personalise the information they receive. Social bookmarking and tagging means that collective value can be added to digital objects, concept and mind mapping, tag clouds and data-derived maps are only some of the ways in which information can be presented in rich and multifaceted ways.

I argue in this paper that there is a need for new mediating artefacts to support teachers and learners in making best use of these tools and resources.  See Conole (2008a) for a description of the use of the term mediating artefacts specifically for learning design. These mediating artefacts can guide and support the teacher in making design decisions. They can provide mechanisms to help teachers answer questions like those posed above, to help them make decisions on which tools and resources to use and in what ways. For example mechanisms to provide them with access to help and advice, expertise and peer support. Mechanisms to enable them to become part of an evolving peer community committed to discussing and sharing learning and teaching ideas.

I argue that this mediation is through more explicit articulation of the inherent designs associated with a particular learning activity and the way in which tools and resources are used in that particular learning activity. If we can abstract these designs and represent them in a meaningful and understandable way there is a greater chance of them being picked up, used and adapted by others, which, in turn, over time is likely to lead to an evolving understanding of how new tools and resources can be used.

Converging schools of thought

I want to focus on three types of Mediating Artefacts and look at how together they can be used to help guide the teacher’s design practice; learning design, pedagogical patterns and OER Mediating Artefacts. A brief introduction to these areas will be provided, followed by a description of how they can be used together to provide a holistic approach to designing for learning.

Pedagogical patterns

The concept of Pedagogical Patterns derives from Alexander’s work in Architecture, towards pattern languages for buildings.  Applied to an educational context, it is concerned with exploring how we generate a set of ‘patterns for good practice’; i.e. here is a problem and here is a tried and tested solution. There is now a considerable body of research on Pedagogical Patterns, such as the work of Yannis Dimitriadis and colleagues in Spain, Peter Goodyear in Australia and the Planet project in the UK. There are a number of repositories of patterns with surrounding communities of interest, see for example http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/ and http://patternlanguagenetwork.org/partners/. Two well-known examples of patterns for collaborative learning are: “Think, Pair, Share” and “Jigsaw”.

The benefits of the pedagogical patterns approach is that the ‘patterns’ are derived from known, tried and tested examples, building on existing good practice. They all have the same format of representation – here is a problem and a potential solution, along with a powerful visual metaphors.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

The OER movement has concentrated on developing open educational resources and studying the ways in which they are used and/or adapted by learners and teachers (See for example McAndrew and Santos, 2008). The benefits of the OER movement is that it is building a word wide set of high quality free educational resources, along with opportunities to build a community around these resources - to share and critically discuss good practice in learning and teaching.

Learning design

In our own work as part of the OU Learning Design Initiative (OUDLI) we are developing a suite of tools and methods to help teachers with the design process and in particular to enable them to create more pedagogical informed learning activities and make better use of new technologies. Our work is focusing on three aspects of the design process: ways of representing pedagogy (and in particular visualising it), providing guidance and advice, and mechanisms to enable teachers to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas. In particular we have developed two tools – CompendiumLD for visualising and guiding the design process (G. Conole et al. 2008) and Cloudworks a social networking site for finding, sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas (Conole & Culver 2009b; Conole & Culver 2009a) In addition we have been developed new schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies (Conole 2008)

The benefits of the Learning Design approach are that it provides a range of tools, methods and approaches to help teachers think differently, making the design process more explicit, means of sharing good practice.

A new understanding of design: an illustrative example

What we can see across these three areas of research are different types of designs. Can we combine these learning design tools with the documented good practice, which has been developed in the pedagogical pattern community, with the real exemplars available in the OER world? The pedagogical patterns describe a learning and teaching activity or strategy according to a predefined template. Whereas the OERs might be considered as ‘designs in action’ and provide actual learning content. Finally, Learning Designs help give us a better understanding of the broad ways in which learning and teaching activities or strategies can be represented from narrative case studies or descriptions through to visual designs.

In a new project, OLnet, we are attempting to put these three areas together, specifically to enable better use of OER. OLnet is creating a global network to help researchers and users of OER to work together – so that research outputs inform practice and vice versa. See Conole and McAndrew (Conole & McAndrew 2010). We are interested in exploring how explicit designs might be used to help learners and teachers and how the different tools and resources from across OER, Learning Design and Pedagogical Patterns research would might be used together.  In a recent book chapter we identify four types of Mediating Artefacts from across these research domains: Learning Design visualisation tools, Learning Design methods, Pedagogical Patterns and Web 2.0 sharing and discussion tools (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Types of mediating artefacts

The following scenario provides an example of how this might work (Figure 2). It describes the creation of an OER and an associated design for the OER and shows how this can be repurposed in three different ways. Tools and resources from OER, Learning Deign and Pedagogical Patterns research are used to help design the original OER and then to share and repurpose it.

Figure 2: Initial creation of OER+design and subsequent use and repurposing

Teacher A: The design phase

The scenario begins with ‘Teacher A’. The context is that Teacher A is putting her beginners’ level Spanish material for the OU course L194. She makes the material available as an OER online in the Openlearn repository (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk). She uses the CompendiumLD tool for visualising to articulate different ways in which she thinks the materials can be used. Figure 3 shows part of the visual design, including the branching sequence to enable a beginner and more advanced route through the learning materials. In particular she is interested in showing how the materials can be used as both a revision exercise for an individual student and at a more advanced level for a group of students working collaboratively. Whilst developing her design in CompendiumLD she has access to ideas and tips and hints from the Cloudworks social networking site for learning and teaching site, as well as from a range of OER and Pedagogical Pattern repositories. These help her to refine her design thinking, to get ideas about how to structure activities in the sequences and suggestions of tools that be used for example for supporting a diagnostic e-assessment test or to enable students to communicate synchronously.

Learner A: Use Scenario 1 – beginners’ route

‘Learner A’ is doing Spanish.  She is a few weeks into the intermediate level Spanish course. The topic she is currently working on is ‘describing places’, she is looking for freely available tools or resources that might help her, she is also interested in finding study buddies to work with, who are at a similar level.

1.      She explores the openlearn site

2.      She finds the set of OERs for a beginners’ Spanish course – L194 – Portales from the Open University, UK, developed by Teacher A.

3.      She finds alongside these resources a visual design – which provides an example of how these resources might be used. The design consists of the following aspects:

a.       A diagnostic e-assessment test to assess her level of understanding of the topics covered in the course

b.       Two potential pathways: a) a beginners route where the learner works individually through the L194 OER material, b) an advanced route where the learner is assigned to a study group to work collaboratively around 1 aspects of the L194 OER material, Activity 2.1. In this advanced route, the existing activity (categorise 3 pictures of buildings as Latin American or Spanish) is replaced with one where the learner has to describe and compare the buildings, working collaboratively with other students and interrogating an expert for information. The activity exploits the jigsaw pedagogical pattern and also uses a free video conferencing tool to enable the study group to speak with a Spanish cultural expert. 

4.      She takes the diagnostic tests and the advice is that she takes the beginners’ route and completes the L194 OER material.

Learner B: Use Scenario 2 – advanced route

Learner B is also a student a few weeks into an intermediate level Spanish course. She works through a similar set of activities to Learner A but in this case after taking the diagnostic test the advice is that he takes the advanced route and focuses in on the adapted activity 2.1 as a collaborative exercise with other students.

Teacher B: Use Scenario 3 – repurposes

Teacher B is an Associate Lecturer teaching on the intermediate level Spanish course at the Open University, En Rumbo – L140, preparing for a face-to-face tutorial with his students. The topic is describing places. Finds the design described above and adapts it to produce two new variants of the design 1. a classroom-based activity where the students describe the pictures using the Think-Pair-Share pattern and provides, 2. A similar exercise in terms of comparing three buildings but the students are asked to describe buildings from their town and then talk with an expert (a student in Spain) who then describes their home town. The activity is set as a precursor to the first assignment exercise for the course.

The design of this scenario represented in CompendiumLD was drawn by Andrew Brasher and an interactive version of it is available here. Figure 4 provides a conceptual overview and generalisation of this scenario – showing how an initial design can query existing resources such as Cloudworks and Openlearn, use these to help create and populate an OER, along with an associated design, both of which can then be deposited back into sites such as Cloudworks and OpenLearn for reuse.

Conclusion

The mismatch between the potential of technologies and actual use in practice is I would argue one of the most important key challenges facing modern education. The areas of Pedagogical Patterns, Learning Design and OER research have developed a range of valuable tools and resources which have proved effective in supporting teachers and learners and enabling them to decide and use educational resources more effectively. The next stage in the challenge is how to build on this; how to make more effective connections across these three areas of research.

Acknowledgements

Many people are involved in this work but want to thank in particular:

§   Olnet/Openlearn: Patrick McAndrew, Yannis Demitriadis (who is currently working with us as a visiting Olnet professor), Tina Wilson, Niall Sclater

§   OULDI: Andrew Brasher, Juliette Culver, Simon Cross, Paul Clark, Martin Weller

§   Funders: The William and Flora Hewlett foundation, the JISC, the Open University for strategic funding

References

Ala-Mutka, K., Bacigalupo, M., Kluzer, S., Pascu, C., Punie, Y. and Redecker, C. (2009). Review of Learning 2.0 Practices. IPTS technical report prepared for publication, IPTS: Seville, available online at http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2139 [18/4/09].

Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J. and Hammond, A.L. (2007), A review of the Open Educational Resource movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities, report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, available online at http://www.hewlett.org/NR/rdonlyres/5D2E3386-3974-4314-8F67-5C2F22EC4F9B/0/AReviewoftheOpenEducationalResourcesOERMovement_BlogLink.pdf, last accessed 5/2/09.

Cole, M., Engeström, Y. & Vasquez, O.A., 1997. Mind, culture, and activity: Seminal papers from the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, Cambridge Univ Pr.

Conole, G. (2008a) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design’, in Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, in L. Lockyer, S. Bennett, S. Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds), 187-207, Hersey PA: IGI Global.

Conole, G. et al., 2008. Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity. Educational Media International, 45(3), 177-194.

Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009a. Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 25(5). Available at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet25/conole.html [Accessed November 24, 2009].

Conole, G. & Culver, J., 2009b. The design of Cloudworks: Applying social networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs. Computers & Education. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VCJ-4XH5640-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1107889889&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=11e571c11f3d1bee54dd010e40090093 [Accessed November 24, 2009].

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Conole, G. & McAndrew, P., 2010. A new approach to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0. In In M. Edner and M. Schiefner (Eds) Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.

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[1] http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

As the geosocial revolution continues – creating more and more intimate links between the digital space and our physical spaces via mobile devices and data driven services – the word ‘neighborhood’ is becoming more and more prominent. A neighborhood (in urban terms, larger than a block, smaller than a zipcode) is the perfect granularity to connect with users as we spend a good chunk of our time there.

I’ve been playing around with foursquare and yelp. These services allow individuals to post where they are…which conceivably then results in blurring physical and virtual worlds as we meet up with others (and extend our social networks). Combine this with Blippy and we essentially declare all our ongoing activities to our network. All we need now is a means to share bowel movement routines. Perhaps the wearable human recorder system will help with that.

…
And so it came to pass that The Open University announced that it was going to adopt Google Apps for Education, and in one fell swoop sign up over 150,000 students to the platform.

And what bounteous riches would those students henceforth be able to benefit from, with “a service level agreement with higher levels of availability than [the OU] could achieve itself”:

• email: “students will be offered their own Gmail accounts with addresses ending in @my.open.ac.uk”
• calendar: when the OU’s student calendaring team held a consultation about future plans a couple of years or so ago, I lobbied hard for iCal/ics feed support, as well as tentatively suggesting that we might be use calendar feeds to transport payloads (documents, or audio files for example) either to students or within the context of a feed powered VLE. (I think I also suggested that they just not bother and embed Google calendars instead, and did a working demo to show what it could look like). So here’s hoping that course calendars also get put into Google Calendar… But what’s gonna happen to all the effort that was put into the Moodle Calendaring support? I guess that if they’re making feeds available, it’ll be low overhead to just pipe the info into student’s personal calendars?
• online document creation and space for shared documents: I wonder – could this be used as a way of getting students to submit their assessments? By sharing them with markers, or Exams and Assessment? As for online documents – Google Gears and (in the fullness of time) full support for HTML5 local storage means that docs can also be edited offline; and even if Google docs don’t work natively in smartphone browsers, the app economy will probably have produced something equivalent;-) As far as storage goes, I have no idea what the current state of the OU eportfolio is…? I always favoured using a service like Box.net (OU Open Sources Moodle ePortfolio – But What Flavour is the API?), which as it happens opened up a comprehensive in browser document preview service this week (Reinventing how Businesses Share with Cloud Content Management).
• instant messaging and contact management: I don’t think our current VLE or StudentHome pages support contacts, presence indicators, or chat? (So for example, in the last presentation of T151, and at the request of students, I embedded a Meebo chat room into a wiki page in the “Course Labs” area of the course I set up to do dangerous and unapproved by the system type things. The chat wasn’t used much though, because it was: a) hard to find; b) not obvious when other people might be using it.) As far as Contacts go, I personally think we should view users with OUCUs as the population of a social network, and develop internal apps like Course Profiles and My OU Story to service that network. IMVHO, of course…

No Google Reader though? Because that’s not really a producer/creator tool, it’s mor of being just a consumer tool?

Here’s what the Goog has to say about Google Apps for Edu:

One thing that interests me in the short to medium term is the extent to which course teams will be encouraged to integrate content that is pulled from Google Apps into the VLE. Around about this time last year, I set up a quick survey using Google Forms for a course. Issues around the need for Google authentication to view the results meant I need to come up with a workaround for producing results charts (Creating Your Own Results Charts for Surveys Created with Google Forms). It’d be easy enough to mbd this charts in th VLE, but that would be competing with the VLE’s own survey tool (which I assume it has got?). So a question I have is to what extent we should drink the Google Kool Aid and spend effort not on developing Moodle apps, features and extensions (that is, apps that use Moodle datastores) and instead focus on apps that use Google as the backend. As for what widget containers to us (bespoke Moodle widgets or Google gadgets, for example), a standardisd intermediate container such as Wookie might be a better bet for a couple of reasons: 1) if we dump Moodle, we can take the widgets with us; 2) if we drop a particular back end service for a widget and replace it with another, we can retain the WIdget UI and just replace the service.

Anyway – enough. As and when this rolls out, it’ll be interesting to see what students do with it, and to what extent OU developers start developing around the apps. As far as the VLE goes, I’d be interested to know whether the powers that be are keen for us to look at ways of integrating Google services into our course delivery. Or maybe they haven’t thought about that yet? ;-)

PS to complement this, see also @andypowe11’s post On the use of Microsoft SharePoint in UK universities

I wrote an article for a new journal, the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE). My piece was entitled 'The centralisation dilemma in educational IT'. I argued that we have a centralisation - decentralisation cycle in educational IT, so we had distributed versions of VLE, which moved to a central VLE, and we are now seeing a shift back to decentralised cloud services.

The arguments for a centralised VLE are:

1. Uniformity of student experience
2. Centralised support
3. Quality assurance
4. Efficiency
5. Robustness
6. Integration of different tools
7. Staff development
8. Platform for expanding elearning offerings

1. Quality: The individual components of an integrated system will not be as good as specialist tools performing any one of these functions
2. Flexibility
3. Pedagogic suitability
4. Relevance
5. Educator control
6. Personalisation

"Having looked at some of the issues surrounding centralised and decentralised educational IT services, we can see that there is dissatisfaction with the current centralised model, but also problems with the implementation of a decentralised model. What this may signify is that we are in a transition point as educational IT services evolve from a tightly controlled and deployed set of systems to a broader continuum of tools...

This next succession of IT services is likely to see an attempt to retain some of the benefits of a centralised system with the diversity of a decentralised one. This will see the easy, open integration of third party applications into an existing hub of central, core services.

However, this approach is still unlikely to satisfy those in the decentralisation camp, because the implementation of educational technology can also be seen as a metaphor for how the institution itself operates. The primary benefit of a centralised system is that it facilitates control – this enables universities to perform their duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students by controlling the environment. In order to realise a decentralised model it would necessitate a good deal of relinquishing control. But for those who favour a decentralised model, this control is both restrictive in terms of the technologies they use, but also what they do with them."

Because it's the first edition the journal is freely available so you can access a PDF of the full article here.

OU chum Niall Sclater also has an article in the same journal, entitled 'elearning in the cloud', which you can also access.

Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image.

Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative.

And this is the problem for any online commodity - there is always a free alternative available. It may not be as good, but it'll do. I apply the same approach to articles and referencing - if I have to pay to access your article, I'll find an alternative which says more or less the same thing, and which I can access freely.

The question for anyone wishing to charge for an online product then is this "are there free alternatives available". If the answer is yes, then forget charging.

In this respect I was reminded of Michael Corleone in The Godfather 2. Senator Pat Geary is attempting to extract a bribe from him and Micheal responds:

"You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing"

Corleone has violence and intimidation to back up his offer of nothing - we have abundance of alternatives. I'm not arguing whether this is morally correct, maybe we should pay, but the point is about behaviour.

Theory and methodology in Networked learning

Gráinne Conole, The Open University

Positional paper for the Networked Learning Hotseat debate, January 2010

Introduction

This paper is intended as an initial position paper to spark debate for the networked learning hotseat scheduled for the week beginning 18^th January 2010. Each section will focus on a specific theme around theory and methods in Networked Learning and will conclude with some questions for discussion. Given the changing nature and contested nature of this field of research the paper begins by providing a definition of some terms of the terms discussed.  This paper draws on a number of sources of data:

·      Outputs from a TLRP TEL workshop on interdisciplinarity on 14^th November 2008. Participants were all researchers involved in the TLRP TEL research programme.

·      A cloudscape on interdisciplinarity http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/1954

·      Relevant research literature

·      It also draws on a special interest group led by Martin Oliver in the early nougties on theory and learning technology, which resulted in the production of a special issue of JIME (http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2002/9/).

These will be combined with the outputs from the Networked Learning hotseat discussions to provide an update positional paper for discussion on the TLRP TEL programme website (http://www.tlrp.org/tel/) as part of a theme on interdisciplinarity in TEL research.

Definitions

Research into the use of technology in an educational context had a long history with changing labels over the years, each indicating evolving trends in the field and emphasising different types of foci of inquiry. Commonly used terms include: educational technology, learning technology, e-learning, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and more recently Technology-enhanced Learning (TEL). Networked learning has a particular niche within this broader family, as Goodyear (Goodyear 2005) contends:

The terms e-learning, web based learning and online learning now have wide currency in education. I use the term networked learning to mean a distinctive version of these approaches. I define networked learning as:

    learning in which ICT is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners; between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources (Goodyear, Banks, Hodgson & McConnell, 2004).

The specific focus of this paper is on theories and methodologies in networked learning. Many books have been written on research methods in Social Science. Cohen et al. is one of the standard texts for educational research (Cohen et al. 2007). The Research Methods Knowledge Base (http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/) provides covers the entire research process including: formulating research questions; sampling; measurement; research design; data analysis; and, writing the research paper.  It also addresses the major theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of research including: the idea of validity in research; reliability of measures; and ethics. The ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/) provides a comprehensive site for collating research methods activities across the Social Sciences, along with the latest in innovations in research methods. Early work carried out by the centre included a review of research methods and generated a typology of research methods (Beissel-Durrant 2004) which illustrates the rich variety of research methods being used reflecting the breadth of different epistemological perspectives in the field.

Oliver et al. (M. Oliver et al. 2007) argue that there are a range of different epistemological positions adopted by researchers in the field and that these have profound implications for how the field will be researched. They argue that this is often explained in terms of the ‘paradigm debate’, and framed as a contrast between qualitative and quantitative methods; although go on to qualify that this is a rather crude distinction; i.e. qualitative data can be interpreted in a positivist way and quantitative data can be used to yield understandings beyond the specific numerical data. They argue that

‘we need to consider how different philosophical positions would interpret the kinds of data generated by particular empirical methods. ‘Methodology’ describes this relationship, and must be understood separately from ‘methods’, which are the techniques used to collect and analyse data (This will include things like interviews, questionnaires, observation etc.) Methodology determines whether the implementation of particular methods is successful or credible. Indeed, according to Agger, “methodologies can’t solve intellectual problems but are simply ways of making arguments for what we already know or suspect to be true” (Agger, 2004, p. 77).

To do this, methodology codifies beliefs about the world, reflecting ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ positions.

The view that knowledge is hard, objective and tangible will demand of researchers an observer role, together with an allegiance to methods of natural science; to see knowledge as personal, subjective and unique, however, imposes on researchers an involvement with their subjects and a rejection of the ways of the natural scientist. To subscribe to the former is to be positivist; to the latter, anti-positivist.

(Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000: 6)

Such commitments and interests arise from historical, cultural and political influences, which collectively shape traditions of research that provide the context for current work (e.g. Conole, 2003). These have profound implications for the topics that people study and the kinds of conclusions they are willing to draw.  (M. Oliver et al. 2007, p.9).

Therefore methods are the techniques used to collect and analyse data, whereas methodology align with different epistemological beliefs and views of the world.

The term theory is contested and is used in a variety of different ways; here are some definitions that are the closest to how it is used in a networked learning research context:

·        Theory, in the scientific sense of the word, is an analytic structure designed to explain a set of empirical observations. A scientific theory does two things: 1. it identifies this set of distinct observations as a class of phenomena, and 2. makes assertions about the underlying reality that brings about or affects this class. In the scientific or empirical tradition, the term “theory” is reserved for ideas which meet baseline requirements about the kinds of empirical observations made, the methods of classification used, and the consistency of the theory in its application among members of the class to which it pertains. These requirements vary across different scientific fields of knowledge, but in general theories are expected to be functional and parsimonious: i.e. a theory should be the simplest possible tool that can be used to effectively address the given class of phenomena. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory)

·        A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/theory)

The relationship between theory and empirical data can be defined as follows:

Social research is theoretical, meaning that much of it is concerned with developing, exploring or testing the theories or ideas that social researchers have about how the world operates. But it is also empirical, meaning that it is based on observations and measurements of reality — on what we perceive of the world around us. You can even think of most research as a blending of these two terms — a comparison of our theories about how the world operates with our observations of its operation. (http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/naturres.php)

Networked learning researchers’ birth disciplines

Researchers at the TEL interdisciplinary workshop sited a broad range of ‘birth disciplines’, including: Computer science, Plant science, Botany, Veterinary science, Ethnology cultural studies, Psychology, HCI, Philosophy, Fine art, Moral philosophy, Electronic engineering, Chemistry, History of art, AI, Geology, HPS, International development education, Linguistics and AI, Philosophy, Sociology, Maths and Physics. Authors involved in the ‘Contemporary perspectives in e-learning research’ book (G. Conole & M. Oliver 2007) also came from a diverse discipline background: Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, Critical Theory, Education, Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy and Management Studies.  

Clearly such diversity brings with it strengths; different theoretical perspectives and methodologies; different interests in terms of the focus of inquiry and research questions, but it also results in tensions - differences in definitions and understandings and even fundamentally opposed epistemological beliefs.  Discussing the emergence of learning technology as a research field, Conole and Oliver (G. Conole & M. Oliver 2002) note:

Learning technology is an inherently multidisciplinary field, and stakeholders include of researchers from different fields (educational research, cognitive psychology, instructional design, computer science, etc) as well as teaching subject-experts who engage with it as ‘end users’ or ‘consumers’. This multi-disciplinarity is a common feature of emergent research areas and, in one sense, is a strength. However, if we are to capitalise on this richness of expertise, it is necessary to work towards a clear theoretical underpinning that allows these diverse cultures to engage with and develop the use of learning technology.

A recent cloud in cloudworks considers these benefits and tensions in more detail (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2806). Here is a summary of some of the main arguments made to date:

·        Some researchers recognise the underlying influence their ‘birth discipline’ has on their research approach. However others argued that their perspectives around e-learning have been shaped far more by the experiences they have had working in the area than by prior studies in an unrelated discipline many years ago.

·        The transition to an educational perspective for researchers originally fro a Science background is very hard indeed, requiring a complete rethinking of underlying epistemological beliefs. However having an understanding of both Science and Social Science perspectives is incredibly useful. Similarly transitional processes are evident from those coming into the research from managerial or business backgrounds.

·        Many researchers are drawn into research into the use of technologies in an educational context from a practical perspective, i.e. what can these technologies offer? What are the issues? This pragmatic stance is coupled with a desire to understand and describe emergent theoretical perspectives.

·        Irrespective of the theoretical and methodological lenses used to study technological phenomena, the contextual and in particular the human dimension is key

o   Whether you call it Hermeneutics (Theology) or multiple perspectives (Systems) doesn’t matter - both recognise the situated and contingent nature of anything involving people. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to make sense of TEL solely using the ’scientific’ paradigm.

·        A number of points were made extrapolating key themes emerging from research and practice. I) The focus needs to be on how technologies can enhance the learning experience, and that it is important to remember that good teaching and learning is possible without any technology.  2) The teacher’s role is crucial, technology wont make a bad teacher good, 3) There is no one size fits all solution. 4) Failure is useful, we can (and should) learn from it.

The nature of theory

In the introduction to a special issue of JIME, Oliver provides an overview of the position of theories in the emergent field of learning technologies in 2002 (M. Oliver 2002):

I was struck by the diversity of theories that people were drawing upon, and the very different ways in which they were using them. For some, a theory was a touchstone, a guiding set of principles, the foundation on which their work built. For others, theories were tools, and the important thing was having the right one for the job. What, I wondered, was the right way to use theory here? Should we believe in them, live them, and risk being dogmatic — or should we be pluralistic, tied to none, and risk being superficial?

The papers included in this issue are as varied and eclectic as the group that contributed them. Approaches vary considerably — from theory as tool, to theory as principle; from theory building, to theory using; from disciplines as diverse as film studies, psychology, sociology and education. So too do the topics — software tools, logic learning, metadata, multimedia; an array of mainstream issues, and other gems besides. To me, it is this diversity that makes this such an interesting area. It is constantly challenging; always impossible to tell quite what perspective might be brought to bear on your problem next.

Masterman and Manton considered the role of theory with respect to elearning (Masterman & Manton 2009 and see also http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/1910) posing the following questions:

·      What is the value of theory to teachers?

·      What do we mean by theory?

·      How has theory has been embedded into three areas?

They drew on Lawes work (Lawes, 2004), in particular the notion that theory gives a framework of understanding that ultimately improves the quality of practice and leads to the transformation of subjective experience. They argued that theory could provide a glue between technology and practice. They then went to make a distinction between theories, models and frameworks:

·      Theories provide a means of understanding and predicting something (Cook 2002). In the original article Cook expands this ‘A theory or model can be used as a means for understanding and predicting some aspect of an educational situation. Theories are not the same as models. A theory can posses an explanatory power and can consist of a set of

…general assumptions and laws … that are not themselves intended to be directly (in)validated (for that, the theory must engender a model). Theories are foundational elements of paradigms, along with shared problems and methods (Kuhn, 1962)
(Baker, 2000). ‘

·      Model are abstract representations that helps us understand something we can’t see or experience directly (Conole, Oliver et al., 2007)), models include things like Kolb’s leaning cycle,

·      A framework is a  structure and vocabulary that supports the explication of concepts and issues (G. Conole & M. Oliver 2002), such as Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (Laurillard 2002).

They argue that theory is a cornerstone of professional practice… and an antidote to technological determinism. However, teachers generally do not consciously espouse formal theories and are driven by prior experience and reflective practice.

Conole and Oliver (G. Conole & M. Oliver 2002) in discussing the range of resources that can be used by practitioners to support decision making, identify five types: tools, good practice, models, frameworks and templates/wizards. They define models as

‘representations, usually of systems. These are frequently visual representations, although formal models are more likely to be syntactic (or derived from an underlying syntactic representation), often being defined mathematically. Models may be tools, in that they can be used to carry out analyses or may permit certain assumptions to be expressed. Equally, however, they may be the object (i.e. purpose) of an activity, in that it may be necessary to construct a model of a system in order to develop an explicit understanding of how it works.’

And they go on to argue that there is a spectrum from templates/wizards through to frameworks:

Aids to decision-making range from highly restrictive ‘templates’ or ‘wizards’, which provide high levels of support and step-by-step guidance but little possibility of user-adaptation, through to ‘theoretical frameworks’, which provide a context and scope for the work but leave the user to devise their own strategy for implementation.

Theoretical perspectives dominant discourses

This section tries to articulate some of the main theoretical perspectives that are evident in networked learning research. It is not intended to be comprehensive; rather it aims to act as a starting point for discussion. At the TLRP TEL interdisciplinary workshop the following range of theoretical perspectives were listed: Social constructivism, Actor Network Theory, Constructivism, Critical theory, Action research, Communities of practice – researchers and practitioners, STS, Scientific enquiry, Conversational framework, Philosophy of technology, Anthropological views on tools artefacts and technology, Activity theory. However there was also a suggestion that we need to move beyond existing theories and that in time new interdisciplinary theories might emerge from TEL work.

Cultural Historical Activity Theory

Socio-cultural perspectives are a predominate discourse in the field. In particular, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (see the following edited collections (Engeström et al. 1999) (Cole et al. 1997)(Daniels et al. 2007) has been used extensively in Networked Learning particularly as a descriptive lense. A key idea in CHAT is the notion of mediation by artifacts (Kuutti, 1991), which are broadly defined ‘to include instruments, signs, language, and machines’ (Nardi, 1995). In my own work I have drawn on this extensively in terms of exploration of the range of mediating artefacts that can be used to support the learning design process (Conole,  2008).  Engestrom’s so-called ‘triangle’ representation (Engestrom 2001) has been used extensively to described particular instances of networked learning interventions, as it helps consider a focus on subject-object with associated outcome supported through mediating tools in the context of a wider community context and associated rules and divisions of labour (Joyes 2008) (Waycott et al. 2005) (Karasavvidis 2008).

Communities of Practice

Wenger’s notion of Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998) has been picked up and used extensively in the field of Networked Learning;(G. Cousin & Deepwell 2005)(Guldberg & Pilkington 2006) (Breuleux et al. 1998)in some cases in appropriately. It’s appeal is probably a combination of the fact that it is relatively easy concept to grasp and that it offered a means of explaining some of the more social-situated interactions arising in networked learning.

Actor Network Theory

Actor Nework Theory considers both people and technologies as Actants in a connected network and in particular that it is the relationship between these actants that is important. Although called a theory it doesn’t explain a phenomenon but focuses more on why a network takes the form that it does. It is much more interested in exploring how actor-networks get formed, hold themselves together, or fall apart.  It was developed by Callon (Callon 1999) and Latour (Latour 2005) and also builds on the thinkings of Foucault (Fox 2000)

Cybernetics and systems thinking

Cybernetics and systems thinking provide a means of understanding complex systems(Capra 1996)

I've been pondering further after my previous post in response to George Siemens' call to arms for visionaries in the open education movement. It's the sign of how good George's post was that it has set many of us thinking around the issue.

I mentioned in my last post that there was something of the pragmatist vs idealist in the debate, and I offer this up just because I'm trying to think it through myself. I'm in agreement about the need for debate and not letting it be overtaken by commercial interests. But I'd disagree with George's opening remark:

"We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries."

I think the opposite is true - in higher education we've got too many stubborn, irritating visionaries and not enough driven pragmatists. I admire idealists, and I know that we need them to hold onto beliefs and drive forward change. But if I'm honest, I also have a bit of an issue with idealists, particularly in higher education. Being an idealist is sexy, admirable. But it can also be an easy option - idealists don't often take on the messy managerial roles of projects. It's then possible to never be proved wrong and to always claim that had they done it your way it would have turned out right. I know this, because I've done it. This isn't always true, plenty of idealists put their careers, their reputation and sometimes their lives on the line. But in the often cosy world of higher education it's possible to hide behind idealism as a means of never having to fail.

I always like people who actually get on and do it though. In his book about the development of the Mac Steven Levy gives us the famous 'real artists ship' quote from Steven Jobs. The point being that it is delivery that matters.

But Jobs is an interesting case of a pragmatist - he is also a purist and doesn't easily compromise. But he knows how to deliver, and it is that focus which I think higher education lacks. If real artists ship, what do real educators do?

In the end, maybe what I'm calling for is this:

So much for peer relationships! Social growth is also a good idea – or was….

Re Taxpayer… these online courses lack the academic interaction between students that is so crucial to a great education

The fact that these readers are arguing with one another in the online comment thread about whether you can have meaningful academic or social interactions in an online setting is really just too delicious.

More interestingly, several students from the OHSU (who someone apparently forgot to tell that they can’t have meaningful interactions online) have joined the argument, with posts like:

I would like to ask those who are posting on the article how much they REALLY know what they’re talking about. Honestly. What do you know about OHSU (Open High School of Utah–what this article is all about)? Next to nothing. You know that it is an online charter school, it’s curriculum is “open,” and that there is a student named Jizelle. Am I missing anything? As a student at OHSU, I would like you all to stop trash talking my school until you understand exactly what it is you’re talking about.

Hi, my name is Robin, I am a thirteen year old girl. I have been public schooled, home schooled, and I am in OHSU at the time being… I have more time to learn, and grow with OHSU. I am sorry if you like brick and mortar schools better, but the facts are, when there are 45+ students in a class with one mentor it becomes babysitting NOT teaching!

I am also a student of the Open High School of Utah… I really wish that people would cease with the stereotyping that children who learn at home lack social skills, have some sort of mental problem or disability (I’m pretty sure my mental health is great, thank you very much), or that this type of learning isn’t as effective. Like what LisaMaren stated, OHSU uses discussion boards, in which we are REQUIRED to read through and respond to what the other students have to say. Yes, the posts are longer and well thought out since students are given the chance to sit there, think, and type it down rather than how it would be in an impromptu face-to-face conversation. Everyone has an equal chance to speak their mind and be heard–unlike in the traditional school, where the shy girl may be overshadowed by the know-it-all geek.

Is there a more enjoyable critic to listen to than the one who disproves his own point as he argues for it?

<Image Open by Mag3737 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/>

This is rather late to the party, but the changing nature of the term 'open' is one of my things, so I wanted to chip in.

George Siemens kicked off an interesting debate around 'openness'. George argues that the term has been diluted so as to become almost meaningless, and that an ideological (rather than, say, a pragmatic) stance on openness is important:

"We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries....

Openness should mean something. It should be driven by ideology, rather than convenience. As a foundational principle in education, openness should be discussed, critiqued, encouraged, and aggressively preserved."

David Wiley then responded thoughtfully, and argues that the pragmatic approach is the best means to advance such interests beyond a niche audience, building on the open source movement and Richard Stallman example George provided:

"Without translators like Raymond, who adapted Stallman’s message so that a broader audience could both (1) understand and (2) see the value of it, Stallman and his philosophies would still be niche players on the global scale today."

(As an aside, there are echoes of the Cato vs Cicero debate in this which I previously applied to Stephen and David)

Jim Groom, quite rightly I think, is suspicious that the term is being appropriated by commercial entities for marketing reasons:

it’s no surprise to me that corporations like BlackBoard, Google, and Facebook would push for this label, and there is little question in my mind that the market cache such a term has right now is increasingly diluting any of its meaning, particularly given it’s not so much reliant on technical infrastructure or content

He then goes on to express some concerns about the nature of the debate:

Who gets to discuss what open is? Where do they do it? Companies don’t really care too much about that discussion, they just care about appealing to users through a term, and if they make up the table, along with administrators at universities and the like, then why do we need to go to the table at all? Isn’t the push away from these legacies of power and privilege a part of what open is working against on it’s most powerful and truly transformative levels?

So here's some thoughts from me, because, hey, it's an open debate right?

Firstly, I share George and Jim's reservations about over-use of the term. I even had a half-baked post ready about how this time next year 'open' will be a naff, over-used term, like 'web 2.0' is now. So, in this respect, George is right in his call to arms to defend the term ideologically. But, I think Jim hits on something too - one consequence of George's call might be that a few 'chosen' people or people in preferred positions get to determine what 'openness' is.

George's position (I think, correct me if I'm wrong George) is that those in education should take control of what open education means. This seems logical, except I think that the concept of openness has been advanced mainly by people outside, or on the periphery, of education. Open source software, wikipedia, the open APIs of twitter and Facebook (more on this later), Google, slideshare, scribd opening up of content, etc.

Which brings me on to my main point - I can live with a plurality of definitions. In fact, I rather like it, and I think academic obsession with finding a precise definition often gets in the way of being productive - witness how every paper, conference presentation, or website about learning objects had a definition of what a learning object was, instead of getting on with just sharing stuff.

I work at the Open University (I think I may have mentioned that before ;)) - and what a lot of the new 'open' discussion misses out is what the OU thinks of as important in open education, namely 'supported' open learning. Access to content is not, in our experience, sufficient for open education to be successful. For students to learn at a higher level they often require a wide range of support structures (although not always, with the right content some students manage on their own). This aspect of 'open education' is largely absent from much of the debate, perhaps because it is taking the open source model and is largely focused around content.

I am not arguing that this should be the definition  of open education, but illustrating that under the umbrella term 'open education' there are many elements. It may be that some of these are not even complementary (for example, providing supported open learning is often expensive so may run counter to the open as in free branch of thought). I think we are too new in all of this to start pinning down definitions or excluding uses. As Clay Shirky (sorry George!) argued about the newspaper industry, we are living through a revolution and we don't know what will happen:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

So, I'll go along with Twitter and Facebook saying they have open APIs, because one could see how open APIs may be the a really significant force in open education. I'd probably feel less inclined to include Blackboard in this because their history has shown their antipathy towards openness. And if Slideshare turns out to be a better model for OERs than MERLOT, then I'll take that on board too.

So I'd agree with David when he says that: "I think a great example of that undernourishment is the belief that open means the same thing no matter where you find it." Open is a big, buzzing ball of interrelated concepts, beliefs, technology and approaches at the moment, and I'm okay with that.

The Reverend contributes to the latest round of the conversation about “openness:”

The larger question in my mind is that what is under girding this discussion is an even more insidious logic than a denatured sense of open, and that’s a sense of entitled leadership. Fact is, the push to make sense of open as a term and discuss it’s meaning, future shape, and ultimate value seems to be the most definitive step in forming an institutional structure of power around it.

What is the alternative to ‘pushing to make sense of the term “open” and discussing it’s meaning and future shape?’ Studiously ignoring the term? Turning a blind eye to what is happening in the field? Is the concern about “institutionalizing a structure of power around the term open” that only a few get to participate in the discussions?

Who gets to discuss what open is? Where do they do it?

It is being discussed in the blogosphere by anyone who cares about it enough to type, right? George chimed in, I chimed in, the Rev chimed in, Stephen has chimed in… Anyone who wants to can take part. I’m sure many more will join the fray.

Importantly, there are at least two parts to this conversation. There is global part of the conversation, where we will discuss aspects of openness (openness of content, openness of research, openness of software, openness of credentialing, etc.) outside the context of specific implementations (i.e., individual institutions or projects). Then there will be the very concretely grounded discussions about specific implementations in specific contexts. The comparison is a little rough, but these will be akin to theory / practice conversations. Both are important, and they should inform each other.

Companies don’t really care to much about that discussion, they just care about appealing to users through a term, and if they make up the table, along with administrators at universities and the like, then why do we need to go to the table at all? Isn’t the push away from these legacies of power and privilege a part of what open is working against on it’s most powerful and truly transformative levels?

Why do we open education people need to have a seat at the table in department meetings, dean’s council, and when the VPs meet with the provost and president? The same reason that open source software needs a seat at the table with Dell, HP, Gateway, and Lenovo. Sure, the hackers of the world can blow away that Windows 7 install, repartition their hard drive, and do a clean Ubuntu install. But how many more people would open source reach / how much more influence would open source have if the major vendors shipped Ubuntu or Red Hat or (name your favorite distro here) straight to consumers? Significantly more – infinitely more.

And, of course, the radicals on each campus can put their course notes on their personal website with a CC license without engaging their administrations – just like hackers can write open source software without talking to hardware vendors. But how many more people would open educational resources reach / how much more influence would open educational resources have if the institutions themselves made wide-reaching commitments to the principle of openness? Significantly more – infinitely more.

Yes, we want a seat at that table. We need a seat at that table. And until we have it, the potential good of open education is going to be severely limited in reach – restricted to the educational equivalent of the computer user who is capable of repartioning his hard drive and doing a clean Linux install. Yes, those users are out there, but they’re the vast, vast minority.

Why does their need to be a continental congress on open? Why do we have to conflate it with system and then elect officials to define it for us? Part of the power and the hope of this space for me is a new scale of working though this ideas that is both hyper-individual and communally local at the same time. To frame the discussion around a table of designated players that move us forward seems in many ways contrary to possibilities these connections and relationships provide us.

Where is this conflated meeting of elected officials happening? The conversation I’m participating in about the meaning of openness is on publicly accessible, openly licensed blogs that have comments and trackbacks enabled. How much more open and participatory is the conversation supposed to be? What am I missing?

I don’t think of this so much as radical as an alternative to the models of leadership, promotion, and adoption of ideas that have utlimately placed them squarely within a system that is moving in a unilateral direction of progress in the name of growth and profit.

Isn’t growth the whole point of openness – growing the number of people who have access to educational opportunity? For an institution like BYU, that for years has had a “zero square foot growth” policy with regard to buildings on campus, wouldn’t a commitment to openness be all about growing the number of people the institution can reach, support, and bless? If openness isn’t about growing or increasing both the amount of educational opportunity available and the number of people who can access those opportunities, what is it about?

And – here comes the part where you can all throw things at me – if we want those opportunities to still be available 3, 5, and 10 years from now, shouldn’t someone worry about how we support them? I’m not saying that we need 2008-destroy-our-economy-and-take-the-world-with-it-style capitalism in open education. But we do have to get over this notion that any time we talk about money or sustainability we’ve tainted and contaminated ourselves.

In his summary of this round of the conversation, Stephen notes:

David Wiley responds to George Siemens’s post calling for more radicalism for open education. It’s a moderate response, reminding people to heed to the goals of education, and not the means. In this I agree – open education is not an end in itself, but part of the means by which we reach our goals of an education for all in a just and sharing society.

See! It can happen! Stephen and I can agree with each other…

And he argues that, therefore, “the ideal [of openness] needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts.” This is true as well – at the margins. But the examples cited by Siemens – Twitter, Blackboard, Facebook – aren’t marginal cases, and claims that they are somehow ‘open’ in a way that is conducive to a free education in a just and sharing society somehow ring hollow.

Perhaps I need to use all caps to make my point clearer than I have been able to in my past posts. MY DISCUSSION OF THE MEANING OF OPEN DOES NOT EXTEND TO SOFTWARE (LIKE TWITTER, BLACKBOARD, OR FACEBOOK). WHEN I TALK ABOUT “THE MEANING OF THE ‘OPEN’ IN ‘OPEN CONTENT’,” I MEAN I’M DISCUSSING THE ADJECTIVE “OPEN” AS IT MODIFIES THE NOUN “CONTENT.” This is the same “open” that occurs in “open educational resources.” This is the world to which the 4Rs framework applies.

It is NOT the same “open” that occurs in “open source software.” We don’t need to discuss whether software is open or not. “Open source software” is already a trademarked term with a vouchsafed definition. Twitter, Blackboard, or Facebook are not open source, full-stop, end of story. They can claim that their software is “open” in some other manner, but no one believes it – I don’t even think they believe it. (Facebook also goes around saying that they care about protecting your privacy. Do we need to define privacy? No. Everyone knows Facebook is doing whatever is in its best interest and that it could care less about privacy or openness.) There’s nothing to discuss here except to complain about companies who mislead the public to make a buck. But there is no special relation to openness in this regard.

Stephen writes that my claim “the ideal [of openness] needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts” is only true at the margins. In this case, I think Stephen is simply wrong. (See, we can disagree, too!)

The differences between software and content are not marginal. The necessary and appropriate considerations of openness in these two contexts are significantly different. People taking the naive position of “OER is like open source software for content!” fail to carefully consider what they’re saying and consequently miss important differences. (It’s like when people used to say “learning objects are like LEGOs!” After some reflection, we can see that this metaphor stuck so powerfully in people’s minds – and was so wrong – as to have contributed meaningfully to the inability of learning objects to deliver on their (over-hyped) promise.)

Our inability to speak and write with precision and clarity about the differences in the openness of content and the openness of software is a huge roadblock to the progress of open education. The “OER is open source software for content” metaphor is so powerful as to be blinding. These differences are not marginal. The differences in the openness of research, the openness of data, and the openness of credentialing are not marginal, either. We need a more mature, more developed, and more precise discourse about open education. And I think that open blogs on the open web is the right place to have it.

We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries. Today, I fear, open education is beset with a more moderate spirit…

Richard Stallman has been somewhat replaced by, or even written out of, the open source movement. Stallman was (and still is) an uncompromising radical. Or at least that is how the well established proprietary software field sees him. The open source movement developed in response to what others perceived as Stallman’s unpalatable views for mainstreaming openness.

I’ve stated in the past that I’m concerned about open education suffering the fate of Stallman – marginalized because it is not palatable at the “power table”. I still think this is a valid concern. But we first need a Stallman in open education before we can even begin to marginalize him. We need an idealist that sets the stage for thinking and debate around openness.

I would disagree and say that we have plenty of stubborn, irritating, aggravating voices in the open education space. A few examples that I respect greatly: First, it’s well known how much Stephen aggravates me, and how uncompromising he is. Second, Kim Tucker works so hard to bring the purity of Stallman’s ideas into the open education space that he sometimes appears to be a reincarnation of St. Ignucius himself. Derek Keats is also a champ in this regard. The UNESCO listserv “discussions” (aka battles) over licensing issues, which are at the very core of openness, were really something.

I don’t want to launch into a full-on defense of pragmatism; however, it is easy to see why the open source movement had to emerge from what Richard was doing with the “free software” movement. He couldn’t get a seat at “the table” because he wouldn’t speak in a language anyone at the table cared about. He still refuses to – and he still doesn’t have a seat at the table. Now, being uncompromisingly committed to principle is fine, as long as you don’t mind being ignored by certain groups. It can mean a life of “being translated” so that others can understand you, which consequently means a life of not having a direct impact, because your message is always being rewritten by a mediator so that it can be understood. (Hence, Eric Raymond has been an extremely popular consultant and wielded a huge direct influence on the computing industry, while Richard has not.) If you want the attention of those groups “at the table,” and you want the opportunity to engage them directly, you have to speak their language. And sometimes you have to adapt your message. I believe that protecting one’s ability to adapt appropriately for different audiences is one of the key benefits of openness, so I will be curious to hear whether George thinks adaptations are appropriate or not.

While we often hear criticism of Stallman’s inflexibility, he has done more to advance openness by not accommodating than he could have possibly done by assuming a moderate or even commercial stance.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Without translators like Raymond, who adapted Stallman’s message so that a broader audience could both (1) understand and (2) see the value of it, Stallman and his philosophies would still be niche players on the global scale today. (Let the firestorm begin.)

David Wiley states that open is a function of gradients (“a continuous, not binary, construct”). According to Wiley, openness is not an ideological concept, like democracy, but rather a functional or utilitarian construct: like a door or window being open or partly open. I can see the appeal of this view – the value of something is discovered in its implementation. But it seems wrong to me when applied to an ideological concept such as openness.

I’m not sure why George makes the leap from my more nuanced view of openness to my somehow not believing that openness is an ideological concept. Of course openness is a concept – and of course people are ideological about it’s meaning. But, like democracy, little concrete debate can be had about the concept (and no implementation of the concept can occur) until it has been operationalized. How can you debate a concept without a concrete proposal as to it’s meaning?

Unfortunately, many people have taken the stance that the open education movement’s notion of openness should be exactly the same as the open source software movement’s definition. Because software and content are different in meaningful ways, I don’t think such a simple-minded, whole-cloth adoption makes sense. This is why I have proposed the 4Rs Framework for thinking about openness specifically with regard to content (including educational resources):

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
4. Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

I guess George doesn’t see value in my “framework” for thinking about openness. His discussion makes me believe that he doesn’t see the 4Rs Framework as being able to disqualify things from being open (“The gradient of democracy has a threshold”). However, as I’ve discussed in the past, there is content that clearly fails to grant any of these rights (and so is closed). There is also content that only grants reuse and redistribution rights, while denying revision and remixing rights (which I call “2R open”). Finally, there is also content that grants all four rights (which I call “4R open”). Clearly, traditional textbooks are not open according to this framework. Anything with a standard (c) statement is not open according to this framework.

In response to my statement:

Licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. If another person or institution’s approach to openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, then look for help somewhere else – don’t criticize them.

George says:

We should criticize. We should debate. By not criticizing gradient views of openness, by failing to establish a solid foundation on which to discuss openness, we are providing an ideology for our generation, not one that serves as a future-focused movement. Openness is a hard topic to discuss ideologically because it’s important. Yes, pragmatics are easier. But pragmatics have a short life span.

Openness is not a methodology. Openness is an ideology along the lines of democracy. It is worthy of theoretical discussion. And various modes of implementation should be subject to debate and criticism.

Two things are entangled in my comment and George’s response – the productive criticism of the ideals of our movement, and the criticism of individuals or institutions that gets personal and becomes both unprofessional and unproductive. I strongly believe that we should engage in criticism and debate with regard to the ideals of our movement itself. No meaningful progress can be made if we don’t. We also desperately need to engage in criticism and debate about the processes and methodologies in which these naked ideals are clothed in the real world. No meaningful progress can be made if we don’t. However, when everyone starts bashing MIT, or starts talking about how stupid anyone is that would ever use the NC clause, or what a waste of space institutions who share pdf files are, then what could be productive conversation turns into vindictives that move the field backward.

Why spend days, even months, debating seemingly insignificant details of openness? Why not just produce something and share it in any manner you wish?

The debate is great, and productive, and I think this series of posts shows that some of us are engaging in it. We just don’t want to discourage people from making their first forays into being open by slamming their “moronic decisions.” They’re worried enough about whether or not they should be open without us attacking their first attempts. We should be supporting them, not belittling them. I’m not claiming that George belittles people, but there is far too much of that in the open education movement right now.

As I’ve said above, I believe that because content and software are meaningfully different from one another, their definitions of open should be meaningfully different as well. I’m not sure if George shares that sentiment, since his article seems to flow freely between software systems and other aspects of open education. Though he does make this nod:

What does it mean to be open? What is an open methodology? What does openness look like in relation to technology, information, learning content, administrative systems (transparency of the student record and related data collection by an institution), and pedagogy?

George continues with a quote:

Robert Hutchins has stated that “the death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment”. A similar concern exists for openness in education.

I think a great example of that undernourishment is the belief that open means the same thing no matter where you find it. While we’re appreciating the differences in software and content, we should look ahead and see that when the ideal of openness finally starts to make its way into the broader institutional policy discussion, it’s definition will have to adapt again. Neither the Open Source Definition nor the 4Rs Framework will be sufficient for the language spoken at that particular table.

We also have to realize, admit, and feel comfortable with the fact that openness does not belong everywhere in education. For example, if students want to keep their grades private, they should be able to. And the existence of one area where openness does not and should not apply should lead us to look sincerely for other areas where it does not and should not apply. I don’t believe George is promoting it, but you don’t have to look far to find voices calling that all copyright should be abolished and all information should be open. This is the cry of a zealous fanatic, not the impulse of a thoughtful person.

Remaking our educational institutions into places where openness is a core, ambient, unconscious value of all who work there is a more intricate and involved matter than giving everyone on campus a copy of the OSD and saying “apply this in all aspects of your professional and personal life.” “Openness” the ideal needs to mean specific things in specific contexts in order for it to be applied usefully in those contexts. It will mean one thing in the IT context, another in the research / scholarship context, another in the teaching and learning context, another in the broader policy context, etc. And we need to thoughtfully develop these different meanings through writing and debate.

Many of us, myself and George included, are aggressively pursuing systemic change in education. (Some of the more radical voices in the field simply want to burn education down and plant new seeds in its ashes.) George asks an important question that each of us should be open about answering – ‘why are we pursuing this change?’ Personally, my reasons for wanting to increase the openness of all aspects of education, each in their own appropriate way, are moral, ethical, and ultimately religious. I continue to be inspired by the great 1975 address by LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball to the BYU community, which included the following statement:

We must be willing to break with the educational establishment (not foolishly or cavalierly, but thoughtfully and for good reason) in order to find gospel ways to help mankind. Gospel methodology, concepts, and insights can help us to do what the world cannot do in its own frame of reference.

Ideas like “sharing” are not concepts that flow directly out of the market, and there is little that the market can tell us about how to do it well. I would never claim that Mormonism (or Christianity more broadly) has cornered the market on loving and serving your fellow man, but my personal belief that I should “love my neighbor as myself” is the bedrock on which my life-long pursuit of increasing openness is built. That principle, sometimes called the “second great commandment,” is one which certainly requires adaptation to the individual, but never needs to be compromised.

The Foundation is making a number of organizational changes designed to consolidate resources and concentrate them more effectively on the Foundation’s central objectives in support of its five core program areas: the liberal arts and humanistic scholarship in higher education, scholarly communications, museums and art conservation, performing arts, and conservation and the environment. As part of these changes, the Research in Information Technology Program (RIT) will be merged into the Scholarly Communications program and cease to exist as a standalone grantmaking program of the Mellon Foundation, effective January 4, 2010. The Scholarly Communications program, which will be renamed so as to indicate, explicitly, that technology-based grantmaking is part of its mandate, will assume responsibility for managing existing RIT grants and the planning of future grant initiatives that emphasize the development of information technologies in support of the Foundation’s core focus. As this merger occurs, my colleagues, Ira Fuchs, who founded the RIT program at the Foundation in 2000, and Christopher Mackie, will both be leaving the Foundation.

The RIT Program at Mellon has been a major funder of open source / open education projects we know and care about, like Zotero, Sakai, Kuali, and Folksemantic. When Hewlett funded content development in open education, Mellon funded software development for open education. Their combined efforts have had a huge, positive impact on the field. With Mike and Cathy both leaving Hewlett last year, and now Ira and Chris leaving Mellon, the field really feels like it’s in transition…

A hearty “God bless” to Ira and Chris as they set out on new adventures.

In that post I invited people to send me more current information if they had it. Both Ryan and Steve Carson of MIT OCW accepted the invitation and provided more updated financial data. (In his reply, Steve good-heartedly suggested that I’m poor at math. My math was correct based on the numbers in Ryan’s article; I think Steve meant that I should redo my calculations based on more recent numbers.) So here we go.

In an article both Ryan and Steve suggested, called OpenCourseWare: Working Through Financial Challenges, we read:

To date, this effort has been funded by a combination of grant funding (41% of FY 2009 expenditures and 72% of total OCW expenditures since inception), Institute funds (49% in FY2009 and 22% of total to date), and donations and other revenue (10% in FY2009 and 6% of total to date).”

Using the FY2009 numbers, and the total of $3.6M for FY2009, that breaks down as follows:

MIT Internal funds – 49% – $1,764,000
Grants – 41% – $1,476,000
Donations, Amazon.com affiliate revenue, and all other sources – 10% – $360,000

This is a much better scenario for MIT OCW than the one suggested by the overall “