Open Education 2011 Conference Experiences

Posted on October 27, 2011 Written by

I’ve just finished up three days at my first Open Education conference in Park City, Utah, and it was an amazing experience, made even more so by being in the middle of ECI 831. It was pretty inspiring to be in a huge ballroom full of people who all “get it” — from teachers to vendors to bureaucrats. I wish all of my co-students could have been here to share in the experience — everything was directly relevant to what we are studying, and so many people were knowledgeable about so much, and were eager to share. Fortunately, in the finest spirit of openness, all of the presentations were recorded and will be made available soon (including mine, ugh, where I fear I talked way too fast due to being a little nervous — my slides are here). Here are a few of my highlights:

Open Textbooks

There was a lot of discussion of open textbooks at the conference. When you look at the numbers it seems like such an obvious choice. Each school, division, city, province, state, country (or whatever unit funds textbooks) is paying each year thousands or even millions of dollars for the same basic textbooks for their schools. A more fiscally-responsible alternative would be to pay an expert or two in each field a couple of hundred thousand dollars to write the authoritative textbook (e.g., Biology 101, Psych 101, etc.), and then make the results openly available for everyone. The potential cost savings are pretty staggering. Fortunately, the tools and services are now being put into place, such as Flatworld Knowledge and Connexions that can make this possible, and, it seems, policy makers are starting to listen. How can they not? Apparently, some traditional textbook publishers are fighting back, trying to get legislation passed that would block this, but it doesn’t seem likely to pass. One speaker quoted Gandhi as saying “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then… you win”. Much of the open movement (source, education, access) has matured to the fighting stage, so its just a matter of time before we win (and, in fact, in many ways we already have).

Does anyone know of any initiatives in Saskatchewan in this direction? I learned that BCCampus is quite involved in moving forward.

Cool Tools

There were several sessions on new tools for open educators. A couple that stood out for me were OERGlue and OpenStudy. OERGlue allows a teacher to pull together open resources from across the web into a course, and build online interactions around those. They’ve developed a useful widget that lets you basically surf the web and grab content into your course. The web site has a helpful demo. By providing a quick and easy way to integrate a wide variety of content into a single course, it looks like a great piece of infrastructure to help expand the use of open educational resources. OpenStudy provides a social network of learning support for students. Anyone can set up a study group for their course and invite others to participate. I was impressed to learn that it already has over 70,000 users in 170 countries. Due to the large size of the community, students often get answers to their questions in minutes, not hours or days. It makes use of a reward system, so that good behaviour is encouraged and bad behaviour can result in banning, and a very positive, helpful culture has been established. This is another good example of a tool that facilitates the connectedness that we know is so important to effective learning (online or off).

Connectedness

A common theme throughout many of the sessions was the importance of building connections and communities. One statement making its way around the twitterverse was “education is more about connecting than content”. This fits very well into what we’re learning in class.

Another piece of good news is that Open Education 2012 will be in Vancouver, which is much closer to home for many of us. I’m definitely planning to attend. I was very fortunate to have my employer pay for this trip, but I’d definitely self-fund a visit to the coast to participate in this next event. The community of people were all enthusiastic, positive, full of ideas, and wanting to talk and share. It is a great way to spend a few days!

Filed Under: Conferences, Thoughts Tagged:

Tweets, Blogs, and Knowledge Creation

Posted on October 27, 2011 Written by

Our class has gotten me thinking a lot about how we learn and how our ideas and knowledge develop. It has been interesting to use Twitter to get continual input from so many smart people (such as my co-students!), and to be influenced by them, remotely, on a regular basis. Often, an idea sparked in a tweet will lead to a blog post, where it can be fleshed out with a little more thought and detail (and beyond 140 characters). If we’re lucky, exposing our ideas in a blog post will generate some helpful and critical comments, which can either reinforce our concepts or challenge us to rethink them. If an idea really gets interesting, we can think about it even further, discuss it with friends and colleagues, and may even bring it to a conference and deliver it as a presentation. Again, this can create a new feedback loop, with a different set of people engaging with the ideas, offering more perspectives and opinions, and leading again to the need to reconsider elements of the original ideas. Based on all of this learning, if you are really jazzed up about it, you can then take all of the thinking, all of the discussions, all of the further investigation, all of the feedback, and write it up as an article for publication in a professional publication or scholarly journal.

All of this thinking and scholarly activity, sparked by a single tweet. Who knew? Anyone here thinking about writing up something for publication? Anyone want to co-author something?

Filed Under: Thoughts Tagged: ,

Open Cities, Adult Education, and Community Development

Posted on October 25, 2011 Written by

Andrea Reimer’s closing keynote at the Access conference was a truly inspiring presentation. In it, she outlined Vancouver’s Open3 policy, consisting of:

  1. Open Source: The city’s purchasing policy now treats open source software the same as proprietary software. In the past, open source always lost out because it wasn’t “supported”. The city now recognizes community support. There is no mandate to always use open source, but instead the playing field is simply levelled. Great win!
  2. Open Standards: The city is committed to using data formats that are widely accessible and open. Data that you can’t read isn’t much use. Another important win.
  3. Open Data: Almost all of the data collected by the city is made freely available on their web site. This matters. A lot.

One reason this matters is because it allows innovative new services to be developed. Andrea gave the example of the massive amount of time the city spends answering the question, “when is my garbage getting picked up?”. Using the open data, a small software company created an application that allows people to now check for themselves, and the volume of calls has dropped significantly.

More importantly, though, is the crucial role data plays in engaged citizenship. A vibrant democracy is based on popular decision-making — but good, effective decisions can’t be made without good data to inform those decisions. The City of Vancouver has now made the critical step of providing the data to its citizens, providing them with the tools for more meaningful (and ultimately democratic) decision-making. This reminded me of the participatory budgeting processes that have taken place in cities in Brazil, Chicago, and elsewhere. This is such an important part of meaningful community development.

One of the reasons I entered the Adult Education program at the U of R was to explore the connections between adult learning and community development more closely. The connections between the two go back a long way, such as in the Antigonish Movement in Nova Scotia in the early 20th Century. For many of us, adult education is fundamentally about the growth and enrichment of the life of the individual learner, and the benefits that then provides to his or her wider community. The community itself develops as the individuals within it develop. This happens through a process of learning — learning about one’s life situation, the politics and economic context in which one lives, etc. Paolo Freire continued this tradition into the late 20th Century, and it lives on today in the work of educators and scholars practicing Critical Pedagogy. And now, thanks to Andrea Reimer and her colleagues, practicing critical pedagogy in the City of Vancouver just got a whole lot more interesting! Rich, open data means greater learning, greater information, greater knowledge, and the potential for greater participation and decision-making, and ultimately, greater community development.

Filed Under: Presentations, Thoughts Tagged: ,

Access, Openness, and Political Economy

Posted on October 20, 2011 Written by

I’m in Vancouver this week at the annual Access conference for libraries. It is always a good opportunity to learn more about libraries and technology, but this year’s program organizers have done a particularly great job, with several sessions on openness — including open data, open standards, open source, and open access — all topics that fit in well with this week’s ECI 831 lecture. The slides from my own pre-conference presentation on selecting and evaluating open source software are available on Slideshare. I added Slide 7 (on the use of social media to find out more about open source and to connect with others with similar interests) late on Tuesday night after class, based on our discussions that evening!

The opening keynote of the Access conference this morning, “From Access to Interactivity” by Jon Beasley-Murray, was particularly interesting, as it brought some political economy into the discussion of libraries, technology, and openness, and provided an important connection between pre-industrial enclosures (which saw the privatization of common agricultural land) with modern-day digital enclosures — where capital takes the products of common production (such as our uploaded photos, videos, etc., as well as our taxpayer-funded university research output) and monetize them for private profit — either through the addition of advertising (e.g., YouTube) or via high journal subscription prices to university libraries (where the taxpayers get to purchase the content they themselves funded). In his talk, Dr. Beasley-Murray made reference to the brilliant David Harvey (a hero since my days as a geography student), including his concept of the “accumulation by dispossession” — where private wealth is amassed not through capital growth but through the appropriation of the products of the commons (more here too). I’ve been involved in the open source and open access movements for several years now, but I really appreciated Dr. Beasley-Murray’s historical contextualization of this issue. It reminded me of not only of the importance of building connections with other people to bring about more openness, but also of the need to maintain our connections with the past. Openness isn’t new at all, in fact, but actually goes back a very long time indeed.

Filed Under: Presentations, Technology, Thoughts Tagged: ,

Major Digital Project Planning

Posted on October 15, 2011 Written by

One of the things that drew me to this course was the opportunity to do a major digital project that was closely tied to my work. It seemed like a good opportunity to learn some new skills and knowledge, as well as getting something accomplished that would have benefits at my workplace.

One important task that has long been on my “to do” list, but hasn’t progressed as much as I’d have liked, is to develop an online course for Open Journal Systems, one of the open source software projects I’m involved with. I’ve already developed quite a bit of online documentation, guides, and video tutorials, but I wanted to pull it all together into a coherent workshop. I do some in-person workshops, but with travel budgets being tight, and with our community growing internationally, it really makes sense to develop an online course. So here is my opportunity! Ideally, I’ll be able to make it both a “wayfinding resource”, helping people find learning resources about the software, but also a “sensemaking” resource, contributing to a better understanding of the software and also facilitating connections with other learners and software users in our community. George Siemens gave a helpful overview of both of these concepts in our last lecture, and really inspired me to try and build these in.

This is also an opportunity to utilize the knowledge I developed in EAHR 810 Designing Programs in Training and Development: Planning and Curriculum Development, which will allow me to review and deepen my understanding of the topics covered in that course. Of all of the planning models we covered in that course, I found Caffarella’s Interactive Model of Program Planning the most helpful. As can be seen in this graphic, it is a very comprehensive model consisting of 12 components:

For this project, I’ll describe how I deal with all 12 steps through blog posts over the remainder of the course. Due to the short timeline, I won’t be able to actually complete all of them, but will at least try to address them. Wish me luck :-)

Filed Under: Projects, Thoughts

Tracking Your Traffic with Google Analytics

Posted on October 15, 2011 Written by

Has anyone else setup Google Analytics for their blog yet? It is a great tool for tracking your traffic, generates a really nice report, is easy to setup, and — best of all — is free.

Getting it going is basically a two step process. First, go to the Google Analytics web site and create a free account. Second, go into your WordPress dashboard and install one of the many Google Analytics plugins. You’ll enter your tracking code here and then just need to wait a few hours for Google to start tracking. Here’s a snapshot image of my Google Analytics dashboard.

We may not see huge amounts of traffic on our blogs, but it is interesting to see exactly how much is coming through, where it is coming from, which posts are most viewed, etc. It is well worth the little bit of effort to setup!

I’d be interested in hearing about other WordPress plugins people are using. I also like EZPZ One Click Backup, which makes backing up a snap — and automatically drops a backup copy of my blog in my Dropbox folder every night.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged:

Open Education and Decoupling

Posted on October 10, 2011 Written by

David Wiley‘s EDUCAUSE presentation, Openness: Decoupling the Future to Radically Improve Access to Education, was an excellent discussion of the problems in higher education (increasing costs, decreasing capacity) and the opportunities provided by open education.

David made a great comparison between education and knowledge sharing – teachers share their knowledge, their expertise, their time, their compassion, their support; students share their questions, ideas, desire to learn, help for one another.

David also highlighted the fact that technology now allows sharing to involving “giving” without “giving away”. You can create a book of your ideas digitally and share it. You still have a copy, and so can millions of others — without any production or distribution costs (beyond having access to a computer and the internet). In this way, technology enhances sharing and therefore enhances education. BUT — and this is a huge BUT — traditional copyright breaks the connection between cost-free sharing and education. Traditional copyright is based on an out-dated production and distribution model but continues to be a barrier to the free sharing of information. As an alternative, David highlighted the development of the creative commons license to facilitate sharing, and thus improve education. I was surprised to learn that there are now over 500 million open education resources available. My own work with the Public Knowledge Project is part of this movement toward open access to scholarly content.

In the second part of his talk, David described the process of uncoupling in higher education. Traditionally, higher education has involved content, support services, assessment, and credentialing. These services are now being decoupled, or broken apart. It is possible to get content from a wide variety of open educational resources, and he named several. A new resource I learned from David was CK12. Support services are also freely available on the internet, such as OpenStudy. As a librarian working for a post-secondary institution, I’d argue that the university still has a critical ongoing role here, although it should be re-thought and open to innovation. My belief is that these “support services”, whether library services, counseling, writing assistance, providing facilities for student collaborative learning, instructor office hours, instructor interaction with students, etc. are all fundamental to learning and will remain a core function of the university.

In addition, assessment services are now available from other organizations, and credentialing is also evolving. Some jobs no longer demand traditional credentials (e.g., see the growth of private credentialing from Microsoft or Redhat and others), prior learning assessments are increasingly available, and institutions such as the Western Governors University and Athabasca University now offer degrees based on your educational accomplishments, not courses taken from them. I also learned about the Open Education Resource University, and look forward to finding out more about it.

I was impressed by how far this decoupling has already progressed and inspired by the opportunities it will present in the next 5 to 10 years. I’m sure it will not only have profound implications for higher education and K-12 education, but also for workplace training. With more content being freely available, with online learning support communities becoming more common (think of the professional learning environments we are all developing through our blogs, twitter, delicious, rss feeds, etc.), with assessments being available from external organizations, and with credentials being offered by institutions at reduced costs, those responsible for training will have a significantly wider toolkit to continue to enhance staff development even while budgets are under strain.

If you have a chance to watch the archived video (it is so worth the time), I’d be very interested to hear your reactions.

Filed Under: Presentations, Thoughts

Power, Authority, and Learning

Posted on October 3, 2011 Written by

One of the many things I’m enjoying about this class is the distributed nature of the learning. One person might post on something they have a question about, and a variety of people can chime in with a response, often based on their own experience and/or expertise. Someone else can then reply to a comment, and so on. In other cases, someone might post on a topic they are an expert in, share their knowledge, and respond to questions and/or other points of view. This is the kind of genuine, real-time learning that takes place all around us all the time. I’m interested in learning in the workplace, and this is exactly how most people learning on the job. I might have a question at work, ask a co-worker or two for an answer, probe further to others, and so on. Sitting in a classroom is a much less common way to learn at work.

What I find particularly exciting about this kind of learning is that it challenges the traditional concept of the “sage on the stage”. Instead of the expert holding all of the authority and determining how the learning experience will unfold, we have multiple experts, with multiple levels of experience, all sharing their own ideas, opinions, and knowledge. I believe this enhances the learning experience, providing learners with a wider variety of perspectives to learn from, and an opportunity to internalize the learning and make it truly their own. Doing this via social media expands the potential knowledge base, allowing this kind of distributed learning to extend even further, letting us tap into more experiences, and widening our own knowledge.

I don’t teach a great deal, but when I do, I’ve been trying to re-direct the power and authority away from myself and share it throughout the room. Sometimes people resist this and object (especially if they were hoping to sleep through my session) and sometimes people embrace it. I’m wondering how others feel about authority and learning, and if you ever try to relinquish some of the power you automatically receive when you stand at the front of the classroom?

Filed Under: Thoughts