These notes pertain to Brian Lamb‘s keynote on Feb 23, 2009 in Portland, Oregon at the ITC 2009 e-Learning conference. Resource/pres page: http://blogs.ubc.ca/open/open-up/
Begins by showing course project which requires students to write/revise an actual article on Wikipedia. Many questions about how the process worked. Good comment/question about opportunities, and leveraging this opportunity in foreign languages.
Brian discusses AP photo of Obama which describes an audience using cameras, phones, and even a laptop(!) to capture their participation in the moment (photo-taking as a social [or personal/individual] act). Flickr was able to track incoming camera phone uploads from this moment.
(JMS: If openness permeates professional fields like we want it to, will this defeat the so-called rise of the amateur? Does this diminish the evolution of a “participatory culture”? If so, do we care?)
Brian telling us how awful OCW has been for MIT: reputation is in the gutter, enrollments have plummeted, content has been sucked into fly-by-night engineering degree mills, faculty have revolted. It takes a while for the audience to get it and start to laugh.
Faculty using simple HTML flat files. Posts everything online. Has been doing it for years. This is DIY openness. “The most important thing is he didn’t need support to do this. He didn’t need a project. He didn’t need a process.”
Evangelizing the benefits of openness. “[Openness] is a show of respect to the students… and a show of respect to the public.”
Creative Commons short explanation. Surprisingly, about half the room didn’t know what CC is.
“I took that AP photo without asking. Poor AP! Poor AP… I’ll buy a copy of USA Today later to make up for it.” Brian can deliver strong opinions with humor, which really works on this audience.
Openness and Creative Commons means “you don’t have to steal intellectual property anymore”. Shows Creative Commons license search on Flickr.
Wikeducator uses an open format for its open content, bypassing the inherent restriction of “open” media but closed technology. MIT uses a lot of PDFs, Berkeley uses live Real Media, which requires an internet connection (sounds familiar!)
Gardner Campbell mentioned with respect to his downloadable MP3 podcasts (thanks for mentioning my MP3 legality blog post). Nancy White being recorded, Creative Commons licensed, and she benefits through reputation, distribution of her “voice”.
SELF-DEFINED.
“I am a recovering Learning Object developer.” Martin Weller referenced.
Brian laments not doing a Twitter shout-out since Bryan didn’t do it yesterday.
Sharing doesn’t cost much any more.
Jim Groom referenced. Fake web garbage. Let’s use this spam blog tool and use it to aggregate student blogs. Turn evil into good. UMW is the best WordPress instance Brian has ever seen. (JMS: I love it too.Documentation is incredible. On an loosely related note, this example demonstrates to me the importance of the individual, of individual genius, focus, and dedication over lethargia of [some] communities.)
Findability of open resources is important. Brian shows Zaid in Malasia’s web page cataloging all open resource sites. You can make a Google custom search engine. Scott Leslie puts list into a wiki page, uses a Google custom search engine to ref wiki page links. Freelearning.ca. To bring a project like this into being so quickly “The secret ingredient is openness.” Brian mentions “a guy from England” but I miss the name. It’s gotta be Tony Hirst.
“I want to see if I can teach and interact with students on mobile devices.” Case study: accessing WebCT on phone. 5 minutes of pain results in finally getting to discussion screen, but still unusable.
(JMS: Brian may be cutting WebCT too much slack. I would rip their dessicated zombie heads off.)
Brian concedes that WebCT’s product was not developed for mobile devices. (JMS: True, but WebCT customers have been asking for mobile support for years, and the CE 4.1 example he is using actually functions in a mobile device, but all newer versions of WebCT/Blackboard do not.)
Everyday a newspaper goes under. “There’s a crisis in every cultural industry.” PirateBay, bittorrent site, has a section for textbooks.
Universities are not popular with the public. Perception of overpaid, underworked, radicals. Quoting a (neighbor?), “Taxpayers are only willing to substitute universities to the extent that they contribute to the national wealth.” Openness might alleviate that intercultural tension.
Nice job, Brian. Hope I captured some of the coherence and insight that you delivered this morning.