I’m certainly not the first to suggest that sustainability is an elephantine problem for current and future OER projects. But it’s a problem that may take several perspectives and ideas in order to condense workable solutions (more…)
I’m certainly not the first to suggest that sustainability is an elephantine problem for current and future OER projects. But it’s a problem that may take several perspectives and ideas in order to condense workable solutions (more…)
A member of the ITForum mailing list asked about the legality of using Audacity to create MP3 files for an educational project, because patents on the MP3 technology are claimed by various different companies and organizations (more…)
In David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course students were asked to randomly choose and then examine 5 MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and 5 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) courses. I’ve done random examinations of OCW/OER in the past, so I changed this up a bit to fit my own inclinations: first, I made my choices semi-randomly (more…)
Mark Crane pointed my attention to the following video recording of Richard Miller addressing academics in the humanities re. new media/technology and the alteration of the acts of authoring and publishing (more…)
During the past month my unit’s offices have been affected by construction in the building in the form of diesel fumes filtering in through the HVAC system. Today a couple of staff members who were toughing it out were told by doctors that they have high levels of carbon monoxide in their blood and the offices have to be cleared out. This might explain (1) my fatigue, and (2) the pleasure I’ve been finding in spending a little more time out of doors as I walk across the BYU campus to David Wiley’s IPT 692R. Today’s topic: Media Issues begins with the question,” what is ‘open’?” and examines the 4 Rs of Openness (more…)
For reference here’s a quick run-down of Creative Commons (CC) v. 3 licenses with comments on their usefulness for open education. As most of you probably already know, CC provides a means by which creators can license their works differently from pre-existing intellectual property licenses. In the USA the two options have been copyright or public domain. CC provides for lots of options in between (more…)
It wasn’t snowing heavily like it was last Tuesday, and I had extra time to get to the BYU campus, but I decided to save myself some future headaches by learning to take the bus. I got on the right line, but going in the wrong direction. Thirty minutes later, I switched buses and made my way just in time to the second live meeting of David Wiley’s IPT 692R: Intro to Open Education course. Here are my notes (more…)
I’ve suggested that “open education” should not be seen as synonymous with various related efforts. Just as there are only approximations at a manifesto for the open education movement, there is no single definition of what efforts constitute or contribute to open education, and open education can not be fairly defined by more granular efforts for the production of open educational resources, opencourseware, etc. That is as much due to conflicting definitions of “open” as it is to organizational motivations (more…)
When I think of open education I tend to think of it at a granular level, in terms of open educational resources (OER), opencourseware (OCW), or even the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). At these more limited levels engaging in open education makes a lot of sense to me, and offers very attainable, short-term goals which serve bot the “target audience” (whoever that is) and my institution. But OER, OCW and open education are not synonymous. Open education, though often referred to as a “movement” is a broader philosophy, one which prescribes aspects of the creation, release, and access to education (more…)
In revisiting a post I drafted Saturday morning I decided to split out the following passages into a new post to isolate a few details and trivia on the history of the open education movement, mostly to facilitate explicit fulfillment of quests for IPT692R (more…)