This was made easy and possible through Donncha O Caoimh’s WordPress MU Domain Mapping plug-in.

Having some experience examining both projects prior to this review, I brought in the following generalized opinions:

• MIT: broad, but shallow -many courses with marginal amount of content and activities
• OLI: deep, but narrow – few courses with significant content and activities constructed for learning

The motivation for these directions seems clear: MIT OCW seeks to reinforce itself by providing semi-useful, translucent access to content from each and every existing course. OLI seeks to define itself as a provider of in-depth, quality, online learning experiences. UNESCO’s OER Wiki describes the two projects as follows:

• OLI “adds instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence”
• MIT’s OCWs “convey the parameters of the course’s subject matter and pedagogy, ideally representing a substantially complete set of all the materials used in the course”

MIT’s French 1

French 1 from MIT OCW is comprised primarily of a syllabus, calendar, readings list, and assignments list based on the textbook Parallèles–a textbook that the syllabus almost fails to mention. the navigation is find and click, but simple enough to learn and use.

The syllabus reflects the fact that this is an existing course that has been “photocopied” for the MIT OCW project–instructions and expectations are restricted to registered students. For instance, it references the MIT Language Learning and Resource Center — a resource unavailable to distance students.

The course site provides PDFs of instructions for in-class activities. Otherwise assignments simply walk learner through textbook activities. Online resources are tacked on to the end almost decontextualized from real learning patterns.

As I opened separate pages for the materials, I wondered, why not combine assignments with readings into calendar as one big course guide? There seems to be no usability rationale for current architecture, except that it fits a single MIT OCW template.

You can download (presumably all) course materials; each index page of PDFs or other content features the CC By-NC-SA license.

OLI’s Elementary French 1 Online

OLI’s French 1 course’s subtitle, “Open and Free: Jan – Jun 09″, immediately reinforces OLI’s assertion that these are full courses to be taught by instructors, or taken by students. The content confirms that this is a complete online learning experience: the structure provides enhanced linear navigation using a combination of tabs and in-page hyperlinks. I found the navigation is somewhat similar to Moodle’s and I wondered if it may have been based on this LMS originally. Aside from a couple broken links, the content itself seems to be fully-fleshed out learning materials, richly media-enhanced with no textbook needed. The content pages include text, images, and video with inline Flash-based q&a activities for self-learning.

Like the MIT course, OLI’s French 1 included a number of external online learning resources, however these came in context at the beginning of the course, and thus I was more inclined to click on several to investigate how they might enhance what was to come.

There does not seem to be a way to easily download all course materials at once, though they are clearly marked CC By-NC-SA on each page. This brought me to a question re. the Flash files: if I download the SWFs and crack them, essentially converting them to FLAs, is that acceptable use under the applied CC By-NC-SA license? Presumably yes, as the source code is inseparable from the finished product.

MIT’s Logic 1

MIT OCW’s Logic 1 course utilizes a web site architecture that is very similar to French 1, ensuring that user learnability of the web system is high. In addition to the basics of syllabus, calendar, and readings this course provides PDFs of lecture notes, which provide surprisingly good, text-book like information and examples. Indeed, I read through several of these and got at least the “feel” for the course.

OLI’s Logic and Proofs

As a user trained to recognize shifts in my scent of information, the first thing I noticed in Logic and Proofs is that this course site’s navigation system was inconsistent with the French 1 navigation system. This is not to say that the alternative navigation is illogical, only that the change hurts my head.

This course features introductory movies that orient the learners to the subject, with a media-enhanced transcript for alternate learning styles. A note on my personal preference: for a subject like this, I prefer text with images over video.

The main content of the course is primarily text, but notably enhanced with relevant learning comprehension and self-assessment questions that open in new window (they didn’t in French) with a separate look. Because of this, Logic seems to be quilted together from 2 different systems.

I have to say that symbolic logic has always captivated me, and while the MIT OCW Logic course intrigued me, the completeness and linearity of the content in the OLI course kept me interested and engaged. As I was indulging in one activity I thought, “I should be getting college credit for this!” Upon investigating this impulse I found that not only does OLI provide instructions for instructors and learners, it provides a means by which students can use the OLI web site to receive credit through their home institution. Talk about mashing up your education. Brilliant!

MIT’s Paradox and Infinity

Similar structure to previous MIT OCW courses–enough so that I see a very predictable pattern here. Readings refer to a standard textbook and (usually “closed”–few available online) articles, as well as problem sets — PDF available for self-challenge (however, notably absent is any electronically mediated method of receiving feedback–automated, community-based, or otherwise).

Interestingly, the course site provides hyperlinks to (discounted) purchase via Amazon.com; does MIT get a cut as a way to offset production costs?

OLI’s Physics With the Andes Workbench

OLI Physics features similar navigation and structure to Logic 1, which is unfortunate as I believe OLI’s French 1 had the most modern and intuitive nav system so far. This OLI course is highly activity-based; lesson information (primarily text, but some video) is immediately taken up into “Learn by Doing” activities use Andes tutor software, available for download and installation on Windows (I couldn’t get it running on Ubuntu through WINE).

Again, I found elements of other OLI courses: complete content, linear construction, self-learning activities and assessments. I am not overstating my impression when for a fleeting moment I thought about quitting my job and returning to student life; I am envious of this and future generation of students who can make their own schedules with flexibility provided by the Internet, and I regret to admit I probably got away with a lot simply by exchanging seat time for credit. If personal responsibility is adhered to, the accountability and outcomes of online learning may be higher, and achieved more efficiently.

Aircraft Systems Engineering

MIT OCW’s Aircraft Systems Engineering course site follows the structural pattern of the other MIT OCW courses (syllabus, calendar, readings, etc), with one notable enhancement: video of class lectures. Listed under lecture notes, the video components make this the most compelling MIT OCW course reviewed so far. Fairly rough Real Media video of in-class guest lectures by experts in the field are provided with PDFs of lecture slides, and MP3s. On Ubuntu I couldn’t locate the RM codec I needed to view the video, but did give the audio files a listen, and these were high enough quality to download and bring on bus rides or road trips. Combined with the slides this makes an interesting, remixable OER.

Prior to embarking on this particular task I had generalized these two OCW projects as being about shallow breadth (MIT OCW) or narrow depth (OLI). My reviews supported this earlier generalization if the primary quality objective is prêt-à-porter OER. With respect to learner value I considered an additional analogy: these 3 MIT OCW are like Polaroid snapshots of authentic MIT courses, scanned in and uploaded to bear the MIT brand; these 3 Carnegie Mellon OLI are more akin to planned, staged, shot, enhanced, and sequenced for online learning, and specifically created to define the OLI project (not the other way around).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KsEQnOkTZ0

Richard references Johnathan Harris, so you might want to check out his web site here.

The following table is adapted from CreativeCommons.org:

Name	Characteristics
Version 3.0 Licenses:
Attribution
CC By. Usage requires citing, referencing of the creator/source. For OERs this is the most “open” license, in my opinion. Unlike Share Alike (see below), it does not mandate any particular license on subsequent adaptations or derivations.
Attribution-NoDerivs
CC By-ND. Usage additionally mandates that no derivative works or adaptations may be made. For OERs I think this is most applicable when a creator is concerned about losing the integrity of the original work if adaptaions, derivations, or remixes are made.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC By-NC-ND. Usage additionally mandates that no commercial use will be made of the work, whatever that means. This is for paranoid creators of OERs, or those who legitimately want to protect the integrity of their work..
Attribution-NonCommercial
CC By-NC. See above. I think this is an underused license in OERs, as it stipulates non-commercial usage but doesn’t limit adaptations to using the same license.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC By-NC-SA. Usage additionally requires that any derivatives, remixes, or adaptation of the work be licensed under the same Creative Commons license. This seems to be the most common CC license for OERs, as it stipulates that all uses are non-commercial, presumably “for educational purposes only”, and preserves the open-ness of the work and any and all future derivatives.
Attribution-ShareAlike
CC By-SA. See above. This is a common CC license for OER where the creator wants to forever preserve the open-ness of the work and all derivatives.

Additionally, there are two notable licenses in draft on the Creative Commons wiki:

Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

According to Creative Commons, Creative Commons Zero (or CC0)…

…is a protocol that enables people to WAIVE to the fullest extent possible under applicable copyright law all rights they have and associate with a work so it has no (or minimal) copyright or neighboring rights restrictions attached to it.

In the US we typically call such works “public domain”, but some writers (e.g. Terry Hancock in FreeSoftware Magazine) have noted that public domain is not a license at all, while CC0 will be.

Creative Commons Plus (CC+)

Creative Commons Plus (or, CC+) is simply an existing Creative Commons license plus “some other agreement which provides more permissions” or, perhaps, requirements. For example, Creative Commons refers to a commercial license “tailored for specific uses with specific names of copyright holders”.

Commentary: I like the idea of both of these additional licenses, as Creative Commons has made the idea of sharing works more accessible and understandable, but is not yet sufficiently encompassing for all uses. Plus and Zero seem to fill the gaps, and for open education might provide creators and institutions with flexibility while still conforming to the Creative Commons label in such a way that basic usage is more instantly understandable (without reading through paragraphs of legalese).

A Brief History of the Internet,Part 1

Internet Map. by Matt Britt, Wikicommons

In the beginning was cyberspace, a dark, unknown void, whose depth and breadth were untested. Beyond this void were multitudes of isolated instances of archived information, crudely organized, but primitively connected, narrowly accessible, and not easily reproduced.

Then the Internet was born, and soon would come days when baud modems populated the lands. And the internet begat baud modems, which begat dial-up servers, which eventually begat BBS servers for trading song lyrics and shareware, and FTP servers for sharing text files and games. Thus the sharing and consuming of niche information multiplied throughout many lands.

From amongst these early adopters were born the elite nerds, and many rejoicing in the magic of the networks let their hearts harden against Copyright, which was the law. There were many who read the works of the Three Philosophers, Asimov and Dick and Gibson, and fashioned themselves as cyberpunks. And there were many who beheld visions of shareware, and the coming of open source. Ten, seeing how the people who were not 1337 suffered, soon the elite nerds opened the gates of the Internet to the masses of the world, and with Mosaic and Navigator ushered them into the wilderness.

The masses found and consumed the information, and it was good. And the masses authored, and created, and it was better. Yea, even through the beneficence of ad-riddled sites such as Geocities the peoples’ voices grew. Creators shared the information that they had with consumers, and consumers often shared it as well, whether the creators liked it or not, for all was public. And some who would not share did so anyway, for they were ignorant, and had no Google Analytics to track visitor data.

Then one day the tempter, a two-headed serpent, came and whispered in the ear of the creators, “If it’s publicly available on the web, how will you make any money?”

So the creators saw that they were naked, and sewed themselves footers with character entities such as ©, and limited their software to 30-day demos. And the works of many creators were hidden, or else ignored, and throughout the land many foul things were uttered against creators.

With his second head the tempter whispered to the consumers, “Why should you pay for that song if you can get it for free?” Thus the consumers were emboldened, and made Hotline, and Napster. And throughout the land their actions were labeled a sin against the creators.

Thus the tempter sowed enmity between creators and consumers, and enlarged their feud by running sensational TV reports on the local news.

There were in this land, living amongst the creators and consumers, philosophers who said, “Behold, we have open source, and GNU GPL for your software.” But the consumers compared it to commercial products which they downloaded from warez sitez, and found them lacking. And so from their long lines in front of the only computer in the office with a CD burner, they mocked these philosophers, saying, “Dream on” and “Get a life”, and turned their backs on the idea of open source, and paid tribute to commercial software companies.

But not all was lost, for the philosophers swayed some of the people, both consumers and creators saying, “Walk this way”, and in their words were prophesies of the future.

Then the age of Microsoft came to pass, and their products were good, or at least better. But the power of Microsoft grew swiftly, and soon the prince CEO was convinced by the whisperings of the tempter. And he consumed many lands, and many commercial products, and the might of his lawyers was made know, for they defended attempts to overthrow it’s great power, and and hurled insults and threats against the followers of open source.

Many who had mocked the open source philosophers had bowed down to Microsoft, and Adobe, and Corel, and idGames, but in private they continued to distribute and download warez. Those among them who had the power zipped these products, and with archives which spanned across 132 floppy disks, they enslaved the other consumers, and tempted them to hunt down passwords from pay-to-click ad links on their web sites, or else suffer at the mercy of Microsoft’s OEM distributions.

In these days there was heard a great and barbaric scream from atop the mountain where the music producers dwell, yea even the great and abominable RIAA, for they had fallen sick in their revenues, which depended on buying albums with 12 songs, but only one good one. But they persisted in their ways, and did not follow the digital path though the consumers demanded it of them. When they were confronted by their follies they lashed out, striking at consumers with one hand, while miming false promises with the other. Thus many fled the RIAA and it’s lawsuits, but many more were trampled, or made examples of. And contempt for these copyright holders grew.

Microsoft continued to weild it’s mighty power, even unto the courts of the lands, and it ran radio advertisements offering gold to those who would turn in the keepers of the warez, which were also called pirates. Thus more consumers sought the philosophers of open source, or at least their software.

And Microsoft began pushing out beta versions as final releases, and there was much wailing amongst the consumers, and many cried, “Why must we suffer under this beta version? Shall we not then cleave to open source?”

The philosophers of open source gathered followers from many lands, and creators collaborated through CSV, so that the whole was greater than the sum, and they proved their valor with Linux, and Apache, PHP, and MySQL. They gave the people distros such as Mandrake, and there were rumors in the land that an office software suite was coming, and it required no CD key, and it would be pure, for it held within it neither advertisments nor spyware.

There was also in this land scholars who dwelt behind the armored walls of the ivory tower, and students who dwelt below them in walled gardens. They saw this struggle and knew the pain of the consumers, for they felt the burden of costly textbooks, and publisher contracts, and cumbersome ePacks. They, too, were confounded, for they needed to create, consume, and reuse content. They had patronized the lawgivers, and though they had been given the TEACH act, the law was incomplete, and so yet they feared the wrath of the Copyright holder.

The open source philosophers knew of the sufferings of the creators and the consumers, the scholars and the students, and their numbers grew. Amongst them rose a few with good intent who would collaborate, and with tools for licensing, organizing, and sustaining the work, could liberate the people. For they knew that a new hunger was growing, one which could only be fed by a freedom both to take and to publish, both to share and to remix.

Set Up Blog Post Licenses

1. From within any blog post, add a new Custom Field called, for instance, “license”.

2. Use an easy, consistent tactic for marking your license. I’m using lowercase letters separated by dashes to describe Creative Commons licenses, e.g. cc-by-sa or cc-by-nc-nd. Use these marks in each post’s “license” field from now on.

Now you’re storing the license metadata on your blog’s server. It’s time to make it look cool in your theme.

Customize Your WP Theme

1. Isolate your theme’s folder in wp-content/themes

2. Upload whatever CC license images that you want to use to your theme’s images folder. Here’s a ZIP file of the CC images I use. Note how I named the images the same way I entered my licenses above, e.g. cc-by-sa.png or cc-by-nc-nd.png. This allows me to shortcut in the PHP.

3. Now the “hard” part: edit the files single.php and (optional) index.php. Find the spot you want to have your license display. This needs to be soon after the WP function the_content() is called. In index.php this needs to happen before the endwhile of the have_posts() function.

4. Write (or paste in) a little PHP. In short we need to use the get_post_meta() function to get the custom field value for this post. Here’s a quick snippet that I used to test theis approach:

   <?php
   if($license = get_post_meta($post->ID, "license", "true")) {
?>
   <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/licenses/<?=$license?>.png" alt="<?=$license?> license" style="border: 0" /></a>
<?php
   } else {
   ?>
   &copy; <?php the_time('Y');
   }
?>


   If there is nothing in the “license” custom field, it defaults to © and the post’s year.

   You can do this on both single.php and index.php or anywhere else you have post information showing.

5. Finally, upload and test!

My extended answer is, “Of course. Why wouldn’t we?”

First, let me note that support for “competitive blogging” does not disallow non-competitive blogging. For instance, I personally will blog regardless of competition, blissfully unaffected by the Eddies or my Technorati ranking (mine is 68–big deal). The two can (and do) live side-by-side, because the web has dismantled the supply-and-demand barriers to self-publishing.

Having said that, even for myself informal competition affects my blogging in a positive way. The nature of any competition is to compare one subject to another and judge aspects of one to be superior. Informal competition is when I compare my blog post to better posts by colleagues, and am motivated to improve my writing or posting style–either to existing posts or to future drafts.

To this end, competitive blogging can encourage improvement and innovation in individual blogs. When I read Chris Lott’s blog posts on ChrisLott.org and especially Cosmopoetica, I’m reminded to reflect deeply before I publish, and to enhance my posts with appropriate media. His posts also exemplify good linking tactics. But Chris is probably not up for an EduBlog award, so why did I choose him? One, because his blogs are personal favorites of mine; they fit many of my own interests and (excepting politics) perspectives, and, two, to prove that moderately popular blogs can still thrive in niches.

Competitive blogging can reward and call attention to those who have put in extra effort or have best utilized their natural/developed talents. This may be an incentive to bloggers, but more importantly it’s deserved recognition that serves as a kind of justice.

Awards and recognition may help readers separate the milk from the cream, the chaff from the wheat, the cliches from the originals. I at least have no time to waste reading mediocre, let alone lousy, blogs. That’s why we read movie and book critics, right?

Models of good blogging encourage networking and promote diverse interactions, as the best bloggers frequently and astutely link to colleagues, neighbors, and even critics.

Even if you dispute the “authority” of traditional institutions, it’s hard to dispute the popular authority garnered by folksonomies or democratic measures such as the nomination/voting process used by edublog awards. Sure, not all blogging awards do this, but most consider public opinion in addition to the more objective criteria found in their rubrics. Technorati uses a number of more sophisticated, Googlistic measures, and we could apply some of these (and more!) to automate different measures of “significance”; for example, relevant interlinking, significant comments, conversion rates, etc can come into play for authority ranking as well.

I end by asking, “Why not?” but it’s not a rhetorical question. I submit that if you disapprove of the awards or authoritative ranking systems, ignore them. If you don’t care about competition don’t engage. Those of us who find consistent, authentic value in competition will utilize it to our advantage. But if someday you’re devastated that didn’t get an award for your blog, don’t complain to those who chose to play.

1. The whole-day experience, while fatiguing (at least for me), was the only way to go about a workshop as ambitious as this.
2. In fact, it could have easily gone two or three days (and would have been a stronger, more memorable experience for it).
3. The participants were both energetic and patient–the latter was important as we dealt with technical issues and the fact that teaching this territory was completely new to us.
4. Though I’d felt we’d been pretty thorough in mapping out the sessions, we could have spent several more hours planning and organizing the workshop for better results.
5. My instinct was to run a pilot segment as an on-campus workshop at UVU as a means of preparing. I didn’t do this, however, and in reflection am sure doing so would have eliminated the few problems I did experience.
6. My concept of “a PLE” has changed. I still think it’s definable, but recognize it to be more like an ever-adjusting, tool-assisted network of individualized processes than an “environment”.
7. “Environment” is easier to say, though perhaps it too strongly implies a monolithic managed system.
8. A well-considered and refined PLE is, so far, the best way for individuals to manage the indomitable mass of information and interactions that are now available.
9. D’Arcy Norman said, “‘PLE’ is a verb, not a noun … an action, not a thing.” I think it’s both: a PLE is a conglomeration of things constantly acted upon. (Someone remind me where I’ve heard this before).
10. Though initially informal, a modular, conglomerated PLE eventually becomes more formal as the individual builds habits and reinforces processes along branches as s/he moves towards “learning/achievement” goals.
11. As Chris spoke in the introduction, I sketched out the following as one concept of how the “interactions” part of my PLE work to send out signals while receiving new signals or feedback:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl=
  "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output type="xml" />

<xsl:template match="/">

<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title>
</head>

<body>

<xsl:for-each select="//*"><!--loop all levels of nodes-->
   <xsl:if test="position() > 2"><br/></xsl:if><!--line break after last-->

   <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="*"><!--does this node have children-->
         <xsl:if test="position() > 1">
            <!--print node + ancestor relationship-->
            <xsl:value-of select="concat(name(parent::node()),'->',name())"/>
         </xsl:if>
      </xsl:when>

      <xsl:when test=".=text()"><!--does this node have PCDATA-->
         <!--print node + ancestor relationship-->
         <xsl:value-of select="concat(name(parent::node()),'->',name())"/>
         <br/>
         <!--print node PCDATA-->
         <xsl:value-of select="concat(name(),'->','"',text(),'"')"/>
      </xsl:when>
   </xsl:choose>

   <xsl:if test="@* > 0"><!--does this node have attributes-->
      (
      <xsl:for-each select="@*"><!--for each name/value-->
         <xsl:value-of select="name()"/>
         =
         <xsl:value-of select="."/>

      </xsl:for-each>
      )
   </xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>

</body>
</html>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>