The World is Open

Here's an interview with Curtis J. Bonk, author of the newly released book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education.

"Academics need to step back when thinking about the open learning world and reflect on all their learning experiences and activities. Yes, they went through primary and secondary school, college, graduate school, and perhaps postdoctoral study. Those extended formal learning experiences color our perceptions of any new form of education that arises. Today we have the potential for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of new learners who might not be seeking a formally accredited degree. They can play in a global educational sandbox with anyone at any time. In fact, the premise of my World Is Open book is that with the emergence of the Web, anyone can now learn anything from anyone else at any time."

Open access and the tricky issue of maintenance

Paul Duguid reviews Gary Hall's Digitize this Book! The politics of new media, or why we need open access now in the TLS (July 31, 2009). Digitizing books and journals not only makes them easily accessible, they should also be openly accessible to all, not locked behind subscription and license walls. Sorting through the polemics of removing paper from documents, Duguid makes the following very practical remark in regards to open content access:

Hall's own contribution is CSeARCH, a repository for cultural studies monographs. Unfortunately, rather than endorsing his ambitious argument, a look at CSeARCH suggests once again that the concept of digitization may seem simple, but its economic, political, and academic reality is not. CSeARCH is ten years old. It has accumulated about 450 titles. Worringly for Hall's thesis that cultural studies is at the vanguard, the arc of acquisitions shows steady growth to a height of about a hundred works uploaded in 2006, followed by a dramatic falling off, with only fifteen uploads in the past three years. As to the content, several are not in fact monographs but articles...and some are no more than links to e-texts on other websites. These not only defer responsibility for authority, integrity and authenticity to sites such as nothingness.org, they also evade responsibility for the tricky issue of maintenance. Yet true openness, Hall's espoused goal, assumes commitment to a maintained, in principle ever-open archive...and maintenance... is a demanding and expensive institutional responsibility, of which there is little sign at CSeARCH.

Blended and Online Learning Conference

The Future of Online and Blended Learning: Strategy, Policy, and Practice

Vancouver, October 24-26

This conferene will address the current and future impact of online and blended (hybrid) learning on institutions of higher education. We expect a lively discussion inspired by successful practitioners of these new forms of post-secondary education, as well as by senior administrators of institutions that are making the transition to online and blended learning.

A keynote address by Chuck Dziuban will set the tone for the conference. Dr. Dziuban is the Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida, an institution widely recognized for its success in adding online and blended learning to its traditional face-to-face offerings. There will also be an expert panel of successful practitioners, as well as a panel discussion by senior administrators who are working to adapt their institutions to the new environment of online and blended learning.

The conference will also feature 18 presentations in concurrent sessions, as well as a poster session.

For more information about the conference, including how to register, go to http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/blogs/fobl/

This conference is sponsored by the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE), the Collaboration for Online Higher Education and Research (COHERE), and the Centre for Higher Education Research and Development (CHERD). It ends as the E-Learn 2009 conference http://www.aace.org/conf/elearn/ is beginning just a few blocks away.

History Matters

The highlight for me of the recent Open Education conference in Vancouver was Norm Friesen's intellectually engaging exploration of the historical foundations of open education, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Heritage of Open Education. Friesen, who is the Canada Research Chair in E-Learning at Thompson Rivers University, made a powerful argument for why understanding our intellectual heritage will help to inform current discussions around open education as well as educational technology and e-learning.

Friesen suggested that rather than framing discussions of open education in terms of the simplistic, "world is flat" perspectives of writers such as Thomas Friedman, we should be looking to a much broader and more diverse intellectual heritage that includes Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Paulo Friere, and the popular education movement.

"All of these precedents and precursors powerfully illustrate that open education should not be understood principally in terms of new forms of software development or economic competition. Education and its opening-up can be much more than a “mad dash,” as Friedman puts it, to compete with “the flat-world field…of 1.5 billion new workers in the global economic labor force.” Instead of focusing on competition in a world or a game whose parameters are already set, education has the chance to be much more about recognizing and even changing those parameters."

Watch Norm Friesen's presentation:

Skills Training a la Carte

The article linked from this post discusses a system where all of the outcomes of several programs were separated into individual skills which the learners (or employer/sponsors) could select and master one at a time. This has interesting implications for design and supervising of programs, as well as positive potential for Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition.

The link is:


http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/12/kellogg

and was provided by Rosario Passos.

A Sustainable and Practical OER Model

Another interesting presentation from the Open Education 2009 conference. Christopher Mackie from the Mellon foundation proposed a sustainable and practical model for using open educational resources in higher education.

"The proposed talk will analyze some of the crucial incentive alignments that block sustainable OER on most campuses today, and propose one possible strategy for overcoming those alignments that, while unquestionably a major departure from current mainstream teaching practices, has the virtues of offering a sound pedagogical-philosophical foundation, a feasible migration strategy, and a set of institutional and individual incentives that may be attractive to Presidents and Provosts at several thousand higher education institutions in the US as well as other higher education institutions around the world."

Models of Open Education

From the Open Education conference which is underway at UBC Robson Square, Leigh Blackall from the Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, gave an interesting presentation on models of open education that have relevance for BCIT. Check his blog for some useful links and resources.

Open Education 2009

The Open Ed 2009 conference is underway at UBC Robson Square. All sessions are being streamed live.