The second morning presentation, A multi-project collaboration to make it easy to create and share content with legs, provided a tool set to easily create online open education resources.
It involves using the open repository at http://cnx.org to import and transform your Google Docs, Word or MS Office files or even webpages to an Open Educational platform. See oerpub.org and http://remix.oerpub.org
Once the materials have been imported they ostensibly can be converted to Wikieducator, and other online tools.
The audio conference is available at http://openedconference.org/2012/program/day-1/day1-1150-c680/
Tag Archives: OER
Keynote Speaker – Open Ed 2012
The Keynote Speaker for the conference was Dr. Gardner Campbell. As you can see from his bio at http://www.educause.edu/members/w-gardner-campbell. He is quite the Renaissance Man.
He started his talk with this photo of the launch from the Stratosphere
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/g-121014-cvr-felix-3p2.photoblog900.jpg
and these quotes.
“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.
“It may be learning, but it’s not academics.”
– A colleague’s response when the presenter first introduced him to the World Wide Web.
The presenter claims that despite academic resistance OER (Open Educational Resources) has won thanks to MOOCs, Coursera, Udacity, edX and Edupunks.
However,
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.
T.S Eliot. The Love Song of . Alfred Prufrock
These initiatives do not fit with the original vision of OER. We are in a double bind. We see the potential of open educational resources, but the actual implementation of it is not what this speaker originally envisioned.
For a better understanding of the issues surrounding OER, the speaker recommended The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer by Seymour Papert and Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson. Open is an attitude towards systems. He differentiated between Schoolers (i.e., those who school or are schooled) and Yearners (those with a strong desire for something more than schooling or academics). He also recommended To Repair the Ruins a series of essay on Milton as well as Who Am I by Pete Townshend for a better understand of the issues arouond this double bind.
We were presented with Bateson’s Hierarchy of Learning.
Learning Zero: “…is characterised by specificity of response, which – right or wrong – is not subject to correction.”
Learning 1:”…is change in specificity of response by correction of errors of choice within a set of alternatives. ” e.g.,Pavlov, habituation, adaptation.
Learning II: “…is change in the process of Learning I, e.g. a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or it is a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.“
Learning III:“…is change in the process of Learning II, e.g. a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made.“
Learning IV: “…would be change in Learning III, but probably does not occur in any adult living organism on this earth.”
The hierarchy is discontinuous. Just as a longer B paper does not become an A paper. All communication has this characteristic — it can be magically modified by accompanying communication.”
Double bind may also be the way out.
Beyond access and cost: a primary benefit of open education insofar as it is not merely open but opening, This is the opportunity for networked transcontextualism — a planetary double-take.
BUT
Don’t fake the double take!
We were then given examples (places) where he found the double-take happening in a course.
The first example was his course, From Memex to YouTube: Cognition, Learning and the Internet
He created a variation of the Apgar test for class meetings.
Then there is the “dackolupatoni“ experiment.
He closed his presentation with quotes from two poems.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot — “Little Gidding” (the last of his Four Quartets)
At a Window
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.�
Carl Sandburg
The entire presentation is available online at http://bit.ly/Gardner-Keynote
Forty free textbooks for BC Post-Secondary Students
I am attending thttp://openedconference.org/2012/ http://openedconference.org/2012/ in Vancouver. We had a welcome from BC’s new minister of Advanced Education. This would appear to highlight the importance the government feels about this initiative.
He announced that the BC Government will make 40 of the most popular post-secondary textbooks available free online. Students will pay nothing for digital versions of these texts and a small fee for a print version. This follows similar intiatives in Washington State and California. BC will be the first province in Canada to support OER.
Free Resources for Educator Excellence (FREE) for Developing, Integrating, and Delivering E-Learning Solutions
I attended a presentation at the E-Learn conference animated by Dr. Robert Moody of Fort Hays State University, USA. See below for the blurb on this. His presentation is available online at http://goo.gl/G988y
E-Learning Solutions (ELS) became widely available in 1997, and its attractiveness and use have increased significantly ever since. This software provides instructors who exclusively teach online with the resources to make course materials like syllabi, lecture notes, tests, asynchronous discussion boards, and live chat available online in one, easy-to-manage location. Online students can use these ELS sites to access course materials, submit assignments, check grades, as well as interact with instructors and other students. Among the most notable are Blackboard, WebCT, Desire2Learn, ANGEL, and eCollege. These vendor-driven software solutions have been extensively adopted by higher educational institutes throughout the United States. In fact, many have also been adopted by K-12 educational curriculum providers to supplement textbooks and other educational materials. This tutorial will provide insight and the presenter’s reasoning behind his departure from Blackboard, to creating his own unique E-Learning Solutions using several free open source digital tools.
Some of the tools he mentioned are listed below.
First ones that I’m already familiar.
Skype
Google Apps
YouTube
Facebook
There were several that were new to me.
Ning is a cloud based tool for creating your own custom social networking environment. See http://Ning.com. Dr. Robert uses Ning as his Blackboard replacement.
Screencast-o-matic is screen capturing software. It is supposed to have a feature set similar to Camtasia. The latter costs $200 and up. It will let you record videos up to 15 minutes in length.
Engrade.ca “is the Canadian version of the popular US-based online classroom community tools. Engrade.ca is hosted on Canadian web servers to comply with Canadian laws concerning government data storage.” I wonder if it is the open source grading solution I’ve been looking for.
Voice Thread was also mentioned and recommended but not discussed. Flash Meeting, a video conferencing system was also discussed. It won’t work on the iPad as it Flash based. It records the conference as well. You can have up to 30 people.
OpenClass — a free learning management system from Pearson
Some interesting developments in online education platforms. Pearson Publishing who provides the MathXL platform I use for teaching online is introducing OpenClass. It is a new kind of learning management system that is offered through the ‘Cloud‘ via Google Apps for Education.
OpenClass will be offered free of charge. A beta version is supposed to be available October 18th. Pearson’s model is to provide and charge for curriculum content. However, other content providers will also be able to make use of the platform.
For more details see the press release here. See their website at http://www.joinopenclass.com. A promotional video, without much in the way of details, is available here.
This development could very well be the ‘game changer’ Pearson claims it to be. The demand for online learning continues to grow, here in BC and around the world.