I’m not quite ready to stake any big bets on it, but my ed tech radar is feeling like we are getting more blips about open education / open content / open learning… There is the grand experiment of Siemens and Downes on a Massively Open Online Course (acronym alert! MOOC) with their now running Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course.
If one goes beyond (what is to be a bit too much) over analysis, what I think ought to stand out what a fabulous effort this is to pry open the traditional course model. It’s not the first nor the last, but getting alot of participation.
It’s not just MIT, okay? But hey, without their brave effort to go the OCW route, none of this might be happening. I am eager to dig a bit into the new new Carnegie Commons book on Open Up Education, itself sensibly being made available in an open format (catch Gardner’s take on its launch).
There are lots of good things to rummage in the Open Education Resources site and the OER Hnadbook out just a few weeks ago. There is serious action going on in Opensource Textbooks.
A true pioneer and making great strides is David Wiley- follow the long comment trail on his recent posts on Open Accreditation
The links could go on and on, an dits easy for my to go link crazy.
This all started because on one of the many bus/train/plane rides I have done in the last three weeks, I listened to a podcast of a short talk by Mark Pesce for an ICT Roundtable for the New South Wales TAFE system on Collisions & Smash Repairs Mark Pesce. If you have been tracking this awhile, there is not much “new”, but I really latched on to some phraseology he used.
He calls for educators to Share Everything:
There’s a new rule for how economies of information work in the 21st century… the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. Information is no longer an economy of scarcity, it is an economy of hyper-abundance. Therefore, the resources that are shared the most widely… extend the value of the environment.
And even better, when citing why the pioneers started “giving away” the content of a $40k per year education (which is not really what is happening):
The value of an education is not being able to watch a lecture on a screen- its the moment of transference that takes place when you have a competent instructor in an embodied way with a student who is actually physically present. But sharing this information, actually extends the value of that embodied education.
So what do you think? Is there a tipping point looming for Open Education / Content/ Learning / ________? Got some stuff to share on this? Play delicious tag with openuped
I’ve been noticing this as well, this recent uptick. It seems to me that a lot of people that have spent a lot of time looking at what an ideal education might look like (including me) have come to the conclusion that the sheer plod of getting open education widely understood and adopted is crucial to unleashing the innovation in course design that we know can happen (“course design” is maybe even the wrong word there, who says these things will be courses?)
For me, part of the realization I had while working on my school’s academic technology plan was how crucial the openness was to understanding all that collaborative learning 2.0 edupunk jazz. Basically, people that work in closed systems have no understanding of any of this. They can’t — because all that stuff, from social bookmarking to twitter assumes an open system.
I’d filed that away as an anti-LMS rant — but “anti” rants are just that — they don’t motivate or inspire the general public. When I read Kelty’s Two Bits, it kind of came together for me. The foundation of all of this is sharable, hackable content. I’d always known that that was one of many things I supported, but it came to me that everything else I believed in I understood because my professional domain had been a shareable & hackable world — and until others were brought into that domain they simply couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. We were selling bread-slicers to people that had never seen bread.
Anyway — as luck would have it the OCWC advertised a position just as these thoughts were solidifying — so here I am working for the Consortium (why does that always sound so John Grisham?) and maybe this sounds marketing-esque but it’s very heartfelt — I think what we are seeing among edubloggers is a recognition if we get people bread the bread-slicer is going to make a lot more sense? At least that’s where I’ve ended up…