EduGlu Sandbox

With my recent thinking about openness, I’ve found myself starting to channel an internal devil’s advocate voice… This post does not represent my personal beliefs, but if we’re going to talk about open education, we need to explore all sides of it…

Shawn Miller from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology re-published my post “The UMW Blogs Story” that chronicles the work we have been doing over the last several years at the Uni

Some off the cuff (on the bike) rambling about some thoughts about what open education is - open content, open access and open accreditation. This is hopefully rock bottom with respect to video production quality - but at least you get to come along for some of my ride home…

A follow-up on my last rant on openness in universities, wherin I improperly aim the camera and showcase my multitude of chin-related tissue.

I stopped to record a quick stream-of-thought rant about openness and the institution. My opinions are my own, not my employers, etc… Please don’t fire me.

So though I took the criticisms of Stephen Downes and others seriously, ultimately I concluded that the potential impact of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education was too powerful for me to ignore. David Wiley has a number of good posts up lately with pointers to the huzzahs, the critiques, and the alternatives, and I would urge you to look them over and give serious thought to whether you care to add your name to the document.

David also has provided a couple web banners, for those of you who share my evident passion for advocacy via remote-hosted images -- if only it had some javascript to slow down my page-load speeds even more!

Speaking of which, the Northern Voice banners have been available for some time, offering a number of options how to show your love for The Moose. As you may have noticed, I chose the biggest and most obtrusive option for my homepage...

Peace, Love, and Linux, originally uploaded by kino-eye.

I probably should put up a post about Seven Second Delay, or something, anything to interrupt this string of three consecutive posts that just recycle something David Wiley has posted... But for reasons I only dimly comprehend I receive a fairly steady stream of inquiries along the lines of "what's the deal with [keeping/getting rid of] the NC clause?" and this post captures both positions in a remarkably accessible exchange.

First, this quite clever spoof of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education:

Swansea, January 23rd, 2008—A coalition of edutainers, foundations, free-market capitalists, adult-entertainment providers, corporates and internet "pioneers" today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet so that it could be sucked up into huge corporate-funded databases.


The Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. Providing resources for bundling, advertising, service-based income and free-market exchange it encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and pay to use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make educators' labour cheaper more pliable, and more easily replaced if they happen to disagree.

...Open edutainment is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for the swamping them with US influenced "affordable" textbooks and learning materials supplied on One Laptop per Child (OLPC), expensive gadgets and the Internet. It opens the door to a small elite class to use the labour of local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses. Of course, then the large multinational publishing houses are freely able to use it.

The Declaration has already been translated into over one language and the growing list of signatories includes: lots of rich people, some people you have never heard of, the usual suspects and, of course, our dear leader Lawrence Lessig.

The cutting nature of this jab has prodded David into responding with perhaps the sharpest, certainly the most passionate, defense of the model that I've read from him:

Though it's dangerous and often wrong to analogize open education with open source, this is one case in which we may safely do so. Try to imagine the current state of Linux if the GPL contained a noncommercial clause… That is, try to imagine a Linux without Ubuntu. Try to imagine Linux without Transmeta supporting Linus. Try to imagine Linux without RedHat supporting Alan Cox. Try to imagine universities or governments deploying Linux if technical support weren't commercially available from RedHat. Try to imagine Linux without hardware vendor support from Penguin Computing, VA, IBM, or Dell.

If in your mind you're already asking "who cares whether or not universities or governments deploy? We're trying to empower the people, not multinational corporations. And who calls tech support?" then you can stop reading right here. You seem comfortable living in the elitist world where only the uber-geeks need the benefits of open source. And since they already have them, congratulations - mission accomplished!

If you're having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out - just think about where open education is today.

Great reading all round. But my inner perverse imp cannot help but ask if with this post Dr. Wiley might have fallen off the wagon (scroll to the bottom)?

This is likely my last post for while, at least until David posts something again...

Last year was a banner year for my conference attendance; on top of the always fun Northern Voice, I was able to attend the (not so fun, for me) IMS Alt-i-lab sessions in Vancouver, the mind opening Open Education convergence in Logan, Utah, the WCET conference in Atlanta, SREB’s Online Learning Task Group Meetings (again, back to Atlanta), and closer to home, the BC Ed Tech User’s Group session in Kamloops and Camosun College’s Distributed Education days.

As enjoyable as many of the programs were, the highlight is always the people, the hallway and barroom conversations where new ideas are spawned, plots hatched and connections made. Indeed, this year’s crop was spectacular in this regard; as much as I am in almost daily contact with my online network, the opportunity to see Chris Lott and Jim Groom twice in one year, and Brian and D’Arcy more times than was seemly was a great boon to my thinking, growth and personal well being.

I typically canvas my network of close friends and edublogger buddies about what events they are thinking about attending, as I know this will factor into my own planning. But this got me wondering (which I did aloud on Twitter) if there wasn’t a better “web 2.0″ way to find out this information, especially a way that would allow me connect with people who I read and am interested in but don’t already have strong ties with.

As usual, Twitter yielded at least one good suggestion, upcoming.org, a site purpose-built for this. So I dutifully reactivated my account there, but I have some concerns. Not uncommon with any social software, the big one is “who else is there.” As much as I want to connect with new folks, the whole exercise began in an effort to more easily (less intrusively) find out where people I already know and like to talk to are going. The second issue is the lack of uptake of upcoming.org, epsecially amongst the educational technology conferences. A number of biggies weren’t in there (before I added them, a feature I quite like) which makes me suspicious of how useful it will be.

So, my question for you to start off 2008: where are you telling people (and how can I best find out) what physical meetings you are planning on attending in 2008? upcoming.org? Your blog? Facebook?

For myself, I will endeavor to use upcoming.org for now (cf. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/syndicate/v2/my_events/201841), but I am absolutely willing to be convinced of the merits of some other method. - SWL

Tags: conferences, events f2f