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Sara Gates, Huffington Post, May 27, 2013 The video is a bit long and feels repetitive in places, but it's also a searing indictment of the school system in Illinois spoken by teacher Ellie Rubenstein. In the video, "Rubenstein explains why she is quitting and addresses several major problems she says she has faced as a teacher in the U.S. public education system. 'I was proud to say I was a teacher,' Rubenstein tells the camera, after describing how she abandoned a career in public relations to 'do something meaningful' with her life. 'But over the past 15 years, I've experienced the depressing, gradual downfall and misdirection of communication that has slowly eaten away at my love of teaching.'" [Link] [Comment]

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Audrey Watters, Hack Education, May 27, 2013 Audrey Watters analyzes and deconstructs  Clayton Christensen's myth of "disruptive innovation," showing how it appeals to the apocalyptic sense of change - "Doom. Suffering. Change. Then paradise." And "no doubt (as a Harvard professor) Christensen has faced very little skepticism or criticism about his theory about the transformation of industries." She questions the premise and challenges the "unassailably true" part of the myth. But you have to read all the way to the end (and do take the time to do so, the article is well-worthwhile) to see the other shoe drop: "The Clayton Christensen Institute does not just offer models -- business models -- for the future... It has actively lobbied governments for certain aspects of its agenda (its mythology?)... (and) is a member of ALEC, for example, a corporate lobbying organization whose education initiatives include writing and pushing for legislation that enables the outsourcing of education to for-profit, online education providers." [Link] [Comment]

[Slides][Audio] Overview discussing open educational resources (OERs) and massive open online courses (MOOCs) as they relate to the future. Issues considered include varieties of openness, licensing and combining resources, access, the nature of definitions, types of MOOCs, change and the future. Vancouver Island University's Online Learning and Teaching Diploma - OLTD 505: OERs, Online, via Blackboard Collaborate (Seminar) May 25, 2013 [Comment]

Tressie McMillan Cottom., tressiemc, May 24, 2013 Some really good writing in this longish post about university admissions that ends with this: "Rather than a market response to unmet consumer demand, my data tell a story of class insecurity that is transformed into a credentialing process through marketing that sorts, and admissions processes that signal to students that a for-profit credential can provide the security they intuit they need. The success of colleges like Profit U not only responds to the individual pain points of students grappling with increasing competition for fewer good jobs, but organizationally they have responded to weaknesses — pain points — in the social structure." This is really important. It's not just about jobs and it never has been. It's also about being able to 'join the club' - only to realize, that once you've finally gotten in, there are many more inner circles you'll never get to see. (Browse the rest of the site, too, for interesting stuff, including this astonishing dispute with the Chronicle from last year). Via Matt Reed. [Link] [Comment]

Phil Hill, e-Literate, May 24, 2013 According to the letter signed by 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, "It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission." They then ask that a committee of tenure and tenure track faculty draft "a set of ethical and educational principles" that will govern their involvement. The Harvard faculty letter, writes Phil Hill, takes the approach of "viewing MOOCs as experiments in 'teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community'." And, pointedly, not adjuncts and support staff, students, providers, funders, or anyone else. [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley, iterating toward openness, May 24, 2013 David Wiley clarifies, and his points are worth lingering on.

• "Some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to 'Be Awesome Instead' of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open – truly open – is absolutely critical..." Quite so.
• And I am really really of the same mind as Wiley when he writes this: "For a number of years I have felt that the overwhelming majority of educational researchers are focused on the 'high quality' problem, to the virtual exclusion of the 'universal' and 'free' problem from the discourse." From my perspective, talk of 'quality' has become a useful red herring for those really wanting resources to be not open and not free. That's not to say I oppose quality (and neither does Wiley). But if it must be perfect before it is free, then it will never be free.
• "The only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others." Once again, I'm completely agreed. This is what I was trying to urge at OECD (not that they listened).

My only quibble is with his insistence on "free 4Rs permissions" - which includes allowing commercialization of free resources. Given what he has just said about opoen access, and about there being "no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen" I just can't see requiring allowing commercial use. Somewhere someone is going to have to say, "if you throw up a paywall, it's not open access, and you've broken the agreement."

Do you doubt me? If I blocked access to this website and started charging a subscription fee for OLDaily, would you consider it consisten with my long-time committment to free and open access? No? Then why would it be consistent with free and open access if someone else did it to my stuff? [Link] [Comment]

Doug Belshaw, literaci.es, May 24, 2013 Doug Belshaw has started a new blog on a new blog service / magazine called Svbtle. Here's his announcement post. "Svbtle is a new kind of writing and publishing network that takes the best things from traditional publishing and combines them with the best parts of the web." There's an application for membership, but it's not clear yet why someone would apply. Meanwhile, it has been interesting watching Doug Belshaw's transition from staid academic to hipster dude since his employment at Mozilla. (I say that just in jest, but it's still interesting to watch.) [Link] [Comment]

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May 24, 2013 So I spent way too much time playing this game this afternoon, which automatically makes it worth passing along. "'Data Dealer' is an online/serious/educational game about collecting and selling personal data - full of irony and humour. It's an interactive exploration of the personal data ecosystem in the digital age and targeted at both young people and adults." Have fun! [Link] [Comment]

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JISC, May 24, 2013 This is a set of eight presentations (slides only) from yesterday's conference on open access policies Goodenough College, London. Presentations inlcude talks from funders such as Wellcome Trust and RCUK, as well as discussion of the green and gold routes to open access archiving. Interestingly, open access includes not the ability to read a document online, but also search for and re-use (including download) the content and unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools (according to thisRCUK presentation). Some good statistics, also, from Alma Swan of SPARC Europe. See also controversy regarding RCUK's policies. [Link] [Comment]

Dave Tosh, Stoatly Different, May 23, 2013 Interesting. "Learning Locker provides a destination where users can create a personal locker housing their learning data that they can then put to work for them. The data comes from a variety of sources including the web and any learning platform that exports Tin Can statements." Of course, for this to work well, you need not only to be able to export your data, but also to make it available (via an API, perhaps) to learning and other applications. Anyhow, this is a good idea, and Dave Tosh certainly has the background in e-learning to understand how it should work. [Link] [Comment]

Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, May 23, 2013 Interesting thought experiment. "If there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen... oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right?" If I were in Germany, would my priorities be changed? I'm not sure, partially because MOOCs are as much about alternative pedagogy as they are about access (but, crucially, they are about access, and that thought is never far from my mind). But in a world of free? Most likely, as Holden comments, "possibly, MOOCs as support and community around traditional classes?" Because access isn't just about opening doors, it's also about makiing sure people are successful once they enter. [Link] [Comment]

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Dave Cormier, MOOC Quality Project, May 23, 2013 Dave Cormier follows my post last week to the MOOC Quality Project with a discussion "on the motives of different vested interests and their relationship to MOOCs." It's a good examination of the many perceptions of 'quality' and 'success' related to MOOCs. "I think it is critical that we understand the ways in which different interest groups will judge the ‘ quality’ of that experience for the convenor (and their sponsors)," he writes. "What are we all in it for? What is the difference between a pat on the back and a failure for each of the different groups convening MOOCs?" [Link] [Comment]

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Twitter, May 22, 2013 Koos, who must have seen my presentation Against Digital Research Methodologies, referred me to this stream: #overlyhonestmethods. There's also an article in the Guardian, here from last January. "scientists from all four corners of the twitterverse have not just dismantled that pure-of-thought image but demolished it with repeated 140-character salvos all bearing the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods... It all started with a neuropharmacologist researcher and blogger called Leigh when she tweeted "incubation lasted three days because this is how long the undergrad forgot the experiment in the fridge." There's 'scientific method', which is pure and abstract and unreal, and then there is science which, like me, muddles along. More: coverage from I, Science, also, the browser of a scientist, also, Tumblr images. [Link] [Comment]

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Kate taylor, Globe, and , Mail, May 22, 2013 I think educational institutions can learn a great deal from the strategy adopted by Canada's National Film Board in 2007 to digitize its collection and move into the field of new media. "At home and abroad, the organization is fusing Canada’ s traditional strengths in documentary and communications technology with its newer reputation as a new-media leader to build a uniquely accessible cultural institution dedicated to storytelling and democratic dialogue." It's hard to overstate what is happening in Canadian public media. Take a measure of Chris Hadfield, add some sniffing bears from the NFB, and add a good dose of Radio 3 attitude, and you have a uniquely forward-looking landscape. Canadian educational institutions should be in the middle of this (and so should we at NRC), not standing on the sidelines. [Link] [Comment]

Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, May 22, 2013 According to this report, "a new peering arrangement being signed today  between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’ s research and education network." Essentially the agreement is to provide cloud access to Microsoft products; "any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’ s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365." In the comments, we read also that janet "are already working on deals with Google and Dropbox – see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services." In general, this seems like a good plan, especially if UK universities are able to save millions of pounds. But there is also good reason to be cautios when you see reports like this stating that "government is currently over-reliant on a small 'oligopoly' of large suppliers (and) benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates." [Link] [Comment]

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Rosanna Tamburri, University Affairs, May 22, 2013 According to this University Affairs article, "the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses... it has committed $1 million to fund the venture. BCcampus, the provincial agency overseeing the project, is rolling it out in phases. It recently released a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first- and second-year subject areas  for which it is sourcing textbooks. It also identified 10 existing open textbooks, mainly first-year introductory texts. The agency issued a call for proposals to faculty members and teaching assistants to peer review the books and is making available an evaluation rubric to use for the reviews." The proposal received a good response from Tony Bates, who calls the idea "shrwed," especially as it implicates faculty in review and selection. It is estimated to save students $1000 per year. No response from publishers in the article. [Link] [Comment]

Christian Glahn, LO-F.AT, May 22, 2013

This is a really useful post. It begins by deflating some misconceptions about TinCan replacing SCORM, and proceeds to offer a much wider description of ADL's overall plan. In a nutshell, writes Christian Glahn, e-learning today has become distributed, collaborative, networked, continuous (etc etc), and so, "this creates tensions with the centralised, single interfaced, individual learning, and course-centred concepts of SCORM." So by 2011 ADL decided to rewrite the specification. TinCan, or the Experience API, constitutes only the first part of this. The  Training and Learning Architecture (or TLA) has, he writes, "four essential parts that are intended to  extend  the present capabilities of SCORM for maintaining interoperability in modern learning environments:" the Experience API and learning record stores (LRS), the content broker, learner profiles, and competence networks. See also  tincanapi.co.uk and see also this response from Michael Roberts. [Link] [Comment]

Lumen Learning, May 22, 2013 In my email just now, this announcement: "Today Lumen Learning and Instructure announced the availability, via the Canvas platform, of six open course frameworks that make it easier for instructors to teach effectively using open educational resources (OER). You can view the press release or browse  the courses from the Lumen Learning website. The brainchild of open education pioneer David Wiley, open course frameworks are curated collections of OER that look and feel like online courses, with content and course segments mapped to learning objectives. These courses serve effectively as blueprints instructors can use to teach a course as-is, adapt or refine the course content to make it work better for their students." So... they're course packages, right? The materials are mostly licensed under CC-by, and there's an option to purchase print materials on Lulu. [Link] [Comment]

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Dean Groom, Playable ~ The Weblog of Dean Groom, May 22, 2013 Looking at the new xBox release (I saw an ad for it on the morning news) Dean Groom writes, "while games are scapegoated as causing all manner of social ills, they are the media-platform which is most able and likely to significantly change who own’ s the content gateway. It will be game-networks which decide which social-network, which movie, which news-channel and music will be presented to the family." The new xBox is Microsoft's play to become the network that leverages access to that attention, and hence, can derive revenue from the advertising and promotion thereby enabled. "What is important is that as a game-media-network they want a direct line to consumers in the attention economy – and that is what it will deliver. It will leverage its games capital to achieve it." [Link] [Comment]

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Chad Sansing, Cooperative Catalyst, May 22, 2013 This is brilliantly done, painting a dystopian picture of the teaching profession in the not-too-distant future. A lot of detail, a lot of understatement, this article strikes a perfect balance of realism and chilling.

“ Taxes?”

“ Who pays those things any more?” [Link] [Comment]