Archive for September 2007

Good morning everyone! As Steve Carson announced yesterday and I posted over on Stingy Scholar, I’ll be taking over the posting on this blog. Steve has some big loafers to fill but I’ll try to do my best. I’m very excited to become a part of the OEDb family and hope you’ll enjoy my links and snide commentary over the months to come. Feel free to send me any links, comments or suggestions to wynnwilliamson at gmail dotty-com.
 

As of tonight, I am passing the baton for Wide Open Education to another writer.  Much as I’ve enjoyed the opportunity, I am unable to maintain the focus and energy needed to keep up.  As of tomorrow, WOE will be in the capable hands of Wynn Williamson of The Stingy Scholar.  I’m sure Wide Open Education will benefit from the fresh energy Wynn will bring.

The New York Times announced Tuesday that they were doing away with the TimesSelect paid content program.  In the Times estimation the potential for growth in advertising was greater than the potential for growth in subscribers.  At the kind of traffic levels the Times enjoys (13 million unique visitors each month), this may be true, but it’s not yet clear that advertising can support lower-traffic models.  Still it’s an idication that putting content behind walls is losing steam.

As we move into prime baseball-watching season, you may find yourself seeking a deeper understanding of the game. MIT OpenCourseWare can help. Just a sampling of what you can find:

• Explore linear impulse and momentum as applied to a baseball struck by a bat on page 3 of these Dynamics lecture notes [PDF] by Professor Jaume Peraire.
• Learn why steriods are considered cheating in student Brian Chase’s paper on the topic. [PDF]
• Understand what facets of the game are most likely to involve magic and ritual on page two of these Anthropology lecture notes [PDF] by Professor James Howe.
• Test your baseball physics IQ with this out-of-this-world baseball exam question [PDF] (question 4) by Professor Dr. George Stephans.

These and hundreds of other baseball-related course materials can be found by searching the site with the keyword “baseball.”

Open innovation topics have always seemed to me to be very relevant to open educaitonal resource development, especially as they move away from open source software into other fields. Open Innovators in doing a series on 12 recommended open innovation books, the first four of which are:

• Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
  - by Patricia B. Seybold
• Motivation in Open Innovation
  - by Robert Motzek
• Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
  -by Henry Chesbrough
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
  - by Chris Anderson

I found Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation to be really helpful in thinking about how open innovation might occur with educational materials. I won’t be surprised if it appears in future posts.

Livemint.com is suggesting OCW as a solution to the talent crunch in India. Freeman Murray writes:

I gave a talk on open-source education and pointed to a variety of examples such as MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu and the Digital Studyhall Project http://dsh.cs.washington.edu, in which videos of expert teachers are freely distributed to the global community. I believe this model of open source education is the only scalable solution to the talent crunch facing the technology sector in India, as evidenced by the much talked about exodus of Riya.com from India because of the difficulty and expense of finding quality senior software developers.

Unlike China, India has yet to start sharing its own courseware widely, which is too bad, because the IITs would be a great addition to the worldwide body of opencourseware. Like China, India faces tremendous connectivity challenges as well, with no mirror site or other similar program so far that I am aware of.

WorldChanging.com has a nice summary of OCW in China. Chinese universities have some 1,100 total courses from more than 220 schools openly published on the web through the CORE China Quality OpenCourseWare page. I notice in the comments below that someone raises the issue of connectivity, which is certainly a challenge. It’s worth noting that CORE maintains a network of mirror sites throughout China to help address this issue.

Everyone knows that OpenCourseWare can be good for the mind, but MIT shows how it can be good for the body. MIT OCW’s Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation page shares courses on SCUBA, tennis, weight training, archery, fencing and sailing. For the more cerebral athlete, there is Physical Intelligence, and Physical Education for Mechanical Engineering–work out body and mind.

You may have caught Andy Ihnatko, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, on the CBS Early Show, touting the latest gadgetry for back to school. He led off with the iPod and played a clip of Walter Lewin’s Electricity and Magnetism video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare.

As it so happens, I got my first chance to play with an iPhone this weekend as well, and yes, they’re way to expensive to make a difference in the short term for people with limited incomes, but they and other devices like them will get cheaper, and they are definitely the first handheld platform I’ve seen that really makes learning from open educational resources a viable experience.

I checked out many of my favorite OER sites, including MIT OCW, MERLOT, Connexions and Korea University OCW (an eduCause site). All of them behaved flawlessly, and the ability to view PDF documents with ease makes the OCW sites very useful on the platform. The iPhone will make the most connected more so, but as the technology becomes cheaper ($200.00 at a time?), it and other devices will have an increasing impact.

And while we’re doing the cartoons, here’s Creative Commons cartoon explaining what Creative Commons is all about:

OCW in a nutshell, in a flickr photoset by Leigh Blackdall.

Here’s a cool tool if you find yourself remixing Creative Commons content while you’re doing a school project or making up lecture notes: CC Taiwan has create this license compatibility wizard. Helped me settle a discussion at work the other day…

A group at Stanford believe so. There’s a petition circulating on Facebook and a prototype site up on the web. Standford would be a tremendous addition to the OpenCourseWare community, and it would be just as exciting to see a group of students leading the charge.

Here’s a discussion not to miss: Terra Incognita is hosting SPARC’s Gavin Baker discussing the linkages between open access publishing and open educational resources. More about him:

Gavin Baker is an IT and public policy consultant. Currently he is developing a student outreach campaign for SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, on the subject of open access to academic journal literature. Gavin also serves on the board of directors for FreeCulture.org, which is an international student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology policy.

I’ll definitely be tuning in for this one.

Here is David Wiley’s summary of early discussions in his Open Education class, which is just getting under way. As a review, David’s teaching this class completely on line and completely open to anyone. You can just participate at no cost, or if you are in school, you can sign sign up for credit through your university.

One of the questions under discussion early is “In your opinion, is the ‘right to education’ a basic human right? Why or why not?” I’m interested to see if anyone argues the negative here. It’s kind of like asking if a clean, safe environment is a basic human right. Well, yes, but that’s not what is going to stop us all from burning fossil fuels. Not only does failing to educate everyone leave a great many people disempowered, which itself can be dangerous, it deprives us all of a part of the human creativity we will need if we are to survive as a species. We need to educate everyone because everyone deserves an education of course, but we need to educated everyone because ultimately, it’s probably the only way we can all live togehter. I see Open Education as a green movement for the mind.