I heard about this initiative a while back, but noticed it mentioned again today on the open culture weblog.
Last April, UC Berkeley, one of the premiere schools in the country, announced its plan to put complete academic courses on iTunes. Fast forward nine months, and you can already find 59 full courses ready for your iPod.
I’ve successfully defended my Ph. D. dissertation, and I’m incredibly happy. It feels absolutely terrific to be done!
I have a few minor edits to do, but I thought I would share the (just about) finished dissertation.
The Open Movement: Possibilities and Implications for Education.
This dissertation reports the results of a two-year long research study focused on describing and coming to understand the perceptions and beliefs of a group of educators immersed in open source culture (OSC)
I was lucky to have the help of great participants throughout this study, many who are mentioned by name in the dissertation. Thanks to all of those who participated and for helping me get through this important stage in my own education. I hope that this document is helpful to others, and I expect to have a LOT to say about my findings in the next few months. And of course, thanks to my committee and my advisor Dr. Cyril Kesten for getting me through this.
Happy holidays everyone!
Peter Suber’s Open Access News reports, “Google is offering to digitize and provide OA (open access) to the back runs of scholarly journals. ”
I think that this is great news for the academic community, that is, if the offer is taken up by publishers on a significant level. Of course, there are pros and cons. Be sure to read Suber’s full post to get a better idea of the specific issues involved.
I enjoy this take on the “take a photo of yourself everyday” meme that has recently been popular.
Great stuff. And I think this could be an easy-to-model assignment (digital story-telling through stop-frame animation) for the K-12 classroom. Of course, the drugs, cheating and drinking may not be the most suitable context.
FOSS is a viable and cost effective solution to many issues arising in schools and IT departments in today’s educational system.
Thanks for your thoughts, Brian. Change is on its way, we just have to keep up the good fight.
Take a look at the posted response from a superintendent from a Canadian school district defending reasons why not to use FLOSS at any levels of significance.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/2531
Clueless. It looks like Microsoft sales reps got to her first.
And what about the trend toward the LMS? I think, if we’re lucky, we will begin to see education back-pedal on that notion.
I really want to expand on these thoughts from David Warlick but just don’t have the time.
Education, defined by it limits, required a curriculum that was packaged into products that could be easily used in the classroom. We used textbooks with scope and sequence, pacing guides, and a teacher’s guide with the answers.
Education, defined by it’s lack of limits, requires no such packaging. It’s based on experiences, tied to real-world, real-time information that spans the entire spectrum of media  crafted an facilitated by skilled teachers, who become more like tour guides than assembly-line workers.
I’d love to talk about how this fits in well with my thoughts on openness in education … for now this will have to rest in my archives.
Very impressive!
Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.
via Digg.
Good things:
Heather Ross reports that SkypeOut (the ability to make phonecalls from computer to telephone/cell phone) is now free for calls made within Canada and the US.
Rob tells us that Statistics Canada is now (finally) Linux friendly.
A Bad Trend:
“Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?” This preprint paper from Educause begins to explain one of the biggest combined issues that educational technologists, educators and netizens are facing now and in the near future. I don’t ever want to look back at this post and think, “those were the days”. I hope the best is yet to come.
Lace Brogden and I wrote this report a couple of months ago, but I never got a chance to post it here. Here’s the executive summary:
This report was written at the request of the Keewatin Career Development Corporation (KCDC) and in follow up to A Comparative Assessment of Four Online Learning Programs (Bale, 2005). This document reports on the findings of the Phase 2 Feasibility Study. The foci of Phase 2 of the research were to identify (a) factorsrelevant to the development and implementation of an online, interinstitutional partnership for virtual resource centre alternatives within and between specific First Nations educational communities, and (b) how such interinstitutional partnerships might be beneficial to a
broad constituency of collaborating education agencies.The report is divided into four main sections. First, a description of the context, including a review of literature relevant to technology and to First Nations communities, a discussion of proprietary and open cultures, and an examination of several existing learning object repositories and their characteristics. The second section describes the research methodology and presents an analysis of the research data. The third section includes recommendations for the establishment of a First Nations learning object repository. The fourth and final section proposes areas for further research.
The highlight of the report for me was working once again with Lace. I feel that we work and write very well as a team, and I have learned more about writing and research in the few hours I spent with her than through all of the other formalized venues in my experience.
I hope that this report may be of use to someone out there. I also thank the rich discussions in the blogging community for much of the information found here.
Boing Boing just pointed to a speech by Michael Geist at the University of Alberta focused on the Internet, innovation and law. Check out the mp3 of the presentation. If you are interested in this topic, it’s definitely worth listening to this very articulate and knowledgable expert in the field.
There’s been several web applications mentioned recently in the blogosphere. Rick Schwier notes that Writeboard is useful for creating collaborative content. Writely and Jotspot Live look like similar services. SynchroEdit looks promising as well as it’s an open source synchronous editing tool which acts similarly to the previously mentioned. So many to choose from.
There’s the useful Web Applications List which features many other web-based applications. Many of these may be familiar, and some are sure to be new to most readers.
I didn’t noticed Ning on the list, a new online service focused on building social applications. Alan Levine has a useful description of the Ning service.
So many tools, coming out so quickly, with so many commonalities. How about someone develop a tool that helps my brain actually keep this stuff in order?