Tag: OER

Answering some comments to my last post.

@ Anto

Andreas, I do not completely agree with you about “control and hierarchy seen in opposition to open resources.
In the case of LOs, “control” may simply mean “technical specifications”. Also in the Open Source software there are several examples of standardization but open sofware remains… open! …

I understand that in some contexts LOs may be useful but it is difficult for me to associate them to OER. Usually, the great open phenomena we have seen in Internet in the last years had an explosive nature, well described by an exponential behaviour. In this course I learned that there has been a great deal of discussion about LOs but I do not see any explosive growth in their use.

My thoughts resonate very much with Karen‘s ones, on this subject:

My primary thought after doing this reading is that if all the time spent discussing arcane definitions of learning objects and complex formulations of common sense observations was instead spent developing some useful educational resources, the world would be a better place.

@ Emanuela

The metaphor could be: a travel (OER) could need a car, but a train or a bike too. (LO or another resource)

May be cars (LOs) are so difficult to drive or so expensive that few people use them? Then, why should we talk about so much? OER are meaningful only if they are used in massive context, or am I wrong?

@ Catia

Well, as for judging the value of a resource I would say that it depends on the context. I think that no resource is better than other per se, but it depends on the fact of being suitable for the learner in a particular situation.

I agree perfectly, Catia. The problem is that in education the context may be extremely variable. Therefore, I’m afraid the adaptation work may be so relevant to make the need of a LO questionable …

Tchau 🙂

@ Rob

We may have to compare some notes, since I’m involved with computer literacy as well.

Oh yes! 🙂

Your experience in that class sounds great. So you need to listen to students, integrate their ideas, allow them to be active, and provide immediate feedback. That sounds wonderful, no matter where your content comes from.

Oh yes, I like this experience so much and I owe a lot to some on line communities such as LTEver and Open Ed.

Besides more technical issues, what I like most is that the students tend to feel more comfortable because they are quite familiar with these tools. Therefore, they tend to express themselves, to share their interests, to aggregate. This is great for the teacher, I know many students much better than with the conventional classroom system where a classroom is no more a classroom, may be with one or two hundreds of people listening to you! I believe that to know your students is very important. Do you agree? In this first experience I’m learning that the best system is to mix the blogging activities with physical presence. When the students want to discuss a new idea or they need explanations they ask for a meeting. Everyone is positively motivated and the mood is usually very good.

You point out an important difference between software development and teaching, where the comparison of open source software to OER development does not exactly match, with software QA testing following a bit of a different model than evaluating learning materials. I’ve written about how they’re similar, but as you bring up, they are not always similar.

Yes, I liked very much your post and got me to think about the analogy between software development and teaching. Analogies are quite useful and it is also useful to see where the analogy breaks up.

I’m very sorry to be so late but I’m too busy with my students. The approach based on blogging we are using in the Open Education course and that I’m trying to apply in my courses is great but with so many students it may be difficult sometimes. By the way, it is curious to play simultaneously the student’s and the teacher’s role. I like it very much! I also like to mix posts related to both roles in this blog. Unfortunately, posts for my students are in italian, of course.

Even if it is late and I had to read classmates posts too fast, I’m posting anyway because this course is really important for me.

At the faculty of medicine in Florence, we have an experience of seven years in applying computer and internet-based technologies for a computer literacy course. The experience is relevant because it is involving about 700 students per year in more than 20 curricula. The results are good. The use of new technologies allows us to make many interesting learning experiments and the student appreciate very much the new methods: 90% declare that they would like to see these method applied in other teachings.

However, these results have nothing to do with the use of Learning Objects.

The crucial elements were

1) to let the student be more active by means of appropriate activities,

2) to propose activities, tools and environments with which students are already familiar in their life,

3) to be prompt to transform students ideas in new learning experiences,

4) to be prompt in answering their questions,

5) to improve the organization of the courses.

I would say that the didactic material, text and so on, played a secondary role with respect to the points mentioned above.

When preparing the course, I tried to find courseware to reuse but all the attempts failed and, almost always, I finished composing the material myself. Sometimes, I took relatively small pieces of information in Wikipedia or some other places.

In the beginning I even did not know what Learning Objects were. Later on, I heard of Learning Objects by people involved in the management of refreshing courses in enterprises. Soon I realized that the Learning Objects model did not fit well in my teaching practice. I felt quite uncomfortable with all the terminology around Learning Objects and even e-learning.

Reading Wiley’s chapter, The Learning Object Literature, relieved me a great deal! Learning Objects literature is too much technical, too much related to computer science instead of to fields where the learner is the main object of interest.

The question if open educational resources “fix” many of the problems experienced by those who work with learning objects is an interesting one. I do not know if, actually, the idea of open educational resources may solve the problems related to learning objects but I believe the two ideas are pretty in contrast.

Learning Objects involve control and hierarchy. These concepts are quite the opposite of open source, to which the open educational resources thinking is inspired, as far as I understand. In open source you can build something from existing software modules, by changing them and putting them together but you can also grab and reuse small pieces of code taken from many different modules. The open source programmer sees the open source software available in the public domain as a kind of continuum.

There is no doubt that the most similar thing in the field of educational resource is what we have in Wikipedia. Actually, as a former software programmer, I tend to see Wikipedia as the main source of possible chunks of didactic material.

However, the analogy between open educational resources and open source has to be taken with care. The context of open source is much more simple: to see if a piece of software works, you run it with test cases and you correct and test it again until all bugs are found. Of course, this process may be not so simple as we can describe it but the context of educational resources is hugely more complicated. How you can assess that a resource is better then another one? How can you assess that a resource is bug-free? Is this last question actually a meaningful one? Questions of such kind are even more difficult to answer because of the inherently localized nature of educational resources: a resource which is good in a certain context may be completely inadequate in another one.

So, what makes difficult a kind of natural selection of educational resources analogous to that we see in the field of open source, is the absence of a strong and immediate feedback on the quality of the resources. I believe that there may be only one kind of effective feedback: the feedback given by a massive use of the resources and, probably, this kind of massive use may take place only in context similar to Wikipedia.

In any case, I believe also that, significant progresses in the field of education are much more related to the behaviour of teachers and to learning practices instead of to the technicalities of learning objects.

The reflection weeks are a great idea! Now we have time to read the other participants posts. I believe this is particularly appreciated by those that are not full time students; even more by those that, being involved in some kind of teaching, are very busy right in the same time period. Personally, I learn as much from posts as from assigned readings. I like this very much.
At the same time, I also appreciated the lost Inviting Someone to Participate assignments. I was looking forward to propose a couple of experiments involving free sharing of educational materials online, having this intention before attending the Open Education course. Of course, I understand it was necessary to give up to something because of time schedule. Perhaps, for those attending while being active in teaching a loose time schedule, based more on tasks instead of strict deadlines, could be more appropriate and it could lead to some fruitful results or, why not to some cooperation.

Wikinomics, written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams points to a number of surprising business stories that nobody would have foreseen before 2000.

It is, in some way, on the optimistic side with respect to Thomas Friedman’s The world is flat. For instance, T&A argue that Friedman sees free software but not the multibillion-dollar ecosystem that surrounds open source. T&A’s book is enthralling but, admittedly, it may give a somewhat optimistically biased idea to many. I must say to propend for T&W vision instead of Friedmans one.

The key suggested by T&A to understand these phenomena consists in how mass collaboration may produce a vibrant business ecosystem where conventional business rules are broken apart. The authors talk in terms of a new economy where totally new organizational structures can co-create value with millions of autonomous producers to challenge traditional business designs.

Several examples in quite different context are given, so that the scope is quite large. The stories are definitely relevant and, probably, they represents the most innovative and huge success stories in the last 10 years.

Actually, we must say that each story , in its own field, represents the exception instead of the rule, even if absolutely an outstanding one.

T&W say that all these stories have four basic attributes in common, four attributes that are in sharp contrast with common enterprise wisdom:

• Being open

• Peering

• Sharing

• Acting globally

Adoption of these rules lends the leadership to give up some control and to be more confident in spontaneous phenomena that are driven by personal interest of very large masses, very often not an economic interest.

When talking about the strategy of Robert Stephens, leader of Geek Squad, 12000 employees expert in solving problems with electronic gadgetry, $1 billion in services per year, T&W tell:

When it comes to orchestrating employee collaboration, Stephens has a new rule: First observe and then implement. “I’m deathly afraid of waisting time and energy trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do.”

Tim Bray at Sun Microsystems tells us that

“The technologies that come along and change the world are the simple, unplanned ones that emerge from the grassroots rather then the ones that out of the corner offices of the corporate strategists,” When talking about the new workplace, T&W say

The bottom line is that the workplace is becoming a self-organizing entity where centralized and tightly controlled processes are increasingly giving way to more spontaneous and decentralized forms and mass collaboration.

And, finally, IBM strategist Joel Cawley cautions

“Keep in mind that there was no strategy to do what we did with open source. It was happenstance all the way through the journey. We started doing what made sense, and kept on doing that each step of the way.”

Whereas T&W indicate openness, peering, sharing and global action as the common denominator of the different stories, I like to see the matter in a somewhat broader perspective.

According to second law of thermodynamics, with time the Universe tends to be structure-less

but

when somewhere a sufficiently large number of interconnectable entities happen to be in touch, after a sufficient time lapse, something new may appear

• bacteria from a soup of molecules -> life

• humans from a living ecosystem -> humanity

• thoughts from a multitude of neurons -> mind

• shared thoughts from a loosely connected multitude of humans -> social aggregation, business, culture as we have known before 2000

• shared thoughts from a tightly connected multitude of humans -> social aggregation 2.0, business 2.0, culture 2.0 ?

In all these cases, if one waits for a sufficient time, something completely new will arise. It is the wonder of complexity. Or a miracle if you like, anyway, it is a fact: it just happens.

In all these cases it is useless to force or to control the processes; it is not possible to control such complex environments. The savvy can hope to make a minimal set of actions to maintain the health of the environment, in some way as the ancient peasant took care of the soil to let good grass grow.

The new brave 2.0 managers described in Wikinomics stories behaved in that way. The question is: will this become common wisdom?

And what about education? Is it worthwhile to work hard to devise some clever business model to foster open education or should we just wait for the next 2.0 wiki-similar tool?

As a last point, it is worthwhile to mention the way the book was written. According to T&W’s description of Wiki workplace in a number of different context, the book itself was written by means of a wiki, Don Tapscott being in Toronto and Anthony Williams in London. They also used the wiki features to let others contribute.

The final chapter, N.11, The wikinomics playbook, has only fifteen words: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to twenty-first-century strategy on www.wikinomics,com”.

Actually, anyone may contribute. Quite a number of new chapters are available. In particular Beyond the classroom is pertinent to the topic of this course. As far as this specific chapter is concerned, while I share the points were the relevant role wiki could play in many aspects of education, I’m a bit perplexed with the final statement

… we have been interested in developing some classroom ‘work books’. These would not be full texts, but supplemental modules – physics, chemistry, math, computer science, history, literature and even religion and law. If someone would like to tackle a project like that with us, we would be very open to sharing IP/Revenues. We are especially interested in the high-school markets and home school demographics. Anyone want to form a team?

where it turns out that the author of the article is the president of a company. There is nothing wrong in this but it leads us on the business model issue, again. Frankly, I think that truly relevant open education realities will appear only thanks to some mass collaboration phenomenon.

I missed the deadline yesterday. Why? I’m too busy with my students blogs! Learning by doing, isn’t it?

They are 33 so far but potential bloggers in this class could be some 100 … will I cope with this workload? Just trying …

Economic aspects of OER. Interesting readings, useful for improving my lacking background. However, too much busy in these days to do something more than just reading here and there …

I prefer to comment on the discussion raised by Alesandro (Alex). I agree with the basic point and it is good to discuss it. However, I do not think one can solve it by means of some kind of WEB 2.0 engineering.

David is one and we are 60. If everyone produce one bit then David must digest 60 bits. Everyone has to digest the other 60 bits. Moreover, sometimes we produce true homework with very long posts. Multiply this by 60: it is simply non human.

Now there is also the meeting point: another thing to read. And perhaps something is also going on in some diingo space or what-else space …

Before going on looking for some other web device or methodology, one should change the terms of the problem quantitatively, for instance by …

1) Hiring a staff to decrease the students/teacher ratio, say a ratio fo 20?

2) Limiting the course to a max students/teacher ratio, say 20, again?

3) Asking for a different kind of homework. For instance, very short texts, just some sentences, some drawings. Perhaps, it should have been our spontaneous behaviour, after having seen the growing number of classmates?

4) Stretching time course: say two weeks per assignment?

5) …

I’d like to continue using the blogs. It is simply wonderful because is a bit like knowing the author; the blog’s appearance and the posts unrelated to the course tell you a lot about the writer.

Of course, it is frustrating to write your thoughts without having a feedback. It’s human. I was delighted in seeing that my first post turned out to be interesting for someone and I became progressively unsure with the following ones. It seems you are throwing your thoughts in a void space or in crowded space where people are saying: “This guy is crazy!”

If we are stuck to a classroom model, more or less, we can’t escape the very trivial problem: to reduce the students/teacher ratio.

PS: In any case, even in this over-crowded situation, this course turned out to be of very high value for me. I will continue reading everything and doing all I will able to do, even throwing posts in space but, of course, after having worked and blogged with my students …

Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.

Albert Einstein

Copyright philosophy is deeply flawed at the very beginning.

Laws should protect our freedom to give and not our freedom to have.

Even more: we have the human right to place our creations into the Public Domain.

Society is dominated by economy, nowadays. Economy is necessary; however, ultimately, society should not be dominated by economic laws but by laws based on basic human rights.

Donation produces abundance, property produces scarcity (A Hacker Manifesto). Incidentally, this is exactly the core message of the Gospel, if one likes this perspective. At any rate, the concept is sound even without the need of a particular perspective.

Megs Planet says:

I think the problem is a culture that sees everything as enclosed property (something that CC and GFDL try to get away from)

Yes!

Copyright philosophy is deeply flawed at the very beginning.

It is not true that copyright protects creativity.

Copyright protects economic exploitation of creativity.

Those that want to exploit their creativity economically are free to do it but also those that want to donate their creativity are free to do it!

Which of these options must be the default? The second one, in my opinion.

One creates something because of passion for something … because of love for something … because of love for nature … because of the joy of sharing …

All this comes before economic exploitation.

Einstein believed that, in order to be able to create, one need to be free, free from economic needs, free from academic achievements.

If you link your creativity to your economic needs or to your academic achievements or to your success, your creativity may be flawed.

Nobody liked Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings before his death. Nowadays, his paintings have extremely high values.

Do you believe that if Van Gogh would have wanted to put is works on the market, he would have painted the same things? Are we really believing this?

No, he was driven by some inner force, not by economic success, even not by the basic need of physical surviving.

I feel as if the economic system had put me in a corner. I think the economic system has put us in a corner.

An animal put in corner is forced to change his own behaviour.

So, many are struggling and asking themselves: “I want to give my work to the Public Domain, but how?”.

It seems that the most free legally recognized option is the CC-BY licence but why are we obliged to pretend something, when giving our work away? Glad to see that others, Houshuang, Greg and, I believe, Alessandro, and perhaps others, are also asking why the BY clause is mandatory.

Therefore, I agree with Greg very much:

So the value of the public domain is not 100% realized in creative commons or GFDL licensing in even the most liberal renditions.

These matters are even more difficult to understand in the educational domain. Educational acts, educational performances, educational materials should belong inherently to the Public Domain. Why to impose licensing practices that diminish the Public Domain value?

The growing number of licenses tells us that the reality is too complex to be put into words, even more into legally meaningful words. We always fail when we pretend to describe all possible cases of complex domains.

I have been told that the Italian system of laws is fairly sophisticated, more than the systems of other western countries. Is it therefore true that in Italy we have a smaller quota of crooks with respect to other countries? Well … lasciamo perdere …

No, I believe we should work to recover the Public Domain as the default option. I believe that we should privilege people instead of content, definitely. Thanks to your tiny brain, David, for this sharp insight (Noncommercial isn’t the problem, ShareAlike is, ShareAlike, the public domain, and privileging).

When coming to everyday work, I find the idea of putting access restrictions – passwords as well as restrictive licenses – on my educational creations, quite an embarrassing one. I am a very small computer science professor. There are thousands and thousands of such beings, out there. For instance, I wrote for my students what one can put in a byte in my own way. That’s good, a teacher is a human in touch with other humans. However, there are thousands of descriptions of the same thing, of the same small thing. Why should we protect these thousands of tiny objects? If I discover a better description of the byte content I would like to use it to improve my description!

A world plenty of people protecting their tiny pieces of work. A nightmare were knowledge, instead of being a vital fluid free to flow everywhere, is reduced to a mass of tiny hidden similar pieces, all stupidly similar!

When coming to everyday work, let’s use the less worst option, the CC-BY license, as it is suggested by Open educational resources and practices.

I’m very grateful to this course. I was really upset learning that what I believed to have put into the Public Domain was still in my pockets! Now I’m a little bit more aware of what is going on in this crazy world!