http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/285717930/

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/Horizon+Report+2008+Presentation

The good folks at Camosun College’s Distributed Education unit were kind enough to invite me to speak on this year’s NMC Horizon Report as part of their Walls Optional Distributed Education Day.

It is a little different presenting on this report - I have been truly honoured to be a part of the Advisory Board for the last 2 years, and very much stand behind the work we do there. But it isn’t “my” report, so I definitely felt a duty to represent the organizations behind it as well as I could, and so tended to be just a little less free form that I have of late in my presentation style (though we’ll see - apparently there is video in which I did start to gesticulate wildly by the end, as is my wont, perhaps a bit inspired by the master of creative chaos who I followed on stage.).

Anyways, here’s a wiki page that has both the slides and all of the URLs I used to demonstrate the 6 technologies “on the horizon”. While I did re-use some slide templates and structure from the inimitable cogdog, finding examples to illustrate the various ‘Horizon’ technologies (as well as Creative commons images to illustrate them) was definitely a fun part of preparing this. Enjoy! - SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/290433553/

I’ve asked twitterites a few times but haven’t got much of a reply yet, so I’m hoping readers have a reference or two to throw my way. Here’s the question - I work on a project that helps share educational resources. We currently support two licenses, a Creative Commons license and a regional consortia license called the “BC Commons” which facilitates sharing amongst the public post-secondary institutions in BC. Obviously this latter is not a “fully open” license as it does limit who can see and reuse the content. We’ve always seen it, I think, as an interim step, a way to get people into the habit of sharing their content but in a ’safe’ way (and a way that the funders, the BC government and taxpayers, could be convinced of the immediate benefits).

Increasingly we are looking to try and increase the use of “fully open” licenses like Creative Commons, but in order to take this step we need to make the case to funders (as well, ultimately, to the content owners) as to why publishing under a fully open license is a better idea, for them, for the funders and ultimately the taxpayers.

So, I am looking for as many good references as I can find to help make the case. I wish it were enough to simply point people at David Wiley’s BCNet talk from 2007 [audio here | video here] (heck, it was given here in BC) because if you ask me, slam dunk!

Unfortunately, I need more, especially actual studies of the benefits or effects of sharing in a fully open way (and especially where a group moved from a more closed to more open model of sharing). Anything that can support or illustrate these kinds of arguments:

• making resources fully open increases the number of accesses (and reuse) of resources, both within and outside of the original constituency


• resources that are made fully open will have more improvements made to them, and thus end up as higher quality resources at no cost, then resources that aren’t


• making resources fully open can provide additional returns for the organizations that do so in the form of increased brand recognition, increased student enrollments, better prepared existing students, etc.


• making resources fully open leads to increased opportunities for partnership


• making resources fully open does not substantially impact revenues to the content owner or institution (and indeed may increase it)

Anything is helpful, and I assume there are others trying to make this case in their own jurisdictions. Do you know of any studies that we can cite to substantiate the above propositions? Or indeed other propositions we should be staking the case on? -SWL

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edtechpost/~3/298528993/

http://www.aupress.ca/Terry_Anderson/kanuka.pdf

A note that the Second Edition of The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (edited by Terry Anderson) was now available online came through my reader this morning, and not having had the time the first time it came round, I made time to go through a few chapters today.

The one I want to highly recommend to EVERY educational technologist (and educator, for that matter) is the chapter by Heather Kanuka titled “Understanding e-Learning Technologies-in-Practice Through Philosophies-in-Practice.”

Perhaps it is because I am a lapsed philosopher that this appeals to me, but I whole-heartedly agree with the notion put forth here that reflecting on one’s personal philosophies of education and technology is an important activity any of us involved in education and technology should undertake (along the lines of the ‘unexamined life not being worth living.’)

Kanuka lays out 3 general philosophies of technology (”uses determinism,” “technological determinism,” and “social determinism”) as well as 5 philosophies of education (”Liberal/Perennial,” “Progressive,” “Behaviourist,” “Humanist,”  and “Radical”) for us to consider.  It is entirely possible that none of these feel like a perfect fit for you, but they provide a good overview starting point to consider your own orientation(s).

Gotta run, but I’ll just end of a slightly facetious note that the conclusion of the paper (”Unless we can systematically identify what we value in education, we cannot justify the choices we make with e-learning technologies, or deliver the promises“) is in itself a philosophical position. While not one I necessarily disagree with, it would be easy to deconstruct the entire piece through that lens of the agency it presupposes. I too make that supposition, regularly, but contingently, always entering back into a dance with these other positions (or, in riposte to Aristotle, “the continually re-examined life is even more worth living”) - SWL