I don’t usually just re-post stuff like this, but this is important and I’m hoping to add to whatever backlash we can create. This is obscene - that Thompson-Reuters is suing over their proprietary “endnote format.” If you somehow needed a new reason to stop forcing your students to buy textbooks from Thompson-Reuters… And hopefully this will see ed tech departments, libraries and grad schools across the continent remove links and endorsements to Thompson’s Endnote product. Locking in your customers and protecting your business through proprietary data formats is just not acceptable. - SWL
I am fortunate once again to be participating on the Advisory Board that is helping with the 2009 NMC Horizon Report. I say “fortunate,” because each year, I feel like I get far more than I give - the Advisory Board truly are a fount of all the latest and greatest developments being used (and influencing) education.
And while I hope you do find the report useful when it comes out in late January 2009, you too can derive much the same benefit as I simply because the process to advise on the Report takes place ‘out in the open’ on this wiki. Indeed, I honestly find the raw materials gathered in the Research Questions (as well as the ongoing hz09 tag in delicious) to be ultimately the most valueable part of the process; inevitably, in order to create a ‘unified’ picture that can be summed up in a printed report certain details are lost, smushed together, improved upon, etc. But all of the raw materials are there for anyone who cares to dig. For instance, this morning I learned about
If you read ed tech blogs, especially the ones I read, then conversations about “open content” and “open education” feel like they have been going on forever. Indeed, at the Open Education conference this year, we celebrated 10 years of Open Education, so it’s been at least that long.
But my experience travelling around my own province for the last few years is that OER is still not a widely publicized phenomenom, and that faculty and ed tech support staff are still living with “scarcity mentalities” when it comes to the availability of free and open educational resources.
So as one small step to address this, we built this new site, Free Learning. There are many other good OER portals out there. If faculty and students were already using these, then we wouldn’t have a problem. But, in my experience, they are not, and as someone who works for the Province of BC, I have a hard time justifying marketing budgets for sites like those. So we built this one, also to give more play to locally developed resources that are Fully Open.
But in building this, I did not want to create a monster we would then have to maintain forever more. I wanted something that was simple to use and provided straightforward value to end users, but was also simple (and free) for us to maintain. Thus we built the site in Wordpress. Using the Exec-PHP plugin allowed us to include some additional PHP web service calls to the SOLR repository to display the Creative Commons resources there in a tagcloud, something that system does not do natively.
I am especially proud of the OER and Open Textbook search pages. These provide a tagcloud of sites stored in Delicious, and then allow users to perform a constrained Google search over just these sites. You are guaranteed that the sites you search are explicitly “open educational resources” from high quality, well known producers. Adding new sites to the list of sites, to the tag cloud and to the Coop engine is as easy as tagging them in Delicious. Since I already do this… it means no extra work. The site ticks along simply because I am online and find new OER sites all the time.
Total time on the project (including wonderful work by my colleagues Victor Chen and Eric Deis) was maybe a week. The bigger job know is getting it known and used around the province. I demo’d it to folks from around BC at the “Learning Content Strategies” meeting we held last Friday. Hopefully that is the start. And we also mentioned that this site could itself be a service for them - using WPmU, we can easily spawn another version of this site that responds to their own domain name, with their own branding, yet still uses the same background engine (meaning their effort is almost none, if that’s what they want). The cost is close to zero, but for our trouble they get a custom branded OER portal they can market to their own faculty. See - I DON’T CARE if you use THIS site or SOME OTHER SITE. I just care that people ACCESS OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES. And if re-branding this makes it easier for them to sell this to the people they support, great. I’ll happily provide you a version, or give you any of the code. That is what building it on top of open source technologies (and freely available services) allows us to do.
Please have at ‘er, let me know if it is useful, or any criticisms or complaints you might have. After all, we aim to please. - SWL
Ever wonder why Google can offer so many different new applications? Well aside from having superb engineers working for them, great ideas, and lots of money, there is also one other dirty secret. They don’t offer any support!
Seriously, have you ever tried access support for ANY of Google’s services? I have tried, repeatedly, on a number of different products (Sites, Toolbar, Custom Search Engine) only to be thrown into a neverending maze of Google groups and the shittiest documentation this side of Microsoft (which is saying something). I consider my information literacy skills to be pretty high, but I am just left baffled by Google’s attempts at support.
Don’t get me wrong - I love most things Google and will continue to use many of their offerings. They “get” the web at a deep level and continue to innovate in exciting ways. But a support company they are not. Dealing with the morass of discussion forums and shoddy documentation would almost have you believe it is intentional… - SWL
Most of you will know one of my long term projects has been to help share online learning resources across BC and beyond. One of the main stumbling blocks to effective sharing has been the diverse (divisive?) environments in which the material are produced/housed/assembled (at last count there are at least 5 major flavours of LMS in our 26 institutions, as well as sundry other ones and non-LMS approaches as well).
I’ve always held that a top-down “standards” approach isn’t the answer; not only is my project not big enough to compell that kind of change, I am thoroughly sceptical of any of the current standards-based approaches to actually work across all of these LMS. Plus for any “solution” to be adopted, it needs to reflect local realities and priorities at institutions, and be seen to solve local problems before it (or at least, as it) solves the ones of sharing outside the institution.
Thanks to a suggestion from Michelle Lamberson, we decided that framing the day around the conceit of “Learning Content Strategies” was the perfect way to bring all of this together (seems obvious now, but we struggled for a while for the right frame.)
After a very brief intro from me, we kicked off the day with an hour long discussion of common problems and challenges around learning content. I facilitated this, getting the discussion going with a set of questions that people answered using iClickers. (As an aside, while I recognize lots of potential problems with clickers, I was frankly blown away by how well the iClicker technology itself worked. Truly simple to use and functioned flawlessly.) It felt to me like a good start to highlighting some of the common problems people are facing and laid the groundwork for the rest of the day.
The next step was to showcase work of a few institutions around the province who, in my experience, have developed different approaches to developing content indepedant of their LMS environments. Katy Chan from UVic, Enid McCauley from Thompson Rivers and Rob Peregoodoff from Vancouver Island University all graciously shared with us some insight into their content development processes and the factors that shaped their choices. The important thing that came out of this for me is that none of these approaches is the “right” one, just the “right” one for their context - they ranged from standalone HTML development, to industrial XML production, to Macromedia Contribute, and each had its strengths but also possibly its complications. It’s a tradeoff, you see, like any choice. But they certainly gave their peers in the audience lots to think about.
The afternoon was given over to a completely different set of approaches to the problem. Like I said, while the vast majority of our institutions use LMS as their primary online learning platform, that is not the future, or at least, not the future I hope for, so we wanted to expose people to some approaches already happening in the province that are outside the LMS, ones that used loosely-coupled approaches or “openness” as an enabler.
Finally, since all the presentations to date had been from a somewhat “institutional” perspective, I thought it important to get an instructor up there to show what a single person can do with the current technologies, and who better to do so than Richard Smith from SFU. Worried though he claimed to be about following @brlamb and co. on stage, he needn’t have - his session was a blast, showing off many web 2.0 tools that he uses with his students. I think some of the biggest value from that session was challenging the notions of the handhel instructor, of the assumption that media must have high production values to be useful, and that this tech is just for “distance” learners. Richard basically made the case that he is able to offer more than 100% seats in his class by always having remote and archived materials for the students. I’m pretty sure this turned more than a few heads.
In all honesty, this meeting went as well, even better, than I had hoped. My goal was not to propose a single solution (as I do not believe there is just one solution) but to bring the problems to light, to get people to acknowledge they exist, and to give them a chance to see some different ways to deal with them, and talk amongst themselves. My experience with this group and with the ed tech professionals in BC in general is, give them a chance to talk and share and don’t be surprised at the number of collaborations and shared solutions that emerge. I have great hope that this is just the start of the conversation and of renewed efforts. - SWL
Yesterday was kind of a sad day for me. My friend and colleague Amanda Harby is retiring from BCcampus. Amanda is the person who first hired me when I arrived in BC, jobless but with hope in my heart and a song on my lips. Amanda (and another colleague, Randy Bruce) are two of the big reasons I took the job at C2T2 - the chance to work with people who had helped grow this amazing grassroots network of ed tech professionals across the province, and frankly, beyond. It sure wasn’t the pay
Those of you in BC are likely well aware of all of Amanda’s contributions in our province. For those who are not, I did a little internet archaeology to try and document some of her many contributions (luckily, Amanda herself is working to collect some of this together; our biggest loss, collectively, will be not just her as a person but her as a witness to and participant in so many projects and developments over the years). Over the years Amanda was involved with:
This barely scratches the surface, but you get a sense of a lot of the different things Amanda got involved with. Always with grace, humour and helpfulness.
Amanda, I am going to miss you, a lot. I know I owe you a lot personally, as do many around the province. I wish you the best as you start this new chapter. I wish you lots of adventures, lots of exploring, lots of great kayak trips, lots of song, but maybe not so many renovations
And, I’ll leave you with this lovely recording of Amanda that was made at last spring’s ETUG workshop in a session on Digital Storytelling.
Yesterday was kind of a sad day for me. My friend and colleague Amanda Harby is retiring from BCcampus. Amanda is the person who first hired me when I arrived in BC, jobless but with hope in my heart and a song on my lips. Amanda (and another colleague, Randy Bruce) are two of the big reasons I took the job at C2T2 - the chance to work with people who had helped grow this amazing grassroots network of ed tech professionals across the province, and frankly, beyond. It sure wasn’t the pay 
