I am hoping that Dave Cormier will write this up fully, as it was his idea for which he deserves full credit, but the eleganceand simplicity of it, coupled with the real need it hopes to serve, compelled me to post something right away in hopes of helping it get going.

As I understand it, after Catherine Ngugi’s powerful opening keynote at Open Education ‘09, Dave spent some time chatting with Catherine, in which he came to learn that there was a person tasked with locating useful open resources for faculty but that this was an overwhelming task. Dave, being Dave, immediately saw the potential for our existing networks to pitch in, sharing as we already do, and set about creating a twitter account, findanoerafrica to send out requests to the community for help finding appropriate resources. The idea was hatched on Wednesday and announced this Friday morning.

Only time will tell if it works and how effect it is. You can help, really easily. If you use twitter, then follow findanoerafrica and basically respond in the helpful way you already do. The difference being you’ll be helping someone who is in turn supporting hundreds of educators. The beauty - it isn’t asking you to do anything you’re not already doing, and the cost was essentially zero. Obviously, this is not going to solve all the worlds ills, but it’s one of those little steps to maybe make it better than it was. Dave - your energy and enthusiasm are both infectious and inspiring. Getting to hang with you this week in Vancouver has definitely been one of the highlights for me. - SWL

So the Open Ed conference has begun and I am frankly overwhelmed to see the 200 or so amazing folks who have come together in Vancouver around “Open Education.” But this movement is far larger than that, it’s a global movement, and we are doing our best as organizers to help folks who couldn’t make the journey participate in various ways. In addition to streaming every session live via the conference uStream feeds, many folks are following along on the extensive twitter coverage via the #opened09 tag.

And that’s not all - I am SO chuffed as an organizer to see this community of network learners creating their own ways of interacting, without any help or coordination.

If you’ve found yourself accessing any of these, we’d love if you’d consider adding yourself to the list of “virtual attendees” - both as a way for people here to connect with you, and also to help demonstrate to our sponsors how the conference has had some impact outside of the immediate physical attendees. And please, let s know if there’s anything we can do to help improve your experience, you are an important part of this community and conference too. - SWL

Have you had your say yet?

I was very pleased to hear that CNIE will be submitting a brief to the Federal Copyright consultation. It is great that you are staking out a position for distance/online education and recognition that ‘virtual classrooms’ should be afforeded fair dealing rights too. However, I would urge you not to compund the currently stiffled innovation in online education by arguing that content need to be behind password protected “learning management system” sites or the like in order to qualify for fair dealing rights. While this at first seems like a palatable compromise with the copyright barons, it will only lead to a further entrenching of a fundamentally broken technology, the LMS, whose replication of the physical classroom in the virtual world looses almost ALL of the benefits the network has to offer learners.

Instead, I would urge you to stake out a position that the position and intent of the user/usage is of much more importance in ascertaining fair dealing, and that course and content delivered ‘out in the open’ should also be able to exert their fair dealing rights. I believe this is a truly important distinction to make, not only for distance education but indeed for higher education institutions in general, as their future will increasingly hinge on being able to integrate and interoperate with the larger community of informal learners who make up the entire Internet, and enshrining in law the requirement that any fair dealing be exercised solely behind closed doors will only continue our march into the margins.

Hopefully you are already following the Open Ed 2009 conference news feed and this will be just so much cruft, but if not I thought it worthwhile to re-post here in Edtechpost the fact that, due to some very generous sponsors, we are able to offer 3 travel scholarships to Open Education in Vancouver, August 12-14, 2009.

I should also note that the deadlines for getting the secured hotel room rates are fast approaching, and a gentle reminder that we will have limited space for the (included in the reg fee) Barbeque-to-end-all-Barbeques on the Wednesday night, so if you want to come, getting your conference registration in as soon as possible will make that entirely more likely.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming… - SWL

Basically, the Collection part of the site (and the related Add-On Collector Add-On - ha!) allow people to create collections of add-ons, annotate each of the add-ons with commentary, share these with other users who can subscribe to these collections!

So, for instance, if you are interested in some of the key add-ons to help yourself become an Open Educational DJ (ahem) you may want to check out my “Open Educator as DJ” collection which I just published, and better yet, subscribe to it, so that as new tools get added they are pushed to you.

Clearly, the PLE is more than just one tool, more than just the browser, and definitely more than MY use of either of these. But for me, the browser, and the various ways I can pimp it out, are a big component of my workflow as both an educational DJ and network learner, but one which has always been really challenging to share with people. With Firefox Collections, that just got a lot easier. - SWL

So I definitely slowed down posting here, committed to only posting when I had something significant to say, but then I don’t seem to be even able to do that? Anyways, I haven’t passed away or anything, indeed I am just back from the fantastic gathering in Utah that was the TTIX conference. Put on by good friends Jared Stein and John Krutsch (amongst other talented folks) this annual FREE conference has much to offer both K-12 and post-secondary educators, and this year included keynotes from myself, Chris Lott and Brian Lamb.

Well, Brian urged us to “Go hard or go home” and I think each of us did in our own ways. Brian delivered another of his great talks on the “Urgency of Open Education,”  a ‘must see.’ And Chris…well Chris nearly brought me to tears with his talk on “The Idea of the Idea.” Far from being the dry talk the title might imply, this was a romp through the history of ideas which ended in a heartfelt plea for a return to deep humanistic teaching, not as a luxury but as an imperative. I strongly urge you to spend the time and effort this talk demands.

And me? Well cowed as I was by these stellar co-speakers, I did my best not to throw up and gesticulated wildly through “The Open Educator as DJ.” I am reasonably happy how it came off, and pleased that I will get at least a second chance at it this fall at the ADL Academic Fest in Madison, Wisconsin. I really did try to show, not just tell (you can see a demo of each of the steps in the workflow here) but ultimately I do think there was too much telling, so I plan to rework that.

I was especially excited to do this talk not only because some good friends had asked me to do a keynote (which always brings up your game) but because for me this talk represents the synthesis of a number of different strands of my work from the past years, bringing together stuff from “Mashups for Non-Programmers,” (2007) “Augmenting OER with Client-Side Tools: A Demonstration” (2007) “The Pros and Cons of Loosely Coupled Teaching,” (2007) “How I learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0,” (2007) “Weaving your own Personal Learning Network,” (2008) “Becoming a Network Learner - Towards a Practice of Freedom,” (2008) and finally “Pimp your Browser” (2009). I’m not citing all of these to show off, but instead because for me this last talk on “the Open Educator as DJ” represents the synthesis of thinking on how OER, PLEs and network learning/loosely-coupled-teaching are initimately related, a synthesis which I did not start with but which I have been groping towards in each new presentation. I keep telling you, I am a SLOW LEARNER!

There was a lot for people to take in; if you don’t want to spend the time going through the talk, you may at least find the resources useful. Ultimately, if there were only 3 things to take away from the talk, I would highlight:

1. clipmarks (and sni.ps) as a critical new method to add to your arsenal which lets you sample and feed individual chunks of the web in a way that still preserves linkability and attribution
2. As I tried to demonstrate with the example of the resources page, the myriad methods available to aggregate and syndicate content wherever you want it to appear
3. the very idea of a network enabled workflow inspired by a metaphor from an existing discipline - as I tried to emphasize in the conclusion, even if the metaphor of “DJ” doesn’t resonate for you, find the one that does, because whether you know it or not, you are already using one, and hopefully by becoming conscious of it, it can become one that helps you to swim in the ever-deepening sea of information that surrounds us.

I think there are lots of holes in this talk, and I am always learning, so please, let me know what you think, what parts don’t resonate for you, and how I can make it better? - SWL

I feel pretty slow on this one, but apparently it came out back in July 2007, so maybe I was on holidays. Anyways, for every single person who has ever asked me for a collaborative web-based timeline tool they could use with their class (I’ve been asked this dozens of times) I’d be hard pressed to see how XTimeline wouldn’t fit the bill.

For all the rest of you who knew about it years ago, apologies, I do try and keep the “me too’s” and overly obvious posts down to a minimum, but then I am a slow learner, so forgive me. - SWL

http://openedconference.org/call-for-papers

I know you have all been waiting with bated breath, well the wait is finally over - the Call for Papers for the 6th annual Open Education Conference (held for the past 5 years in Logan, Utah but this year moving to beautiful Vancouver BC, Canada) is now open.

I am pretty stoked about this, in no small part because I am helping to organize it with a few of my favourite people. I’m also excited because of some of the things we’re trying with the program; as you’ll notice in the CFP, we’ve introduced the notion of strands, the one I am most excited about being the StartUp strand. The Open Ed conference has never had any problem attracting leaders in the movement and encouraging a deep level of discourse around the topic, but I cannot imagine what it might have felt to be someone from a school not already immersed in OER to attend. Well I hope this strand (plus the number of great efforts currently underway to help people start their own Open initiatives) will attract those newcomers and catalyze another round of folks to start sharing openly.

So please, submit a proposal! Registration information is also coming quickly soon, I promise. Hope to see you on here in August. - SWL

Writing this post was as fun as...

This is me officially throwing in the towel at trying to write some profound synopsis of the event that was Northern Voice 2009. I give up. I tried. I really tried.

I tried to capture how, inadvertently, a presenter from a consulting firm that shall not be named clue’d me into how important it is for us trying to create change (whether it be through learning or social action) to not uncritically adopt social networks explicitly framed with commercial motives.

I sought, but failed, to capture an ever growing sense that not all boundaries are created equal; that there are groups bounded not by firewalls and passwords, but by relationships and trust,  and that, far from this being an exclusionary thing, because of conscious acts and the intent to invite with a welcoming heart, they grow, are inclusive.

I struggled, and lost, with my growing understanding (born in part firsthand through my own thumbfisted ‘facilitation’ of WordCampEd - sorry!) of the importance of messiness, not just in teaching in learning, but in resisting reductive rational ‘frameworks.’

And oh how I wanted to tell you how I’ve given up asking for the secret sauce to becoming a good teacher and instead just to keep trying myself, everyday (but still watching and learning from those who can every chance I get to be around them).

But I failed, and all you get is this poor excuse for a post. To everyone I had the pleasure of learning with at Northern Voice, THANKS. You are the reason I keep coming back. The relationships we form, the trust built, is what helps me take bigger chances when I’m sitting here writing on my own. Although…apparently not in this post - SWL

I was pretty conflicted whether to post this at all - you may have noted the frequency of posting on anything LMS-related is WAY down on edtechpost, ever since I got born-again, and the vision of learning here seems, well, problematic at least (which is why I removed the title “A Student Feedback Tool That Links CMS Use with Good Grades” from the original link).

But…this is interesting and does deserve some attention both for its steps towards transparency and some of the ways in which transparency is being used to engender positive faculty peer pressure. I can already hear all sorts of howls from every direction - about faculty rights and independence, about the shallowness of this as a ‘ratings’ scheme, of students gaming the system, of… Yeah, I get it.

But if you find yourself charged with supporting and promoting a campus system (and don’t actually feel like answering for yourself the soul destroying question of why you have to sell something if it is actually as valuable as it’s supposed to be) then maybe this will jog some ideas loose. While I will continue to suggest that simply being fully open is ultimately a better way to address many of these issues, until that ideal situation pertains, sometimes we gotta take our ‘openings’ where we can find them. “There is a crack in everything…” - SWL