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The official documentation for the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is here:

• Program
• Program (2.5 Mb)
• Final Proceedings (3.4 Mb)

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Friday, September 29, 2006
Concurrent sessions

Remixing Higher Education-The Open Content University
Jason Cole, Open University

Curent model: access through subsidy, scale with lecture, courses are products, focus on content, web as an add-on. And there’s a huge difficulty to scale this model, to make it grow. Simultaneous curricula are obsolete. Technology is not the issue: innovation is.

One key innovation: the consumer as creator. So, open your course design. If we look at courses enrolment, there’s an obvious “long tail” effect, with Psychology I being far more enroled than Quantum Mechanics. Thus, redesign Top 25 courses. I you can innovate in the head, you can translate it down the tail. Commoditize the big 25 (cheap and effective), personal attention down the tail, monetize research – podcast.

Search is so highlly personal. It is the antithesis of being told or taught, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Revolutions usually suck for ordinary people, Paul Saffo. For whom will true open education suck? Faculty, administrators, textbook editors.

Comments from the audience

How can society afford losing the role of the university as the holder of content and teaching? Well, I have an answer for this: the ultimate destiny of university should be the same one as the one of NGOs: disappear. But not disappear for the sake of it, but just because their goal (poverty elimination, universal knowledge) is accomplished. That surely won’t happen, but this does not mean that the role of the university cannot change to be fitting the actual state of things. If people can contribute more to the commons knowledge and teaching, then the university has to focus on other things, such as creating new one no one is exploring, gathering it, chosing among good and bad knowledge, etc.

A Research Agenda for Open Educational Resources: Summary and Highlights of an On-line Forum
Kim Tucker, CISR/Meraka Institute

OER Research Agenda at the UNESCO IIEP OER Wiki

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Friday, September 29, 2006
Concurrent sessions

Open Content in Education: The Instructor Benefits of MIT OpenCourseWare
Preston Parker, Utah State University

Five ways to be compensated:

• duplication
• distribution
• alteration
• derivation
• exhibition

Benefits of “Open Content”:

• Better quality
• better compensation for creators (credit to the right person)
• more efficient
• less expensive product (eliminate the intermediary)

How are people compensated:

• traditional methods
• suppelmentary goods
• suplementary services
• reception
• sponsoring
• adds revenues

Institutional benefits (of OCW):

• enhance faculty and student enrollment
• showcase student content
• offer alumni something more
• make connection with life long learners

What are faculty benefits:

• Recognition
• marketing
• leave and accessible academic legacy
• connections/networking/collaboration
• reach learners not reachable otherwise
• increase class enrollment
• easier content dissemination.

Open Business Models:

• Marketing model
• Advertising model
• Suplementary goods
• Individualisation goods

Tools for Creating Open Content: CMS4OCW and CMS4ROCKL. When Teachers Want to Share.
Pedro Pernias & Manuel Marco Such, Universidad Alicante

CMS4OCW: CMS for OCW. For institutions.
CMS4ROCKL: CMS for content for knowledge and learning. For individuals, creating p2p repositories.

Both tools facilitate the creations of organized structures tgo aggregate context for the individual items. Each course is a especific “portal” to access the catalogue. They are CMS (not LMS), handle Scorm, let users create more complex structures by using single items, creates a repositoryof Scorm packagge which can be harvested easily through MHP or OAI, sindicates through RSS.

The user can upload documents and files to “my contents”. Organize the documents & files there and preview the results.

LOR@: Learning Objects Repository Architecture. Not a repository, but an architecture.

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Friday, September 29, 2006
Keynote sessions

The Technology of Open Education
Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Learning matters: getting better at getting better.
Open matters: no lock-in but innovoation; collaboration, competition, coopetition; open is where exciting stuff happens.
Technology matters: from scarcity to abundance; clarity of mission is important (what are you goin to do with all this abundance).
Access to all resources. “If we share, we’re halfway there” (Mark Prensky).

The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid

Globe: The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) is an international consortium that strives to make shared online learning resources available to educators and students around the world. The consortium provides a distributed network of learning objects that meet quality standards. GLOBE aims to connect the world and unlock the ‘deep web’ of quality online educational resources through brokering relationships with content providers.

LionShare as a P2P way to also share archives.

Better to rely on open standards that any company’s “open” API.

ALOCoM stands for Another Learning Objetcs Content Model and allows searching and tagging files such as MS Office’s. Just install a plugin on your MS Office suite. Infovis presents a graphical representation of ALOLCoM use.

The paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz: from scarcity to abundance.

Goal: to generate automatic metadata instead of having to type them.
Attention metadata: track my “behavior” like Pandora does, but with learning objects searches/uses. Attention metadata characteristics: property (“their mine”), mobility (“I want to take them to the application I want”), economy (“If you want to use them to send me adds, pay for them”), transparency (“If you’re tracking me, I wanna know”).

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Thursday, September 28, 2006
Concurrent sessions

DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups?
Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia

diygonewild.notlong.com
Teacher as DJ (David Wiley)
Aggrssive

The Sakai-OCW-eduCommons Project
Joseph Hardin, University of Michigan

Bringing it all online: discussion tool, tests & quizzes tool, online class support, etc. But how to make it easy for the faculty?

OCW Tool: support for tagging in Sakai, IP status for Creative Commons, OCW repository.

Steps: choose materials, tags, check copyright, create course pages, OCW Review, Export.

Taking the Tools to the Content: Learner Support for OER
David Wiley, Shelley Henson, Justin Ball, COSL/Utah State University

MOCSL

Making Open Content Support Learning or MOCSL is a set of small tools designed specifically to advance the state of the art in supporting end users’ abilities to find educational resources, reuse educational resources, and close the feedback loop between end users and content authors.

OsmoseRSS: aggregator with social component, such as tags, resource sharing, etc. You can create groups to add content that is already generated: from del.icio.us, flickr, 43 things, etc. See also osmoserss.org

scrumdidilyumptio.us: establish relations between websites. See also scrumdidilyumptio.us

Send2Wiki: such a website content and send it to somewhere it can be manipulated

Pheromone: create trails through websites (different ones) so sort of online resource is created

Annorate: lets anotate and rate web pages

RelStore: compare tags and sites

OCW Finder: finds OCW OER.

The simplest the tools, the simplest the interface, the simplest its purpose… the most people will participate.

Here come my notes on the Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content that we are attending:

Thursday, September 28, 2006
Concurrent sessions

Mellon-funded Open Source Projects for Higher Education
Chris Mackie, Mellon Foundation

Flagship achievements: JSTOR, DAA (humanities Nobel Prize), MM Undergraduate Fellowships.
Openness projects: Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, PKI|OKI, D-Space|FEDORA, LionShare, VUE|SIMILE|Zotero|Didily, etc.
Possible upcoming initiatives: Student Service System, “User Delight” (usability), Coprehensive Text Analysis Framewok (“Scholar’s Workbench”), Humanities Middleware. All emphasize: services-oriented architectures (Java), collaborative, distributed development, for-profit/FP partnerships.

Core values and visions: service to traditional constituencies (arts, humanities, museums…), access (open source), sustainability, generality (compelling use cases), collaboration, synergy, elimination of redundancy via collaborative convergence.

China Open Resources for Education Upadate
Fun-Den Wang, CORE

CORE: China Open Resources for Education.

Translating/localizating MIT OCW from English to Chinese (expected 1,500 courses for end 2006), but also the inverse: Chinese courses into English.

Based on this OCW, there’s tutoring from the faculty to the students that follow the “lectures”.