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Ed Webb

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...48777

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Oct 09 - Snapshot
  • A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 12 Oct 09
       
      Buggeration - the credentialist barrier.
  • the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?
  • David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
  • ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
  • "Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"
  • the unbundling of higher education.
  • MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
  • "Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
  • Peer 2 Peer University
  • University of the People
  • Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.
  • much open courseware is "lousy,"
  • "There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"
  • "It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."
  • The model boils down to six words: Do you like this? Enroll now!
  • a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.
  • Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."
  • the free courses taught him one thing, something important when you've been out of school so long: He can do it. He can follow a Yale class. He has nothing to fear.
Ed Webb

The Future of WPMu at bavatuesdays - 0 views

bavatuesdays.com/the-future-of-wpmu

blogs blogging digitalidentity domains hosting jimgroom edupunk

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Oct 09 - Snapshot
  • I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.
  • what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship.
  • we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.
Ed Webb

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education | Fast Company - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...who-needs-harvard.html

education edupunk web2.0 college

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Sep 09 - Snapshot
  • Ed Webb
    Ed Webb on 07 Sep 09
     
    I'm pretty sure this is not about Edupunk. It's about entrepreneurship in the relatively limited sense of making money. Heh.
Ed Webb

Edupunks Unite? « eLearning Blog // Don't Waste Your Time … - 0 views

www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/...edupunks-unite

edupunk opinion UK LMS

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Sep 09 - Snapshot
  • the universal trend is that the managed and forced structure of the VLE or LMS is being recognised by the facilitators as too restrictive, the educators are too slow to realise it, and the accountants are too deaf to listen to us before they invest thousands of pounds (if not millions) and hundreds of hours in developing in favour of one solution that is an immovable lump hanging around the Institution's neck.
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Utah State U.'s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes - The Chron... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...7913

open openaccess open-ed Utah recession edupunk

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Sep 09 - Snapshot
  • The Utah State University OpenCourseWare project has shut down because it ran out of money, according to its former director, making it perhaps the biggest venture to close in the burgeoning movement to freely publish course materials online.

    The project published a mix of digital content -- lecture notes, syllabi, audio and video recordings -- from more than 80 courses before its demise. Its aspiration had been to open up access to materials from every Utah State University course, said Marion R. Jensen, the former director.

    Instead, Mr. Jensen was laid off on June 30. And, while the Utah OpenCourseWare Web site remains up for now, it no longer has any dedicated staff and is no longer adding new courses.
     
  • “the first one that, I think, has closed for sustainability reasons,” said Steve Carson, president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.
  • having a diversified set of support for your project
Ed Webb

Official Google Blog: More books in more places: public domain EPUB downloads on Google Boo... - 0 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...more-places-public-domain.html

epub google ebooks publicdomain

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Snapshot
  • Starting today, you'll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we've digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven't even been built or imagined yet.
Ed Webb

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Edupunks and Credit Hours: Fumbling Towards a Theo... - 0 views

suburbdad.blogspot.com/...and-credit-hours-fumbling.html

edupunk opinion future education

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09 - Snapshot
  • Awarding some sort of recognition for task completion or demonstrated competence independent of the time it took to achieve that offers one potential way to break the upward spiral. If you manage to blast through calculus in eight weeks instead of fifteen, more power to you.

    That said, though, I could easily envision the abandonment of the credit hour as relatively beneficial to those already on top -- in four years at my SLAC, I never heard the phrase 'credit hour' -- and devastating to the rest.
  • To the extent that we move from "here's what you need to do" to "what do you want?," we both enable high achievers to cut loose -- a clear good -- and allow the less savvy to wander aimlessly, which is a real problem.
  • The "edupunk," as near as I can tell, is the nifty-sounding update of the autodidact. And as with the autodidact, the edupunk is susceptible to some predictable shortfalls: uncorrected blind spots, lack of broader perspective, too-early path dependence.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The mode of production of education has to change, and now, can. We'll need to come to grips with that in some sort of serious way, or others will, edupunks or not.
Ed Webb

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation - O... - 0 views

openedconference.org/...1037

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Aug 09 - Snapshot
  • These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 19 Aug 09
       
      Beautiful!
  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.
  • those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.
  • That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without.
  • social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed.
  • at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?

  • The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy.



    How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full:


    “It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.”


    (http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194)




    What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?

  • imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
Ed Webb

Here we are…there we are going « Connectivism - 0 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=151

siemens education future OER openness connectivism connectiveknowledge

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Aug 09 - Snapshot

  • Learning consists of weaving together coherent (personal) narratives of fragmented information. The narrative can be now created through social sensemaking systems (such as blogs and social networks), instead of centrally organized courses. Courses can be global, with many educators and participants (i.e. CCK08).


    Courses, unlike universities, are not directly integrated into the power system of a society. Can decentralized networks of autonomous agents serve the same function as organized institutions?


    But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?

  • The virtues that a society finds desirable are systematized in its institutions. However futile this activity, it helps society, and media, to hold people accountable, to devise strategies, and create laws so people feel safe. Similarly, results that are desirable (financial, educationally, etc) are systematized to ensure the ability to manage and duplicate results. I shared some thoughts on this systematization last year as a reason for the currently limited impact of personal learning environments (PLEs). Quite simply, even revolutionaries conserve.

  • Teaching is what is most at risk. Can a social network - loosely connected, driven by humanistic ideals - serve a similar role to what university classrooms serve today? I hope so, but I don’t think so. At least not with our current mindsets and skillsets. We associate with those who are similar. We do not pursue diversity. In fact, we shy away from it. We surround ourselves with people and ideas that resonate with our own, not with those that cause us stress or internal conflict.


    Secondly, until all of society becomes fully networked (not technologically networked, but networked on the principles of flows, connections, feedback), a networked entity always risks being subverted by hierarchy. Today, rightly or wrongly, hierarchy holds power in society.

Ed Webb

C. Wright Mills on blogging | Savage Minds - 0 views

savageminds.org/...c-wright-mills-on-blogging

mills blogging blogs craft scholarship practice praxis philosophy education

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Aug 09 - Snapshot
  • On Intellectual Craftmanship. I was amazed how clearly the reasons why scholars blog were laid out in the opening paragraphs. In what follows I have changed none of Mills’s original language except for replaced ‘journal’ and ‘file’ with ‘website’ and ‘blog’. Clearly Mills didn’t envision the files he advocates as public documents, but other than that the parallels are uncanny
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