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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 - Cached
  • 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?
  • 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."
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
  • 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

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 - Cached
  • 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

The Promise and Peril of Ed-Tech Democratization - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...29413

education technology future opinion edupunk

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • the Indians I heard in London accepted the following premise: university education, at least in part, involves seasoned, well-educated people determining what less seasoned, less well-educated people should know, then proceeding to teach them. By contrast, at the Palo Alto gathering there was much more talk of “hacking college.” This worldview, though certainly not universal, reflects a certain disdain for hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. Instead, it embraces a radically individualistic approach to higher ed, one based on the idea that it’s always a great thing when students create their own education, piecing together courses and educational materials, free from the confines of convention.
  • Lots of students who want a college education, whether at the elite or mass-access end of the spectrum, either want to study a curriculum that has been proven, need support because they don’t have the tools to educate themselves, or both.
  • The edupunk aesthetic certainly has some appeal – why not blow up some traditional assumptions about the structure of education? And it is so varied that it wouldn’t be fair to say its proponents are all blind to questions of giving students the guidance they need to succeed. But its anarchistic edge risks leaving students to their own devices so much that oversight and quality control goes out the window
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  • There’s no reason we can’t use disruptive tools to teach an established body of knowledge, in a particular course sequence, to more people, more effectively.
Ed Webb

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

chronicle.com/...7913

open openaccess open-ed Utah recession edupunk

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Sep 09 - Cached
  • 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

Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...21261

free open education Georgetown awesome

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Kevin Donovan had an ambition to build an open-courseware Web site, this one amid the "not-so-free culture" of Georgetown University, as one blog put it. Mr. Donovan, a junior in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, wants to see first-class education available to the third world. He argues that open courses make sense, given Georgetown's Jesuit tradition of social responsibility. The dean of his school bought his pitch, which carries a valuable lesson for fellow student organizers: once you obtain that kind of high-level support, things get a lot easier. The open-courseware project became Mr. Donovan's summer job. Working with faculty and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Mr. Donovan helped put six courses online last year. He hopes to build on that start in the coming semester.
Ed Webb

Universal broadband should be about control, not just access. - By James Losey and Sasc... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

internet mobile mobilephones censorship US USA politics regulation

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The Internet is a democratizing technology not because users have access to services like Twitter and Facebook but because it supported the development of these tools in the first place. Ignoring this distinction has led to the United States' unfortunate decision to craft public policies that focus primarily on expanding Internet "access" with too little attention paid to the fact that not all access is created equal (PDF). By focusing on access, disregarding the mounting threats to the openness of the Internet, our politicians and regulators are ignoring a growing divide between users with control over digital technologies and those without.
  • protect the rights of users to create
  • the iPhone is part of a new class of devices that actively keep the end user from having control
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In effect, mobile carriers have created a second-class Internet connection. This spring, Verizon demanded that Google remove free tethering applications from the Android Market so that it can charge users a monthly fee to turn their smartphones into mobile hotspots. Combined with restrictive data caps—often a low two to five gigabytes per month (for comparison, the typical Blu-ray disc containing your favorite movies can hold 50 gigabytes of data)—mobile connectivity severely limits user options.
  • When compared with the freedoms still present on other types of broadband connections, mobile networks' demands offer fewer opportunities to think differently or to innovate. This is particularly problematic because it disenfranchises those (such as minorities, people in lower income brackets, and young adults) who are more likely to depend on smartphones to access the Web. In fact, Pew Internet and American Life Project found that smartphone ownership is highest with minorities, and nearly one in five young adults only access the Web on mobile networks. The increasing limitations on the Internet craftsman means these groups do not have a voice in how the Web evolves.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 16 Aug 11
       
      Note also that in the developing world the vast majority of web access is via mobile phones
  • Policies addressing the digital divide must embrace the Internet Craftsman and confront the deep and growing chasm between users of restrictive technologies and those free to innovate without gatekeepers. The Internet's potential to empower is strongest when users are free to turn their imaginations into reality, not when innovation is confined by increasingly restrictive policies of network operators. The future of democratic communications depends on the ability of network participants to have control over the technologies we use every day.
  • If everyone with a 3G unlimited plan started tethering and using their phones for home internet (instead of the relatively limited bandwidth things you tend to do on a cell phone), pretty soon nobody would have speeds faster than dial-up. This is a difficult problem with no easy solution. I don't like the fact that mobile data costs so much, and I do think that mobile companies could certainly be more consumer friendly, but it's a myth to think that we can all have cheap, fast, unlimited mobile internet access - you can probably have any two of those, but not all three.  
  • I really think you're kind of off base on the "mobile is second-class access and that's inherently unfair". Mobile is limited because cellular bandwidth currently is limited and you therefore have to pay more for it. To extend your craftsman analogy, anyone can buy wood and a hammer, but access to a five-axis lathe is limited by complexity and associated price. I don't especially want to have trouble checking my email at lunch because some guy is ripping the collected works of Orson Welles through bittorrent on the same cell. Different tools for different uses. I seriously doubt anyone with a strong interest in programming really can't get access to cheap or free broadband these days...say, at every library I've been to in the last 10 years? Open access is a necessity, but so is working within the limitation of the existing tech.
  • I worry that as consumers become accustomed to (more or less justified) mobile caps and limits, landline providers will get away with implementing caps that are significantly less justifiable, and done more from a profit motive than from a desire or need to provide improved service.  
  • There would be no problem if carriers wanted to restrict the volume of traffic, but that's not the issue. Instead they want to restrict how you use that volume. They're happy to let you use gigabytes of bandwidth watching YouTube on your phone, but start threatening you or force you to buy an outrageously expensive tethering plan if you want to do some casual browsing on your laptop/netbook while it's connected through your phone.
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 - Cached
  • 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

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

openedconference.org/...1037

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • 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.
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  • 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.
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