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The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) announced a new report called, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age,” now available at MIT Press. The report is in response to our changing times, and addresses what traditional educational institutions must know to keep up. From the announcement,
“Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg in an abridged version of their book-in-progress, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, argue that traditional institutions must adapt or risk a growing mismatch between how they teach and how this new generation learns. Forms and models of learning have evolved quickly and in fundamentally new directions. Yet how we teach, where we teach, who teaches, and who administers and serves have changed only around the edges. This report was made possible by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in connection with its grant making initiative on Digital Media and Learning.”
A central finding was that “Universities must recognize this new way of learning and adapt or risk becoming obsolete. The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.”
Not coincidentally, one of the ten principles for redesigning learning institutions was open source education: “Traditional learning environments convey knowledge via overwhelmingly copyright-protected publications. Networked learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and products.”
The report is available in PDF via CC BY-NC-ND.
No Comments »CAPL, the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon
CAPL, the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon originally founded at Washington and Jefferson College in 2003, re-launches today. From the announcement email:
“CAPL is a free, online, non-commercial visual glossary comprised of authentic photos for language and cultural instruction and research. Created at Washington & Jefferson College, CAPL seeks to provide teachers and learners with high-quality authentic images for their classrooms and teaching materials. Additionally, it provides researchers in applied linguistics, visual cognition, and automated image recognition with a database of high-quality culturally authentic images they can use in their research. At the core of CAPL is the generous creative commons license.”
CAPL is based on the premise that “visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture.” It asks the question, “Is a house really a Haus, is pain really хлеб, and when we see red cabbage, is it really red?” To find out, go check out CAPL for yourself!
All CAPL images are licensed CC BY-NC.
No Comments »Launching Inside OER, the Comic
For those of you who’ve been following, ccLearn started interviewing innovative people and projects in the open education space last April, when we kicked things off with a highly informative interview of Leigh Blackall at Otago Polytechnic (the university whose default licensing policy is CC BY. Inside OER is the current culmination of our efforts, the full suite of interviews available for redistribution and remix at the ccLearn site.
Now we’ve tried something new. For our latest Inside OER, IssueLab’s Lisa Brooks on Opening Up Research, we decided to make our own adaptation, lifting the complete text of the interview and remixing it with images, screen shots, and speech bubbles. Drawing extensively from resources in the public domain, CC licensed photos on Flickr, and the help of a handy application known as Comic Life, we give you our very first issue of Inside OER, the Comic.
Hopefully, this will not only grab but sustain short attention spans. IssueLab, in particular, is doing great things for the open education community and Lisa is especially apt at articulating exactly what that is and what they are aiming for.
The comic is licensed CC BY, of course, so share and derive away! You can also remix the text version at CC Talks With.
2 Comments »CC Talks With: IssueLab’s Lisa Brooks on Opening Up Research
Logo by Gabi Fitz | CC BY-NC-SA
ccLearn recently spoke with Lisa Brooks from IssueLab. Instead of crossing telephone lines (who does that anymore anyway?), I caught up with her via that archaic method of correspondence known as electronic mail…*
*Similarly archaic, but not outdated in coolness factor, are comics. The first comic issue of Inside OER is this same interview in comic form. Instead of the same-old and streamlined text with interspersed pictures, we decided to experiment. Let us know what you think! For those of you on hand-held devices (or a preference for just text), read on here. Read More…
3 Comments »BYU Launches OCW Pilot
It appears that David Wiley’s move to Brigham Young University has already resulted in progress towards opening the university’s content. Long-time pioneer and academic of open education, Wiley reports that BYU’s Independent Study has launched its Open CourseWare (OCW) pilot with six Creative Commons licensed courses under CC BY NC-SA.
“The pilot includes three university-level courses and three high school-level courses (BYU IS offers 250 university-level courses online for credit and another 250 high school-level courses online for credit). The courses in BYU IS OCW are content-complete – that is, they are the full courses as delivered online without the need of additional textbooks or other materials (only graded assessments have been removed).”
The most interesting thing about this pilot is that it “is part of a dissertation study to measure the impact of OCW courses on paying enrollments.” So far, “the results are very positive – 85 of the 3500 people who visited the OCW site last month registered for for-credit courses… if this pattern remains stable, then BYU IS OCW will be financially self-sustainable with the ability to add and update a number of new courses to the collection each year, indefinitely, should they so choose.” Echoing Wiley, that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to seeing these results develop, in addition to other inquiries into the sustainability of general OER initiatives in the future…
No Comments »Incentive Bill for 21st Century Skills
Last month, a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate recognized the fact that students learning today need to be taught the necessary skills to succeed in this century—an age of new media, the Internet, and ever evolving technologies. The bill, introduced by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, would “create a new incentive fund that will encourage States to adopt the 21st Century Skills Framework.” The fund would provide federal matches to those states that integrate the teaching of 21st century skills such as “creativity, innovation, critical thinking and financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy” into core curricula, according to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
eSchool News reports what Shelley Pasnik, “director of the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology,” has to say:
“The legislation goes beyond technology. It’s about implementing a framework for 21st-century learning,” she said. “It’s more promising this way. If it were just about technology purchases, it would be a missed opportunity.”
We couldn’t agree more. Giving a student a computer won’t teach him or her how to use one, but integrating activities that require the use of one will. More broadly, students will learn the relevant skills to succeed in the current day and future when core curriculum is revamped to include current day and future projects. Revamped curriculum and associated learning materials will also only achieve maximum impact if the resources are open for use and iteration. Opening up the resources makes the federal investment worthwhile, and is helpful for states that are slow in jumping on the bandwagon to catch up. It also gives extra incentive for high quality materials, as competition turns to collaboration between states.
You can read the full text of the proposed bill here.
No Comments »PALM Africa Releases “Genocide by Denial” Under CC License
PALM Africa, an African CC-based publishing project, just released their first open-access book from AIDS specialist Peter Mugyenyi titled, Genocide by Denial: How profiteering from HIV/AIDS killed millions. The book is being released under a CC BY-NC-ND license making it free to download and share. PALM is using the release to test the impact open access initiatives have on book sales but, as noted by Eve Gray, there is another reason this license choice is so important (emphasis added):
The timing is impeccable, as the release of the open access version of the book coincides exactly with a breakthrough at the World Health Organisation, which has finally reached agreement on a global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property [...] Among the recommendations in the WHO plan of action is government intervention to ensure voluntary sharing or research, open access publication repositories and open databases and compound libraries of medical research results. Thus Fountain’s engagement with open access publishing on a public health topic is right in line with – and ahead of – developing global policy.
PALM and Mugyenyi’s license choice thus becomes a practice in the very lessons they are attempting to teach. Beyond this, Gray argues that “Mugyenyi’s book needs to be read by the South African bureaucrats who are trying to enforce widespread and rigid commercialization of public research”, a task that while difficult, is made easier due to the free sharing encouraged by their license choice.
1 Comment »EFF Teaches Copyright, without an agenda
When it comes to copyright, our youth are too often bombarded with extremes. The entertainment industry giants propagate a skewed perspective by launching anti-copying educational programs, leaving out much of the balanced information necessary to cultivating user’s awareness about her real rights to a resource. This results in students thinking that they can react in only one of two ways: by breaking the law in the face of overbearing restrictions, or by doing absolutely nothing at all with copyrighted works, effectively stifling the learning that comes of creatively engaging with them.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recognized this problem and went to work on a copyright curriculum that would not only be fair and balanced in perspective, but comprehensive in its scope by encouraging discussion and self-education. From the press release,
“Kids are bombarded with messages that using new technology is illegal… Instead of approaching the issues from a position of fear, Teaching Copyright encourages inquiry and greater understanding. This is a balanced curriculum, asking students to think about their role in the online world and to make informed choices about their behavior.”
ccLearn has taken a look at Teaching Copyright and we commend it. The curriculum is created and vetted by lawyers and promotes a balanced teaching perspective, clearing up much of the misinformation that is current industry propaganda. Like EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry says, “Today’s tech-savvy teens will grow into the artists and innovators of tomorrow.” We need to help them “understand their digital rights and responsibilities in order to create, critique, and comment on their culture. This curriculum fills an educational void, introducing critical questions of digital citizenship into the classroom without misinformation that scares kids from expressing themselves in the modern world.”
The entire curriculum and accompanying resources on the Teaching Copyright website are licensed CC BY, which appropriately encourages students, teachers, and anyone else to adapt it to various educational needs and contexts.
2 Comments »Teaching About Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
Last November, the Center for Social Media at AU released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which followed on the heels of a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. These guides were aimed at clearing up many of the urban myths surrounding copyright, especially when it came to classroom use of copyrighted materials.
Now, the Media Education Lab at Temple University has produced excellent resources based on the original guide to help teachers teach about copyright and fair use in their classrooms. Resources include lesson plans, Powerpoint slides, videos, case studies, podcasts, and FAQs. The lesson plans iterate on topics from the code such as “Understanding Copyright”, “The Cost of Copyright Confusion”, and “Defining and Applying Fair Use”.
What tickles me: that in order to find out just what you can do with these resources, you get to view and use them first—Learning fair use via fair using! To use these resources in your classroom or study group (or for simply personal edification), check them all out here.
1 Comment »Open Education and Open Science in Poland
Two very important conferences were held in Warsaw earlier this month (and late last month): “Open Educational Resources in Poland” (23 April) and “Open Science in Poland” (5 May). Alek Tarkowski, Public Lead of Creative Commons Poland, elaborates on the open education workshops held at each conference, one of which was led by ccLearn’s Ahrash Bissell:
“Two practical workshops on open education were organized by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED) in coincidence with two conferences taking place in Warsaw in April and May 2009: the conference on open education on 23rd of April 2009 and the conference on open science on 6th of May 2009. The first workshop, conducted by Susan d’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University, provided an overview of practical issues tied to open education, such as community building, IT tools and development strategies. The second workshop, led by Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn, focused on open licensing issues.
The two workshops were attended by a dozen representatives of NGOs active in the field of education and culture, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education. Most important, they provided an opportunity for people working with open educational projects or considering starting such a project to meet and network.
As a result of the project, the Coalition for Open Education hopes to increase its number of member institutions, as well as enable the growth of open educational projects in Poland.”
For information on the conferences themselves, check out Alek’s detailed reports for both.
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