Open Educational Resources

There is an expanding field of digital materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse. Social media is being used to spread awareness and use of OER. Such resources include courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals. There are growing online communities developing and sharing these resources. Here are some example sites:

OER Commons
Issuelab's OER Research
The California State University's Affordable Learning Solutions
MIT's OpenCourseWare

Campus Technology article on Student-Driven Content

How might this impact the liberal arts campus? The first thing that comes to mind is students searching for low-cost alternatives to their textbooks. I doubt they'll find free (legal) versions of their textbooks, but they may find many other resources for research or plain old study helps. Faculty will probably have to lead by example in selecting or suggesting OER resources for their students. Instructors may also find materials they can use to help build a course, especially online content. There are many opportunities here for collaboration and knowledge building.

This development of OER reminds me of a conversation in a recent Teaching Circle that illuminated the distinction between a culture of cheating and a culture of sharing. Cheating represents the negative aspects of  our society: piracy, cheat codes, doping, the present-day expansion of the fiercely independent "me-first" strain in American culture. Sharing represents the positive aspects of this shift fueled by social media: open source, collaborative, Creative Commons, remixing, sampling, Groupon, the present-day expansion of the "We the people" stick-together strain in American culture. Now that I actually articulate that spectrum, it sounds almost like the Native American story of the two wolves: which one grows stronger depends entirely on which one you feed. Here at OWU we crack down on cheating. We also practice and promote sharing. OER is one way to expand that positive trend.

(For example, the OER image above was voluntarily released by the copyright holder into the public domain.)

Augmented reality is spreading

I recently learned of a new augmented reality app that instantly shows librarians books that are misfiled on shelves:

This got me thinking about augmented reality (AR,) an artificial environment created through the combination of real-world and computer generated data, as I'm seeing more and more of it. One of my first posts to this blog was of an app that instantly translates printed text. And then there's my nephew, who recently got a Nintendo 3DS and was showing us Face Raiders:

AR is still a new field, and shows lots of exciting potential. We are only beginning to imagine the applications of this technology. I can easily see it being used in education across the disciplines.

Got any other examples?

Wikinomics, Grouponomics, Social Media is changing the world

I was wowed this morning when I learned that Groupon is the fastest growing company ever. (I was also surprised to find that the second fastest growing company was Priceline.com.) As the Forbes article mentions, "Groupon" has taken a place in the lexicon of online shopping and is moving into our cultural consciousness. It was even mentioned in a comic in the latest New Yorker Magazine.

This is just the latest example of how social media is changing our economics and thereby our society. The terms for these new ways of doing business, such as "grouponomics" or "wikinomics" are as innovative as the methods themselves, and capture the spirit of the enterprise.

It's exciting to watch the change all around and to take up our tablet iDevices and play, knowing that we're a part of this transformation as well. Who knows, the next great idea for utilizing the read/write Web might come from a small liberal arts college student in central Ohio, encouraged by forward-thinking faculty...

Honoring the 'Social' in Social Media

Today, being the first of April is observed as 'April Fool's Day' in the United States and elsewhere. After only a few keystrokes I've learned that the holiday was first mentioned by Chaucer in 1392. That's a long history of pranks!

In the Internet Age we continue this tradition utilizing the social media of our time. For example, Google has 'launched' Gmail Motion, even inserting a link to it in the Gmail (and BishopMail) gear menu. YouTube features the 'Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911' and lets you watch any video in 1911 style. I watched the beginning of a video on the current social media revolution--that I had shared in a workshop yesterday--in this redux rendition. Talk about anachronistic cognitive dissonance! I'm sure other sites are having similar fun today.

And we love to share such fun via social media. The top 5 viral pictures of 1911 video has already been viewed nearly 400,000 times and it's not even 4:00 EST. That's the power of social networks: connecting people, spreading the word or the meme. One consultant described it as word of mouth on steroids.

When I had a personal blog several years ago, I would change the theme and title and publish bogus posts on this day. Those posts were some of my most popular. This EdTech at OWU blog is relatively new and not well known, but I look forward to it becoming more conversational and less monological. In that spirit, the spirit of social media, I invite your comments. What are your favorite April Fools pranks of the Internet Age? What are your favorite stories of the human impact of Web 2.0? (Stories of Twitter Revolutions in Northern Africa most welcome!)

Responding to the changes of the Information Age

A recent New Yorker Magazine article entitled "The Information: How the Internet gets inside us" by Adam Gopnik reviews responses to the increasing influence of the internet and social media on society:

A series of books explaining why books no longer matter is a paradox that Chesterton would have found implausible, yet there they are, and they come in the typical flavors: the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful.

All this technology that surrounds us certainly has an impact, and we navigate those changes in our own ways. Gopnik lumps authors into three camps: the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. He critiques all three camps and has some fun along the way:

There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live--as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities.

In the end he points not to the machine, but to us. "The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user." The crux of the matter is not in the technology or how it networks and pervades our living; it is in our relationship with it.

We manage this relationship through various means, some virtual, others actual. (He points out that a "social network is crucially different from a social circle.") And, for those of us who are educators by trade, we get to meddle or muddle in on our students' relationships to technology, especially where it is used in class. Articles such as this help us to step back and take a look at the larger picture, which Educational Technologists help us to find the best application of that technology in our teaching.

Technology and Travel Learning

Many of us traveled this past week, as the our Google Map illustrates. Destinations were scattered across the globe. I was in Jamaica on a Spring Break Mission trip.

Although I didn't get to blog while I was there, another team, traveling in May as part of a travel learning course, has created a blog just for sharing their experience.

OWU - Obesity and Prevention in Italy and the US

The team of 14 students is being led by a Phys Ed Professor and our Dean of Students. They and the students have started with introductions and will be blogging while they're there, sharing what they're learning and experiencing.

A blog is a good way to share information, allowing for comments and discussions. You can post short essays, hyperlinks to other sites, photos, even embed videos. OWU students, faculty and staff may now create Blogger blogs in their BishopApps account. For assistance, please contact the Help Desk.

We've also started compiling a list of OWU blogs at Follow OWU. If you have one you'd like to share, please let us know.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a technical term indicating the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel or data connection. The term is also used loosely to indicate how much workload a person can handle in their day-to-day duties.

I could say I haven't had the bandwidth to blog lately due to time-consuming projects, such as the Blackboard upgrade and updating our classroom inventory. Yet blogging is an important medium for communication with my constituents, peer colleagues at other institutions, and the world. It's simply a matter of making it a priority and making time for it.

This semester I've made it a priority to attend the Psychological Foundations of Education class. This has been a good exposure to a typical course here at OWU, and one that integrates a a fair amount of technology: PowerPoint is almost always used for presenting material, and the presentations often include video. The Blackboard course is available and is where course documents can be found. (I've accessed it via the Blackboard Mobile app on my iPad.)  The document projector is sometimes used. The course is taught in Phillips 210, where there is a SMART Board, but the interactive features of that are not used in this course.

It will be interesting to discuss with the instructor ways that she might utilize technology more in this class. However, it's been eye-opening to simply observe her teach and interact with the students. It's given me a deeper appreciation for the time it takes to prepare and present a lesson. I typically teach stand-alone workshops that last up to an hour and a half. She's teaching 50-minute sessions three times a week for 16 weeks, and that's just one of her classes.

It's understandable if faculty don't want to start something new in the midst of a semester. They may not have the bandwidth to give it the attention required with everything else they're already doing. I'm here to support what they're already doing, and to be available when they're ready to learn something new.

My first workshop this semester is Thursday at noon, and will cover the new apps in BishopApps, including Blogger.