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To the ghosts who write history blogs
Okay, maybe it's not an Obama moment in history, but, as you may have heard, the OU has adopted Google Apps for education for its students, and I think this may be a significant move in educational technology. Niall announced it and Tony has given his reaction. We're by no means the first to do it, but I think the OU's adoption is significant for a number of reasons: It ain't Microsoft – there will have been strong lobbying to adopt an MS solution, so the move to Google marks a shift in the power base or at least the default assumption that it's MS who do enterprise solutions. It's…
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The centralisation dilemma in educational IT
I wrote an article for a new journal, the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE). My piece was entitled ‘The centralisation dilemma in educational IT’. I argued that we have a centralisation – decentralisation cycle in educational IT, so we had distributed versions of VLE, which moved to a central VLE, and we are now seeing a shift back to decentralised cloud services. The arguments for a centralised VLE are: Uniformity of student experience Centralised support Quality assurance Efficiency Robustness Integration of different tools Staff development Platform for expanding elearning offerings Whereas the arguments for a decentralised model can be summarised as: Quality: The individual components of…
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My final offer is this: nothing
Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image. Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative. And this is the problem…
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Do you have to do social media to get social media?
Christian, aka Documentally has a post entitled "Understand Social Technology Through Participation", in which he says: "How much can you understand from just watching and not participating? Last night I met a Professor who although used Facebook and other platforms seemed proud to state he did not use twitter. His job was to study social Technology and although obviously a very smart chap It made me wonder.. Is it possible to comprehend something as complex as social Technology by not participating in a platform like twitter. Can you glean just as much insight from only using sites like Facebook?.. All of my insights into Social Technology have come from my…
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Idealism and Pragmatism
I've been pondering further after my previous post in response to George Siemens' call to arms for visionaries in the open education movement. It's the sign of how good George's post was that it has set many of us thinking around the issue. I mentioned in my last post that there was something of the pragmatist vs idealist in the debate, and I offer this up just because I'm trying to think it through myself. I'm in agreement about the need for debate and not letting it be overtaken by commercial interests. But I'd disagree with George's opening remark: "We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know,…
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Stepping gingerly into the ‘open’ debate
<Image Open by Mag3737 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/> This is rather late to the party, but the changing nature of the term 'open' is one of my things, so I wanted to chip in. George Siemens kicked off an interesting debate around 'openness'. George argues that the term has been diluted so as to become almost meaningless, and that an ideological (rather than, say, a pragmatic) stance on openness is important: "We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries…. Openness should mean something. It should be driven by ideology, rather…
