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The issue of scale
Michael Feldstein has an interesting post on the issue of scale, inspired by Jim Groom's Open Ed keynote. Michael's post is very reflective and thoughtful and he admits he'd always sort of dismissed Jim and the edupunk stuff as interesting, but it doesn't scale, and scale was what he was concerned with. He concludes he was wrong to do so, and maybe Jim's approach does scale, but not in the conventional sense: "But if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform." In his comments on the…
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Bridge 2 Success
This is the third in the what I'm up to at the OU posts. A while back we were part of a consortium that won a bid in the Next Generation Learning Challenges funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, & The Hewlett Foundation. The partners are us (IET at the OU), MIT, the Anne Arundel Community College and University of Maryland University College (UMUC) – the project is Bridge to Success. It's aim is to use OERs to help community college students who struggle with study skills, and math(s) in particular. So we've taken some OU courses and these have been adapted in the US, and made available through our OpenLearn labspace.…
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Book launch – YOU are invited
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bayasaa/2693171833/> The good people at IET have offered to do a launch of my book, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Rebecca Ferguson have done a great job in organising it. Details are here in Cloudworks, the important details are below (one of them is not true, guess which one): When: Tues 15 November 2011, 3-4pm Where if you're OU based: Ambient Lab, ground floor of the Jennie Lee Building) Where if you're online: Live streamed here: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1769&s=31&ran=1641022548&state=1 Twitter hashtag: #digitalscholar Competition: YES! Win a free copy of the book. To enter the competition, please show or tell us what you consider to be "a digital scholar". Entries can take the form of an image, audio clip,…
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JIME editorship
The second of my 'what does Martin do every day?' posts. I've recently taken over editorship of JIME – this was a highly innovative journal when it was first started up by Simon in KMi over ten years ago. It was open access before anyone talked about open access and had an open peer review model. But as with so many academic journals, particularly when there isn't a big publisher behind them, it operates on the margins of everyone's time, and it's kind of stuttered over the past few years. So we're planning a relaunch next year. We are currently working through a backlog of papers, so no new submissions…
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Curriculum Business Models
I rarely blog about the day job anymore, so I thought I'd do a series of posts around 'what I'm up to at the moment', as I'm involved in a lot of projects that are interesting and probably relevant to other places as well. And also, just in case you thought I just sat around all day. First up is the Curriculum Business Models project. I'm the academic lead on this, having taken over from Grainne. The project grew out of a lot of the learning design work at the OU, particularly the JISC funded OULDI project. The name is a bit of a misnomer I feel, it isn't really…
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Jobs weather
Like many, I was saddened at the death of Steve Jobs yesterday, and inevitably it led to some reflection on the impact of a person's life. In 1999 I wrote part of a course (T171, You, your computer and the Net), based around the story of the early computer industry. We used Cringeley's Accidental Empires as a set text. Ultimately this came down to a story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Incidentally, this compelling narrative was a very good way to teach about dry subjects such as microprocessor operation, analogue to digital conversion, etc. At the time Jobs had just gone back to Apple, and it was by no…
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Made-up social media stats
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizettegreco/279539306/> Seeing as most media reports concerning social media seem to rely on no evidence whatsoever, I thought I'd pinch an idea from Josie Fraser, and just make up some stats (she had some wonderful ones about retweeting). Feel free to use any of these, remember they have no basis in truth, but when has that stopped people? I expect to see them in an interview with Baroness Greenfield any day now. 7 out of 13 people confess that they would rather go on holiday with their iPad than their spouse Every day £27 billion in productivity is lost through people using social media at work 4 out of 9…
