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Digital resilience in Higher Ed
I've mentioned the idea of resilience before (thanks to Joss & Richard for linking it to open education and giving me the idea). When Terry Anderson from Athabasca visited us last year, I worked on a paper to explore the idea more fully with him. Resilience borrows the idea from ecosystems, pioneered by Holling, who described it as "‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables". In our paper we take the concept and use it as a means of thinking about how HE institutions can view the impact of digital…
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Tips for getting your blog aggregated
This is for H817Open students – the rest of you, move along now. If you have registered your blog with the H817Open blog aggregator (by completing this form) and posts aren't coming through, here are some things to check: 1) Maybe it has come through – it checks every hour or so, and posts them according to the time originally published. So yours may end up on an "Older posts" page straightaway. So have a look through, or use the search box (at the bottom of the page) to search for an identifiable term in your post. 2) RSS where art thou? – in order to aggregate your posts, we…
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5 reasons to do a MOOC & 5 reasons not to
I gave a presentation last week with the above title. In my preparation it wavered between 10 reasons to do one, and 10 reasons NOT to do one, which indicates my ambiguous take on MOOCs, so I settled for half and half. By "do a MOOC" here I mean for an instructor or an institution to offer one, rather than a learner take one, although you can infer some of the learner reasons also. Later in the week I followed the uniteMOOC session up at Newcastle via Twitter and some very similar responses were being given there. My presentation is below, but actually, you'd be better off looking at Sheila…
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H817Open MOOC content available
(Enjoy the MOOC or the puppy gets it) The content for my MOOC, no, I mean, open course, on Open Education is now all available in the OpenLearn environment. It doesn't officially start until March 16th, but I'm adopting a more flexible approach than many MOOCs so you can work through it in your own pace (and it'll stay up afterwards). Some points to note: You don't have to enrol to view the material, only if you want to contribute to forums and also to get course emails Use forums instead of comments, there is one per week When you enrol, nothing magic happens. The OpenLearn platform has recently had…
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Goodbye to two colleagues
I don't often use this blog for personal reasons, but two colleagues are leaving the OU, and for various reasons I can't make either of their leaving dos. So, to assuage my guilt, and also to publicly acknowledge and thank them, I'm blogging it. I'm sure it's better than a fountain pen as a leaving present. The first colleague is Ross MacKenzie. Ross works in what is called Learning and Teaching Solutions. They do all the content creation stuff from editing to DVDs to running the VLE. In fact, it was Ross who succeeded me as VLE Director – I'd come up with a solution based on an open architecture,…
