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A USB port for informal learning
I’ve been part of a team working on an unusual (and dare I use the word, innovative) course at the OU. It’s called ‘Making your learning count‘, and the unusual thing about it is that it doesn’t really set out to teach a particular topic. Rather it seeks to recognise the learning that people bring with them from informal means, such as OER and MOOCs. There are several challenges in this. Firstly, we can’t just formally recognise all possible OER, so we have to get students to do something to demonstrate their learning. But then secondly, having gone for this broad approach, as opposed to just accrediting a specific MOOC…
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Sci-Hub and the Rebecca Riots
Going on one of my extended, and tenuous analogy skits, you are warned. In order to consider recent developments in open access publishing, particularly Sci-Hub, and #ICanHazPDF I’m going to go back to, where else, a set of rural riots in 19th Century Wales. The Rebecca Riots as they were known, were a series of protests and disturbances in South-West Wales concentrated in the period 1839-1844. The target of the protests were usually toll-gates, which were demolished by large crowds during night-time raids, although toll-gates were seen as symbolic of a wider series of grievances. The leader of the crowd would be dressed in women’s clothes and be referred to…
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The Golden/Dark Age of what?
One of the rewarding things about being in ed tech is that because it’s very fast moving you get to act all wise with very little experience. I mean, I started in this in 1995, I’ve been through interactive CD-ROM, electronic tutor groups, intelligent tutoring systems, elearning, VLEs, virtual worlds, elearning standards and metadata, learning objects, personalised learning, OER, blogging, web 2.0, PLEs, MOOCs, intelligent tutoring systems (again), open textbooks, personalised learning (again), learning analytics, and a whole bunch more. To do the same in another discipline I’d have to be approximately 250 years old. When I reflect on this I’m struck by two sides of the same notion: we…
