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Feel the l-OER-ve
(The sun always shines for OER) OER18 was held in Bristol this year, superbly chaired by David Kernohan & Viv Rolfe, and once again organised and managed with care, efficiency and joy by the team at ALT. I found it stimulating, challenging and enjoyable as always, but I’m not going to comment on the content so much here, (Sheila and Maren have some excellent posts amongst many others) but rather on what are the characteristics of it as an event that make it probably my favourite regular conference. These are entirely personal, so I don’t offer them up as a ‘how to’ but just what I like. Size – it…
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Love, Faith, Hope & Charity – the future of the OU
I’ve had a draft of this post kicking around for a while now, but after today’s news that Open University Vice Chancellor Peter Horrocks has resigned, it seems now is the time to publish it. I won’t go into specific suggestions about policy or strategy (but, hey, I have lots of those!) because that is too internally focused and not of interest to most people outside the OU. Instead I want to focus on more cultural, generic issues which, while brought to a very public head at the OU, are pertinent to many in higher ed I believe. I’m going to couch these in terms of Love, Faith, Hope and…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs
Whatever happened to blogs eh? What kind of poor, deluded, stuck in the past has-been would still keep a blog? In my 25 Years of EdTech series we’re now at 2003. Elearning is A Serious Thing, with standards, platforms, policies and strategies. Blogging developed alongside these more education specific developments, and was then co-opted into ed tech. In this it foreshadowed much of the web 2.0 developments, which it is often bundled in with. Blogging was really just a very obvious extension of the web. Once anyone could publish, they would inevitably start to publish diaries. This speaks more to the immutability of human communication than new technology – give…
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When is widening participation not widening participation?
The Higher Education Policy Institute released a study today that ranked universities by their widening participation stats. You’d expect Russell group unis to do poorly in this, but I bet the Open University, a provider set up to specifically address WP will do well, right? Except, they didn’t include it. I got into an exchange (HEPI Twitter is feisty!) on this, where they defended their methodology. But this was itself revealing, they replied to my criticism about the OU’s exclusion saying: “To be clear, there is not a valid way of including it in this study as Polar focuses on young people, the data was sourced from UCAS etc etc…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2002: Open licences & OER
(As much as I love OER, this is a crap logo) This is part of the ongoing 25 Years of Ed Tech series Now that the foundations of modern ed tech had been laid with the web, CMC, elearning, wikis, etc. the more interesting developments could commence. For 2002 I’m going with Open Educational Resources (OER). In the preceding year MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative which marks the real initiation of the OER movement, but it was in 2002 that the first OERs were released, and people began to understand licences (MIT would adopt Creative Commons in 2004). MIT’s goal was to make all the learning materials used by their…
