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OU or OpenU
My colleague, Simon Buckingham Shum, raised an interesting idea the other day when he suggested we should start calling ourselves the OpenU, instead of the OU. His argument chimes with something I have been saying in SocialLearn presentations also – namely that 'open' is a term that has gained much currency lately. Whether it was extraordinary prescience, or just good luck, on the part of the Open University's founders, choosing 'Open' for the name has served us very well. We could have, for instance, been called something like 'the University of the airwaves' which would have dated very quickly. Back in 1969, Open meant 'Open Access'. This was revolutionary at…
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What I hope to learn from CCK08
I've signed up for George Siemens and Stephen Downes massive online open course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" which starts next week. I have a kind of meta-interest in it (as I suspect a lot of participants do), in that I'm not just interested in what the course is about, but also in how it works. So, as much as I am interested in the content, I'd have signed up if it was 'Shakespearean Tragedies' or 'George and Stephen play the banjo'. So here's what I hope to find out over the coming months: To get a better appreciation of connectivism and particularly how people are applying it. To see how…
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Tender is the right
I wanted to hit the ground running in my stint as SocialLearn director, but we have come across a minor hiccup. For services over £139,893 we are obliged by EU regulations to go to a public procurement process. We will be doing much of the technical development externally and if at some point we exceed the EU limit without having abided by their regulations, it could get messy and we'd end up in court. So in the interests of openness, and keeping my job, we'd best go through the process. We're putting together the tender now, which has to be posted for 30 days, then we have to select the…
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SocialLearn Director
Starting in September I am going to be the Director for the SocialLearn project here at the Open University, for 6 months at least. The Vice Chancellor and senior management have agreed to fund us so we are pushing ahead on a punishing development schedule to have something usable by next February (with releases along the way). Taking on the responsibility of director is a double-edged sword. On the one hand I can influence the project more and make decisions. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone else. I am also using the project to explore different approaches to management. My starting rules are: i) No regular, formal meetings.…
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iTunes nonplus
I had a strange experience with iTunes Plus recently that left me scratching my head at the logic of DRM. I was trying to create a playlist and realised an album I had bought a while ago wasn't in my library (Chet Baker Sings, if you're interested – it's melloooooooow). It must have been lost in transfers between laptops, so I went to the music store and went through the process of buying it again. In the past when this has happened it has notified me that I already own it and has let me download it again for free. This time however, it said I could download it from…
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The punk zine approach
The Leisurely Historian has a nice post on what education can learn from the punk zine movement, which flourished around the time of punk. One could also expand it to any fanzine movement really (football fanzines would be another good example), where the DIY ethos makes them more valuable to a certain audience than the glossy, formal productions. He lists several things we can learn, which I'll touch upon, but you should read his post: All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine – ie a lot can be achieved with relatively low resource. For a zine this meant you didn't need an expensive printing press. For an…
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OU YouTube Channel is go
Adblock Continuing the ‘every educator is a broadcaster’ theme of recent months, I’m pleased to point you at the OU YouTube channel. It has two main parts (with a third ‘Research’ coming on line soon): OU Life which has videos from students and staff; and OU Learn which has clips from OU courses. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops. There are only a handful of videos up at the moment. Unlike a conventional university we can’t just point a camera at a lecture and get a (quite boring) video. While we have a large archive, the (swear, curse, shout) rights clearance on this stuff is more difficult than…
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SocialLearn presentation in Elluminate
I did a presentation for George Siemens last night on SocialLearn. It was an open (naturally!) session in Elluminate. George recorded it and you can relive it in all its mumbling glory here. I think it gives a reasonable overview of where we’re at, and I tried to broaden it to wider issues also. George tries manfully to make me sound coherent by asking intelligent questions, but in case you hadn’t twigged it, I’m a better writer than I am speaker, so it’s a bit rambling in places I fear. Enjoy?
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Digital literacies
I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I’d put them in a blog post. This isn’t the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies: Different voices – think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I’m not sure who they…
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Openness – catch my disease
Adblock Post title pinched from Ben Lee – Catch my disease I’m in Barcelona for the last FLOSScom meeting and I’m presenting at the Free Knowledge Free Transfer conference. The talk I was going to give was about using open source approaches in education, but I’ve changed it to one on how openness can be seen as a virus, which higher education is catching. The argument goes like this: once you start being open about content, it becomes contagious to all aspects of your life. There are different ways the open virus can spread, and some people are more ‘resistant’ to it than others. One highly infectious carrier is The…
