Introduces concepts of openness in education, and explains concepts behind the OpenShare modification that allows Moodle teachers to share just parts of their online courses.
20. Leigh Blackall’s “There Is Another Way” slide http://www.flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/64955399
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Editor's Notes
Intention: spend most time demo’ing Definition and application of open-ness how that can be facilitated with Moodle open
Biosphere2 LMS is a closed system susceptible to good and bad metaphors. Biosphere2. Good reasons for being closed: student privacy, fair use, intellectual property and copyright—the instructors and author’s. In the beginning, “edenic” open-ness out of ignorance technical or otherwise Fair Use helped us guess where educators were on a continuum of highly likely to be sued and only somewhat likely to be sued I remember teaching a workshop on Fair Use and mentioning (what was at the time) a new piece of legislation: TEACH act—for new technologies, articulated new ways in which we were likely to be sued. Of course we had FERPA, important for K-12 but arguably less important for higher ed. WebCT and the standardized LMS, preview page, password protection, closed system Technology in and of itself is neither good nor bad, excepting how it’s used Here’s another analogy.
Rusty Cage LMS is a closed system. Course “shells”, or “cells” are “protected” by the “benevolent dictator”, the teacher. Limits on what information come in, restrictions on what goes out, regardless of who authored it. At odds with the Web 2.0 trend? Contrary to the way society is going? participatory culture, self-publishing, collaboration, remix, share. Are we prescribing “managed learning” vs describing what’s really going on? “ EviLMS”?
System “ Our earlier attempts to use the Internet for learning were limited by our common understanding of what, where and how learning takes place. Most of us imagined the classroom and everything that goes on within it, and looked for tools that could help us replicate that online. We found the LMS. The LMS took away our fears of Internet anarchy, and promised educational control - or managed learning. Few recognised the oxymoron. Then we focus on content, spending huge amounts on developing content. sharable learning objects, all meta data tagged and copyright managed. We got what we wanted, no one could (or would) use our stuff!”
Open flower Advantages to open-ness in education Values of pre-existing content What beautiful things can we share by opening up? Define terms OER OCW OE
Advantages of openness Not just provide for participatory culture, or “Web 2.0” mentality These as well http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/2007/10/why-a-reputatio.html
Sounds good. A lot of movement. At this point I should note that I am not an evangelist of the church of open, I am, at best, a questioning convert. If anyone was a fan of the X-Files you will remember the poster in Mulder’s office. What did it say? Yes, that’s me. Open education sounds like a great thing, but in many respects we are still waiting for evidence to regarding sustainability, and return on investment—even if return is not measurable in traditional economic terms. We wanted to get involved, but to do so requires sharing and reusing of resources. So with IP how do we share content for educational purposes? How do we know if we can share, remix, reuse?
Participatory culture, web 2.0 asks us: are you a creator or a consumer? Either way, CC helps us. Freeing up IP Creative Commons. What is Creative Commons and why should I care? CC relaxes some of the restrictions of normal IP law typified by copyright. It isn't a de facto dismissal of an author's personal and financial claims to the work; instead it offers a very precise set of circumstances under which a work can be reused, republished, or even remixed. Because OCW is sharing content with the world, it necessitates the use of some sort of more relaxed CC licensing. Its important to note that even if you use a CC license you still retain ownership rights, you can still sell, distribute, whatever your work
In fact, one of the driving philosophical arguments behind the open education movement is that learning materials can be improved when they are shared and adapted for diverse learner audiences, curriculum, and situations. The reusability and remixability of learning materials is also reliant on package size, which we'll get into when we talk about learning objects.
We are a university with a pretty strong DE department, that’s where I’m from, and we have a lot of faculty-authored content that could be published as opencourseware—entire courses, high quality (we like to think so). So how technically do we do this? Recognize Trailblazers: MIT Static content Separate server Publish and forget
educommons – open platform for ocw publishing Strong on workflow Easy to use Still separate system Still publish and forget Let’s take a look at eduCommons’ integrated workflow
We discovered Uk Open University’s OpenLearn: Whole courses! Promote interaction! Uses Moodle Wait, Moodle is an LMS, and it’s a good one, we thought So can we combine the two?
I come back to this slide about the systems. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I want to reuse, repurpose, modify if necessary. So branching off what the Open University has done, we asked can we use an LMS for both our registered students/live classes and opencourseware publishing.
Let’s look at the advantages of a single-system solution.
So this would require a modfication of Moodle. Here are my priorities for any modification’s provision.
But how to do it? Story of the open mod. Developer for 1.5 & 1.6, watching for roles, made a full working mod for 1.7. Lost our developer Project was abandoned. I didn’t have time nor the burning desire to put my head in his code, yet I didn’t want to forget. Earlier this year we decided to pick it up again for 1.8 and 1.9. So we ran with it as it was with our new developers, focusing on setting up a role that would have special permissions to see only shared/open content. Then I met two guys from UCLA, Jovca and Mike Franks, who had made a similar Mod focusing on Groupings. This caused me to step back, and though I had a presentation the next day, completely rethink our mod’s approach. We will likely refactor our mod based on the simpler Groupings solution, including our own features. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tags
C for copyright/protected. CC for Creative Commons or Copyright Cleared. Defunct, closed, shared, open.