Yes, I know the title is a bit #slatepitches. But I really mean it. As some of you know, I work at the same college I graduated from almost 20 years ago. I did a lot of stuff in between, but I ended up back here, in part because I really believe in state provided… Continue reading

(hoisted from the archives) When it comes to OER, sharing, in general, is not the problem. Reuse is the problem. Anyone who has been working in the Open Education space for any length of time knows this, so I won’t go into it too deeply. But the key to everything is reuse, at least reuse… Continue reading

I have a news alert, set a long time ago, that keys on variations of open education terms. More and more lately, it sends me pieces like this, from places with “Wall Street” or “Market” somewhere in the name: Our country’s educational system needs a reset. On that score, I agree with the critics of… Continue reading

Back in May, I gave a presentation down at UMW on Just-in-time Learning, where I argued that the skills typically associated with the liberal arts were particularly suited to our modern challenges. In short, what we call 21st century skills are 19th century skills, rethought through network lenses. I gave the example of trying to… Continue reading

I’ve been thinking of ways to bend the cost curve using OER and get to that 60% college-educated place people keep talking about, while still building on the existing Higher Education system. And I’ve been thinking particularly what sort of education I might like my older daughter, now eleven, to have access to in six… Continue reading

I can’t actually figure out how to get into the UNESCO online forums on this topic, so I suppose I’ll post here in the meantime. I think I have a bit of a unique perspective. A couple of years ago I was the first Director of Community Outreach for the OpenCourseWare Consortium. For various reasons,… Continue reading

Another relevant datapoint as we look at eCitizenship, and the coming social disaster if we do not teach students tools of engagement. From Papacharissi 2010: But what renders privacy a luxury commodity is that obtaining it implies a level of computer literacy that is inaccessible to most, and typically associated with higher income and education levels,… Continue reading

I’ve been thinking a bit about Jim and Brian’s article, and trying to better understand (and triage!) my concerns. What I’ve been thinking a lot about is addresses, or more properly, unique universal names (some early thoughts on cell phones numbers as names  here). Here’s my most recent stream of thought. This is a PogoPlug: Now,… Continue reading

D’Arcy’s got a post on the recent Ethan Zuckerman presentation, and like me, he’s taken to this word xenophilia. It’s a neat presentation — if you haven’t watched it yet, you should. Zuckerman talks about the limitations of Twitter and such things in the talk, but he actually begins with a success of Twitter — one that brought… Continue reading

I gave a seminar last week to the Blended Learning class some of our faculty are taking. It was on what education is starting to look like in a world of open content — but to start I had to give them a model of what exactly it is that they do right now. One… Continue reading