That's been my experience so far.

??? Am I being too open about this process?

This seems very much like what I was talking about yesterday with MinnState folks and reported on my blog.

I still don't see how institutions are continuing to miss the inevitable outcome, when adjuncts who feel no connection to an institution hop right over to the Mother-of-all-MOOCs online institution that makes the first credible bid to disrupt/replace them?

"Inclusive Access" and "Netflix of Books" (do you mean Kindle Unlimited?) not necessarily the same thing. Netflix DID make movies more accessible at lower net cost.

Another great idea! Would a 0 (zero) with line through it in icon help it live at top of list?

Good idea! I wonder if I could convince student government to do this on my campus? Just emailed Student Senate members to ask...

I get the raised eyebrows, but don't things like transfer curriculum requirements provide some degree of direction that the faculty at, say UMass, maybe don't feel?

Wish I was there, at my alma mater too! 1. Cutting costs, check; 2. Improving learning, check; when do we get to 3. streamlining instructor workloads? Currently in midst of argument about course caps at my school.

My beef is more with historians who don't even know they're doing it, and do things like put coded markers to interpretive structures into narratives in textbooks. Undergrads from other majors in surveys, who will never read historiography, miss these markers and don't realize they're reading a story told through a particular lens.

Ultimately, isn't the market going to do that?

Aren't MOST new ideas explained by way of metaphors or analogies to known ideas?

Sometimes that obscure language actually helps historians make subtle but important points. I'm thinking of something like Hayden White's Metahistory here. Having said that, I'm pretty unforgiving when something I'm reading puts me through that "foreign-language" wringer but then doesn't pay off with a big insight.

Long tradition of top-level physicists like Hawking writing for the general public.

As grad students we're exposed to all kinds of jargon and specialized analysis and argument. But it's not really that much more difficult to understand that just as most regular people (who ARE interested in history) aren't interested in our professional arguments, they aren't interested in our technical language. Failing to adjust our language to our audience is just sloppy, like using the passive voice.

Recording the trail we wander through this info seems to be a key feature of the Hypothesis annotation view we return to whenever we open the page.

Implications for education?

Interesting that there was apparently recognition of the importance of info creation as well as manipulation and consumption.

Has this been achieved by people, or have algorithms taken on this task and automated this process beyond our ability to directly interact with these concepts?

As it becomes easier for individuals to manipulate symbols, what happens?

General Semantics, A.E. van Vogt, Null-A...

But the increase in efficiency and effectiveness comes from improving the interface so that the relationship between the artifact and the human is easier to manage. A graphical user interface that requires less work on the user's part (even if it required more work for the system programmer) improves those synergies and emergent opportunities. There's an increased benefit when those interfaces can be proliferated widely.

And the prior evidence is pretty strong for an "emergent" set of new insights and capabilities as these intellectual tools (artificial light, writing, printing, libraries, universities) proliferated.

This seems to echo back to that "aboriginal" example above, where our current seemingly enhanced intelligence derives quite a bit from a circumscribed set of "problems to be tackled" that no longer involve survival, but are more focused on things like making phone calls. Does it matter whether our external "intelligence amplifiers" actually deskill us as humans and make us more dependent on thought-labor-saving technology, as long as we don't lose access to it? Did writing put an end to a rich oral tradition in antiquity? Does Wikipedia and Google search make us more forgetful of "facts"?

Emergent properties again -- is there an implication that a new (higher?) level of emergence may await?

A working definition for education in the digital age?

There's a sense here that some emergent new ability will be discovered once the difficulty of "routine" tasks diminishes.

But they shade into each other. Is reading an explicit-human process? What about when a text-to-speech app reads to you? Is that composite? What about when an app keyword-searches a bunch of documents for you and returns only those with the info you want?

This must be a useful insight for UI designers.

Does this focus on the pencil-stroke enhance or detract from the explanation of how to write a document? At what point does this granularity become a detriment?

As others have noted here, the idea that the aborigine surviving by her own wits in the outback is tackling less complex situations than the white dude using a telephone seems a bit backwards. A more accurate statement might be that the aborigine does not have the necessary tools and information to build a telephone network. But that's the point, isn't it? That neither do WE. Being the beneficiaries of a technological patrimony and standing on the shoulders of giants doesn't actually make us superior to the aborigine. If anything, it might make us less adaptive and more brittle.

This is an important suggestion that most thought is symbol manipulation and that computers could be built to assist with it, if not to do it themselves.

Considering human supported by smartphone in similar terms as we once considered human supported by library.

Do we tend to miss this point, that these new technologies are a continuation of earlier "means" that included language, narrative, writing, printing, libraries, etc.?

Are these three separate charges, or are the second and third considered only as means to the first? The point is, will the system office be able to "provide opportunities" to departments and faculty that are not able to create Z-Degree outcomes?

Since Z-degrees are defined as Associates Degrees with zero textbook cost, it seems likely that 2-year institutions will be the focus of much of this effort. Is there a way for 4-year institutions to apply for some of this appropriation to incentivize OER adoption that will save students $$ but not immediately lead to a new Z-Degree?

Similar to US expenses.

The difference might actually be that similar activities are done by US instructors in the LMS and are not as visible as they seem to be in the UK.

It will be interesting to see if we can build layered materials that present important ideas or content at a variety of levels of detail/complexity for different subsets of students. For example, a module on the Columbian Exchange that has a “slider” to increase the depth of the coverage for different audiences.

And then once they've opened their competencies and credentialing, how do they continue to charge tuition? As a student, why wouldn't I just cut out the middleman?

I'm not sure I'm against this. But it is incredibly disruptive. In this world, the difference between a Harvard BA and a Bemidji State BA could be substantially reduced. Since I'm at Bemidji State, I suppose I should welcome this change and work to hasten it. But there still seems to be a missing element, and it seems to me a bit like a publisher's dream of capturing the entire value-chain in the learning app "Stack".

Doesn't reducing the cost of every other element of education to zero put an inordinate spotlight on the fact that the only value-add left that the institution is charging for is the credits themselves? That they're basically an accreditation gatekeeper? Is this where higher ed wants to shine the spotlight??

There are implications, though, from the creative side, when you switch from thinking about textbooks to thinking about "learning materials". Textbooks typically have a single author or team for the entire work. Learning materials are much easier to imagine as promiscuous remixes. There are tradeoffs to these two approaches. I think we can expand idea of textbook to include ebook multimedia and interactive (H5P) functions, so maybe we don't need to dump the term on those grounds.

All the more reason to make the e-book significantly more compelling than the pdf.

I wonder if I can emulate this improvement in learning in reading-oriented (history) classes by guiding the students through a Hypothes.is-based annotation engagement with texts?

Because Khan Academy math is better than a textbook.

Except that adopting OER does demonstrably increase the number of students who take your class, which measurably improves learning FOR THEM.

Good model

This is not only a great reading list, but a model of how perhaps to structure a reading course with outward-facing content that makes its appeal wider than the single-semester cohort.

But again this is a generalization across a WIDE range of different schools, so conclusions about places where students rack up $200k debts may not apply to places where they do not.

Or maybe the humanities & History courses have failed to adapt to the needs and interests of these new students?

This seems to be the bigger issue. Can we craft a better pitch for why students ought to major in History? If not, can we focus more on OTHER ways to add value for majority of undergrads in other majors?

The interesting elements here are teacher-training (Normal) schools becoming universities and the decrease in women students as they increasingly found viable career paths beyond the "Mrs" degree.

Interesting to correlate this change with non-recovery from Great Recession for most people.

But what can we say about the "peak" that could help us understand the change?

This is a completely different issue. How many new History MAs and PhDs does American actually need per year?

Because undergrad History surveys fill a core requirement, but also because they support other programs, esp. where faculty are not distracted by focus on grad students/research? How many of the surveys at PhD schools are taught by senior faculty vs. contingent?

History course enrollments up at institutions like mine where BA is highest degree, down at MA and PhD institutions. What TYPES of courses increased? What happened to major/minor numbers?

Overall decline in undergrad enrollment dropped substantially over a three-year period that does NOT seem to correlate with an economic crisis or other obvious "cause".

Looks interesting

Is change in lifetime income potential a way of measuring higher education's social contribution? Is it too broad? Can it account for distributive injustice?

This is incredibly ham-handed, but not necessarily a bad question to be asking, esp. as digital education begins disrupting brick-and-mortar schools. Can we be more explicit about the value we add as educators?

1962...

Slap on wrist.

Collaboration requires a space where the answer isn't yet decided, doesn't it?

Top Hat is not an OER company

This is obscene

To return to a question from an earlier convo, what impact would a CC-BY-NC-SA license on the OER have on the ability of these parasites to use our work?

Not entirely up to date, but pretty recent.

To what extent does the fact that Hypothesis annotations show up in our feeds (and are thus useful for us tracking our movement through texts) while mere highlights do not, determine usage patterns ?

In another sense, though, it makes the reader's process more visible so that the reader no longer needs to trespass into the author's territory. I've always been dissatisfied with the lit-crit position that the author must be completely decentered and her contribution minimized to make room for the reader. THIS seems to create a real space for the reader, and in so doing maybe it also allows the author to reclaim some of her space.

Interesting -- what would it look like to have a shared annotation layer that could be accessed by a variety of tools?

Making annotation an important element of versioning things like textbooks.

Another goal

Another useful term

Nice description -- design principle.

Discuss work-in-progress as a valid publication.

To what extent are these actually at odds?

Disruptive of hierarchy.

This would definitely solve the web-reticence issue some students might have -- but what does it look like in practice?

Alignment statement for Hypo

This is probably a long-term goal of mine that I might as well own up to.

Students can watch their ideas evolve and a class can trace changes across a series of readings.

So maybe the more reasonable long-term strategy is to build these web-based linkages rather than try to capture all these network-resident learning elements within an LMS.

Should I start exploring this too?

Sounds like those 19th-century Chapman books filled with platitudes about the upstanding men of the regions. https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Chapman_brothers

The idea of wilderness is definitely in play here, but let's not overdo the criticism of 18th-century people for not having 21st-century environmental values.

There's got to be some evidence of what the Indians said to each other that's not filtered through this "settler" lens -- maybe have students read this alongside Colin Calloway's Scratch of the Pen.

There's a BIG difference between the gap between academic and popular history and this, which seems more in the tradition of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly "history".

Or at least of an uncritical embrace of the turner thesis.

Another book that JUST came out which I'd highly recommend is Joshua Specht's Red Meat Republic, 2019 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KBFNL7Z/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://archive.org/details/greatesttrustin00russgoog/page/n13

1863-1927: Son of Philip Danforth Armour and inheritor of the business.

Also check this one for history.

Check this for history.

John uses these -- I'm not sure they're entirely effective but they're probably worth a try.

Still a classic burn!

License?

Would love to, but unfortunately I'm not a subscriber.

Right, so hopefully you were adequately compensated for the work you put in.

Of course this value-add is probably less valuable in 2019 than it was in 2015.

Also the clearest expression of the "publisher" model -- how we're not thinking of teachers as being involved in the creation of the content they teach. 3rd grade math may be a valid case (but even it might not be...), but I'm not sure this analogy extends to, say, college history.

This is the clearest expression for me, of what David Wiley might be talking about when he calls OER infrastructure.

I'm inclined toward the attitude regarding for-profit publishers you describe here. And I don't really buy David's analogy between OER and apps like the Apache server. Maybe this is a difference between K-12 and higher ed? I don't think of OER (even my own) as a generic piece of infrastructure like a bridge that anyone can drive over to the same place. We're talking about students becoming active learners -- why aren't we talking about instructors remaining active teachers?

Yeah, this feels closer to my reaction too.

Isn't this exactly why it isn't helpful to think of content as infrastructure?

Okay, I went back and read (and commented on) that post, but I still disagree.

Okay, so the open source software analogy has deep roots. But I still (looking at this a dozen years later) think this analogy is flawed. Apache was a webserver (infrastructure) that could serve any page (content). I think the proper analog to Apache in OER is a platform or app (Pressbooks, Hypothes.is), not any particular Pressbook or annotation.

There seems to be an assumption here that "rich" is meant in a technological sense rather than in the quality of the insights rendered by the materials. So we're talking about a richer educational material being one that users experience at a higher frame rate and resolution, with higher media "production values", maybe with more interactivity or adaptive branching...in the future maybe AI.

Another way of asking this: how much "richer" is the latest Version of Word in Office 365 than MacWrite in 1985, if the learning outcome you're looking for is "write a short story"?

Okay, now I'm well and truly down the rabbit-hole!

So educational infrastructure = learning outcomes, educational resources, assessments, and credentials. I'm not sure I agree. Educational resources are content. I suppose they can be thought of as generic enough to be one-size-fits-all, but it seems like that approach minimizes and trivializes the role of both the teacher and learner. Seems like a rather mechanistic, whole-equals-sum-of-parts approach to learning. But the focus on assessments and credentials seems appropriate in this mix, I suppose. makes me somehow less excited about being a teacher.

I worked at SGI as a systems engineer when Linux was just coming into its own. IRIX didn't go down without a fight. I agree that Linux offers a possible model, but right now I don't see the publishers as Linux evangelists. They may jump on the bandwagon when there's no stopping it. And we ought to be open to that possibility, I agree. But the OER community is Linux, not the publishers. We need to make it irresistible before they'll get to that last stage of the ignore-laugh-fight-then you win process.

I think you underestimate the S-curve.

This is what publishers would have us believe because they think they can own the building-things-on-top space. I don't think I'm ready to drink that koolaid yet. The ultimate aim, if you follow this logic to its natural conclusion, is eliminating the instructor's role altogether. But a big element of the students' User Experience (to borrow from the software world's vocab) is the instructor.

Yes this is clearly the case. But again, where does infrastructure end and content begin? I don't think my content is that undifferentiated.

This is a cool idea, if the implication you’re driving at is that there might be some model there for sharing between educators writing open content and authors writing commercial textbooks. The code contributed in the open source model benefits everyone by improving the state of the art. Is that true in OER, where the medium and message are less easy to distinguish?

I’m not sure I’m prepared to accept the argument that the same publishers producing the Psych 100 textbook are NECESSARILY the go-to people for grad courses.

So we can follow the $$

This semester my institution offered 1062 courses. The bookstore reported that in only about half were textbooks ordered. So I’m not sure that the logic in this paragraph, leading to the 90% textbook number, is quite right.

But OER isn’t just infrastructure. It’s not really a road or a vehicle, it’s the content, which is breaking free of the traditional media that it was once trapped inside.

I wrote a book about Knowlton in 2012. It's available currently on Amazon, but I'll probably turn it into a Pressbook this summer.

Use this to show increase in recent years

Put this in brochure too.

Use this in next info piece.

That's what I've been finding in conversations at BSU.

Validates the other survey claim that students facing expensive textbooks tend to take fewer.

UCD study finds no statistical difference btw textbooks and OER. Baseline result suggesting no negative impact.

Another reason for admin. to support shift toward OER.

Even when taught by same instructor!

Check this against our faculty.

This is good additional info above and beyond the question of whether students buy the assigned textbook.

I'm not even really sure what this entails. Are we saying "don't even bother thinking about creating an open textbook until you're a master of UDL." Seems like a bit of a barrier to entry/participation.

Might be a more effective carrot than a stick. Something like, "hey, there are people here who speak UDL, so if you're a subject matter expert or a pedagogy person maybe it makes sense to team up." So far I'm not hearing so much of that at Rebus. I'm hearing more "these are our priorities and they should be yours too."

Begin by having them respond to the readings and mind the gaps. Also maybe by having them vote on the effectiveness of readings, relevance to course material, ease of understanding, etc.

Or hunger, or working full-time.

Also critical assessments of authority structures, truth claims, value judgments...

Are there any examples currently where something is not free of charge but is free of licensing restrictions?

Adding to course materials in summer & fall classes

I just looked at a few sections of it that apply to what I'm doing currently in my US I course. It's basically the Openstax textbook.

Yeah, and people regularly compile copyrighted material inside a course shell and cite "fair use" but that doesn't mean this is the desired outcome. It's what we have to do when free remixing isn't an option. So it's less something to celebrate as something to evolve beyond.

Two questions re: that: How much more is the authoritative expert's professional curation supposed by the publisher to be worth? Eminent historians writing textbooks. Second, how much of that activity aggregates the work of instructors -- or in other words, replaces that work? Should we have minimum wage instructors in the future using super-value-added digital texts? Why not just eliminate instructors and engage students directly with textbook companies?

Who is eating whose lunch, actually?

This is the transition from print to digital being reproduced in a more expensive print book. How long can that last?

This is not entirely two sides of same coin. But it does emphasize the question about what additional value is the new version of the textbook bringing.

Growing dissatisfaction with a subscription-based publication model with "scholarly research outputs" freely available to public.

How are my lectures different from a Wikipedia entry? It's not just bundling with assessments etc. How much of this bundling is a distraction? A technological solution seeking a problem to solve?

Maybe flow and pipes is a good way to think about higher ed in a digital world?

People do need to be paid for their work. Use this idea in HighTech class and compare to Jaron Lanier.

I'm concerned that my work is going to be aggregated in a paywall-protected anthology whose value-add is simply the act of aggregation or, now that I think of it, the claim that value can only be gained from it if it is consumed in a particular way. That is, in a for-credit course in a degree-granting institution.

How quickly does this become a discussion about what the academy does. I agree with Steel in the sense that I believe the experience of studying text A or historical event B with me is different from just reading about it on one's own. But how much of that extra value resides in what I bring to the vs. the fact that in order to get a grade and Lib Ed credit, the student has to do the work in my class?

I just watched the Scalar video and my brain sorta exploded. Will definitely have to return there and explore it a bit more...

Also good background for HighTech course, but it's too long and although it's online, it's also copyright protected. But at least it's not behind a paywall.

Add to High Tech course reading list, after having them turn on Hypothes.is

Add this to History of High Tech course reading list too.

These are both interesting threads to follow. Hypothes.is breadcrumb trails could be used by students (and we're all students) to identify sources that can later be pulled together into syntheses. It could also be used by instructors to track this work by students...

This also happens in course readers that excerpt the "important bits" from longer texts.

Is this an issue if the student has used the idea cited appropriately? As long as they're not taken out of context, we don't expect an authority to be entirely consistent, and we don't insist that they agree with us on everything in order to consider a point valid, do we?

If you are using this hub I'd appreciate it if you would drop me a line at dan.allosso@bemidjistate.edu . I'm trying to see if this will be a spot we can get going again for collaboration across the system. Thanks! --Dan

This is a nice, short animated video covering not only the basics of CC licenses but also the institutional arrangements in New Zealand supporting CC authoring and use. It got me thinking about investigating organizational issues at my university that might help or impede CC and OER adoption.

I'd like to understand a little better how accessibility relates particularly to the topic at hand? Moreso, for instance, than to traditionally-copyrighted materials? This guideline document is quite elaborate and to be honest, I looked at it for a few minutes and then sort-of backed away, shaking my head. I believe thinking about the usability of things we create with open licensing is important, but to be honest this is more than I'd be comfortable trying to consider when creating new OER. My suggestion, I guess, would be to find somebody to translate this legalese into simple language and straightforward guidelines (as the CC organization has done for CC).

Don't miss the menu bar at the top with links to additional resources, examples, and search tools. Although designed for UCB people, this is great info useful beyond the Vancouver campus. It's worthwhile to back out to the main page (https://open.ubc.ca/ ) and explore from there.

The interface takes a bit of time getting used to, and isn't precisely suited to finding exactly what you're looking for. On the other hand, searches often return VERY interesting material you didn't know you were looking for, which can be quite helpful.

The article is relevant and useful as far as it goes, but a slightly more contemporary example might be the shift from ideas of common use and private ownership in America illustrated by the “enclosure” of the Merrimack River by the Boston Manufacturing Company which dominated the textile industry in Lowell and Lawrence in the 19th century. This shift is described in Ted Steinberg’s book Nature Incorporated and I talk about it in my OER Environmental History Text I’m developing on Pressbooks. I’ll add a link later, when the text is complete.