educators need to enable students to develop a comprehensive vision of society that extends beyond single issues

engage in an ongoing struggle for the right of students to be given a free formidable and critical education not dominated by corporate values

What is often lost by many educators and progressives is that popular culture is a powerful form of education for many young people, and yet it is rarely addressed as a serious source of knowledge

developing alternative public spheres

They must also learn how to be cultural producers

educators need to develop a comprehensive educational program that would include teaching students how to live in a world marked by multiple overlapping modes of literacy extending from print to visual culture and screen cultures

educators need to consider defining pedagogy, if not education itself, as central to producing those democratic public spheres that foster an informed citizenry

a revival of the social imagination and the defense of the public good, especially in regard to higher education

a discourse of both critique and possibility

connect reading the word with reading the world

Education is never innocent: It is always implicated in relations of power and specific visions of the present and future.

any pedagogical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritizes some forms of identification over others and values some modes of knowing over others

create those public spaces for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values and authority necessary for them not only to be well-informed and knowledgeable across a number of traditions and disciplines, but also to be able to invest in the reality of a substantive democracy

Examples of such violence can be seen in the forms of an audit culture and empirically-driven teaching that dominates higher education. These educational projects amount to pedagogies of repression and serve primarily to numb the mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have little regard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding what it means for students to be critically engaged agents.

viewing public and higher education as democratic public spheres necessitates rejecting the notion that they should be reduced to sites for training students for the workforce

audit culture (a culture characterized by a call to be objective and an unbridled emphasis on empiricism)

what Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham describe as "that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created

pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency

a pedagogy of repression

All the while, these forces are undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.

Far more than a teaching method, education is a moral and political practice actively involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills and values but also in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms of individual and social agency.

civic literacy

Thinking dangerously is not only the cornerstone of critical agency and engaged citizenship, it's also the foundation for a working democracy.

Critical and dangerous thinking is the precondition for nurturing the ethical imagination that enables engaged citizens to learn how to govern rather than be governed.

In the present moment, it becomes particularly important for educators and concerned citizens all over the world to protect and enlarge the critical formative educational cultures and public spheres that make democracy possible.

What is the objective, what is the definition of success, as academia and its libraries engage in issues of scholarly communication? Answering this question crisply and with a clear sense of priority may allow libraries to evaluate their investments, and to organize, staff, and run their operations, with greater focus.

Who Owns Digital Science?

When is a Publisher not a Publisher? Cobbling Together the Pieces to Build a Workflow Business

Putting the Red Light, Green Light Model Into Practice

Red Light, Green Light Aligning the Library to Support Licensing

Reflections on “Elsevier Acquires bepress”

Premium mediocrity is a stand-in for the classy kind of post-scarcity digital utopia some of us like to pretend is already here, only unevenly distributed.

The plan will add anywhere from 5 to 7 trillion dollars to our deficit.

A Brief History of Domain of One’s Own, Part 1

Documenting a Domain of One’s Own

Influencing unfolding realities may be less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to change ourselves

The commons has also provided a language and ethic for thinking and acting like a commoner—collaborative, socially minded, embedded in nature, concerned with stewardship and long-term, respectful of the pluriverse that makes up our planet.

the commons is at once a paradigm, a discourse, a set of social practices, and an ethic

using open digital networks to try to create “catchment areas,”

structural capacities for individual agency

the dead end of meliorist reformism

Cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has said, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy.  The economy is not broken.  It’s simply unjust.”

Even social democrats and liberals, the traditional foes of free-market dogma, seem locked into an archaic worldview and set of political strategies that makes their advocacy sound tinny. Their familiar progress-narrative—that economic growth, augmented by government interventions and redistribution, can in fact work and make society more stable and fair—is no longer persuasive.

As open educators with a commons vision, some questions might include

Through teaching Open, can we model the value of knowledge as commons in a way that shifts our thinking and practices towards the sharing and maintenance of all commons such as water, forests, soil, air and seeds?

He writes “The commons, briefly put, is about self-organized social systems for managing shared wealth.”

All the OER, open pedagogy, open practices, teaching, learning, critical digital pedagogy, diversity, inclusion, etc. discussions all come back to this.

The most important role of a university is to prepare citizens.

Or maybe it’s how we are defining ‘citizen’ these days. Has that word been co-opted to mean “worker”?

This is a boys place; a white boys place.

We need to teach so that our students learn how to think dangerously.

The distinction between assessment and surveillance seems really blurry to me.

Group Behavior and the Tragedy of the Obvious Choice

problems of diffuse authority

There is only one context in which “open means the 5Rs”

six interrelated competencies: mastering rigorous academic content, learning how to think critically and solve problems, working collaboratively, communicating effectively, directing one’s own learning, and developing an academic mindset

Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive.

We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.

“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.

Although providing a framing definition might be the obvious place to start, we want to resist that for just a moment to ask a set of related questions

a set of yes or no questions for edtech products

As I find the conversation in the OpenEd community start to concentrate around platforms–specifically OER textbook platforms–I want to ask to what standards are we holding these platforms accountable?

a public link to your newsletter

OU Create has lent us the opportunity to talk about what does it mean to give students their data

So I’ll go ahead and say I see open as an end product less interesting. Open as a space that can produce open products: I find much more interesting.

All content used in the ATD OER degree pathways must have open license terms allowing unrestricted use, reuse, revision, and redistribution.

Sixty-three percent of instructors said that developing a course with OER takes at least one and a half times as much time as a traditional course.

Forty-two percent of instructors surveyed reported that they are very likely to promote use of OER to colleagues, while only a small percentage would not.

More than half the instructors participating in the ATD initiative are new to OER, while 83% have experience teaching online and/or hybrid courses.

Launching OER Degree Pathways: An Early Snapshot of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative and Emerging Lessons

OER-Enabled Pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only practical in the context of the 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources. Some people – but not all – use the terms “open pedagogy” or “open educational practices” synonymously.

Transform Malaysian youth from being consumers to producers and innovators of digital technology.

Computer science is no longer introduced as a separate discipline but as a field of study at the crossroads of several disciplines.

Jessica had never used a computer and was surprised to learn that technology is more than just a tool for the young men in her community to promote illicit pictures.

Intel®Learn Easy Steps

hese programmes benefitted from being designed in conjunction with the people by whom they were intended to be used.

‘Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills’ programme funded by Intel, Cisco and Microsoft and led by the University of Melbourne

‘transversal competencies’, ‘non-academic skills’ and ‘non-cognitive skills’

rather than institutions providing formal tuition or teaching, the approach focuses on supporting informal mentoring relationships between individuals

‘Soft’ and ‘complementary’ skills, including ‘twenty-first century skills’,

Specialized digital skills for professionals with ICT-related jobs.

Digital literacy for all or basic digital skills for low-level users of ICT.

Computer programming and coding skills for children and young people.

itical data literacies

ritical information literacies,

cognitive domain r

intrapersonal domain

interpersonal domain

3.‘Higher level’ skills: using digital technology in empowering and transformative ways

2. Generic digital skills: Using digital technologies in meaningful and beneficial ways

1. Basic functional digital skills: Accessing and engaging with digital technologies

Digital literacy model: Canada Centre for Digital and Media Literacy

Remote and automated systems

Data-based and computational

Proprietary and open forms of technology provision

Participatory (co)creation and ‘making’

Social and collaborative

Networked computing

proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill’ (SDG 4.4.1)

Digital literacy has also been positioned as an enabler of rights. Unless people have choice and agency, they cannot act in their own interests.

governments are a key means of safeguarding ‘public good’ concerns in the face of increased for-profit provision of online education

the Rapporteur stressed the need for robust government oversight of education and technology policy-making, particularly in terms of ensuring that digitally innovative forms of education provision do not lead to socially restrictive outcomes.

Having reached a point where the ability to make meaningful use of digital technology determines, to a significant extent, an individual’s ability to participate in modern societies and economies, then the need for action and intervention is obvious.

digital skills provision extends beyond the reach of traditional education institutions

broadband and ICTs also increase the ability of individuals to choose and arrange learning that is appropriate to their particular circumstances and needs

technology is widely perceived to support and enhance how individuals learn

Members of the Broadband Commission Working Group on Education RECOMMEND that the Commission

automatically generated data on the use of digital platforms and services as a means of mapping patterns of digital competencies and skills

Develop appropriate measurement and monitoring strategies

Promote quality and innovative provision

Ensure inclusion, equity and gender equality

Ensure effective government support and multistakeholder cooperation

Salient priority areas that policy-makers and practitioners

Some of the most relevant ‘digital skills’ likely to arise from these developments may not involve the direct use of digital technology.

ensure that all individuals are able to continually hone skills and competencies

Pronounced inequalities and disparities exist in terms of individuals’ digital skills and competencies within communities, countries and regions.

Foster ‘soft’ and ‘complementary’ digital skills: Incorporation of ‘twenty-first century skills’ into national curricula; development and promotion of practical programmes that aim to inform and safeguard digital safety; implications of online activities; development of digital literacy and citizenship; knowledge of digital rights; and awareness of how digital technology, big data and algorithms shape society.

Promising trends

The term ‘digital skills’ refers to a range of different abilities, many of which are not only ‘skills’ per se, but a combination of behaviours, expertise, know-how, work habits, character traits, dispositions and critical understandings.

digital citizens

Working Group on Education:Digital skills for life and workSeptember 2017

Distributing Products Built for Chrome

A commercial/proprietary vendor borrows funding, setting that borrowed funding against potential future revenue; an open-source community pools present capacity to create a sustainable future.

the fact that open-source software is the best guarantor of open standards

Conway's Law

The problem with this variant is that the tendency to aggregate functionality will at some point drive the Pike to eat an LTI-enabled Minnow

Pike and Minnows

Socio-economic factors are therefore potentially of particular significance to the NGDLE conversation, but are all too often not adequately represented or are reduced to a simplistic (and unsustainable, unless an infinitely expandable market is assumed) model of counting new LMS adoptions.

we simply had far less experience in component-based architectures and open application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the interconnection and communication of systems and components

At an institutional level, the lack of a clearly articulated transition path from the LMS to a potentially more flexible, component-based successor was undoubtedly a significant factor.

the Cylons

A white whale

There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

Call me Ishmael.

lisskane her grain of sand, dackolupatoni

Grains of sand are inert physical objects. They just lie around

whoever holds the bucket has the coins

W3C Web Annotation Data Model

We spend a lot of public and private money chasing silver bullets in education. I propose we would be better served by investing that money in providing educators with the training, support, and incentives to participate in the work of advancing the sciences of learning.

There is no silver bullet. In fact, there are all kinds of non-obvious factors that influence how well a given educational strategy works for a given student.

What if they failed because there aren’t just one or two factors that account for the difference that human tutors make?

not all subjects lend themselves equally well to being broken up into small, discrete, and straightforwardly measurable learning objectives that can be determinatively sequenced

the findings of the paper raise questions about whether our fundamental approach to educational research is adequate to the task of learning how to meet these grand educational challenges of our age

the effectiveness of different self-education strategies is heavily mediated by contextual factors like culture

STM views all scholarly, scientific, technical, medical and professional publishers as reputation managers not only of themselves, but of the whole community as well.

Today, you’re either above the API or below the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do.

premium mediocre

<script src="https://hypothes.is/embed.js" async></script>

Call me Ishmael.

Do public universities provide value over and above the costs that they accrue?

“Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.”

This is, fundamentally, about the dream of a public learning commons, where learners are empowered to shape the world as they encounter it.

Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive.

So one key component of Open Pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access.

one of the central gifts that it brings to faculty is that of agency

Open Pedagogy and Social Justice

he wishes Lacuna could be updated more easily. Texts must be submitted to the tech team for uploading, which can take a few days, and once his grant funded fellowship ended, he had to upload documents on his own, he said.

Social Media Is The New Smoking

I know I am sounding negative here, but it is the truth.

By and large, social media is not good for you.

Putting the Alternative Academic Back in Alt-Ac

those who are making a killing off cigarettes and anti-smoking campaigns alike

Alt-Ac Conversations and Social Media as the New Smoking

waiting for Godot

The edtech ecosystem brings forth its own set of privacy, ownership, and security concerns.

Our job is to manage the differences between these two cultures and bring collaborative, not overly competitive, learning solutions to our institutions.

rigorous, peer-reviewed science

In many ways, the health care community is ahead of the education community.

Instructors are learners too.

The word ecosystem, borrowed from its ecological and biological roots, here refers to the educational technology (edtech) market.

Everything must be open.

The overarching theme? Everything must be open.

open standards

Great edtech should fade into the background

The 2 Sigma Problem

What Is the Next Generation?

Shaping the Educational Technology Innovation Ecosystem

The privacy dashboard discloses to students the learning data being captured about them and how it is being used (such as for research and/or early warning tools).

An additional analogy can better describe the NGDLE: the LMS needs to be a central nervous system that connects the components (the bricks) in a unified learning ecosystem.

It's hard to imagine instructors both constructing a new mash-up environment and crafting improved learning activities.

Now is the time to start our journey.

As Herbert Simon observed: "Improvement in post-secondary education will require converting teaching from a 'solo sport' to a community-based research activity."

Understand that as difficult as the technology might be to envision, articulate, and implement, the culture changes required between where you are now and where you need to be to implement it will be much, much harder.

nontraditional platform partners, particularly those who have a learner- and learning-centric approach and architecture

Representation of Learner Identity

our systems need to be smart enough to direct learners back to review and relearning activities when the learners are struggling to remember or effectively apply previously demonstrated competencies at later stages in a program

More advanced versions of CMA functionality would allow learners to specify their own learning goals, map them to learning activities and experiences, and discover ways to self-validate achievement of those goals.

stored in the LRS

the repository of all learner goals, achievements, activities, and interactions

it is built from the ground up around individual learners

two major categories of required components: software architecture and learning architecture

A modern DLE of any generation is virtually unthinkable without standards support built in, readily available to connect and share data with a myriad of other tools and services.

By adaptively and dynamically updating learners' paths across programs, the N2GDLE increases the probability that students will achieve completion and earn credentials.

a slow, natural-selection process that brings us to the possibility of the N2GDLE vision

the once universally rejected ITS model

a willingness to work through or ignore the fundamental challenge to traditional instructor and student roles

no significant change

Unsurprisingly, neither of these domains has led to significant change to the traditional roles of or relationships between teachers and learners.

The unstoppable democratization of the web