Reflections on Learing Objects and OER sustainability

The Question put to us was: QUESTION -- How are the issues around OERs similar to those around learning objects? How can OER initiatives be sustained?
I read the papers (after printing): Learning Objects Literature by David Wiley (http://opencontent.org/docs/wiley-lo-review-final.pdf), the Reflections on Open Educational Resources:and institutional case study by Norm Friesen (http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/664) and Creating, Doing, and Sustaining OER: Lessons from Six Open Educational Resource Projects (http://tinyurl.com/bgssvw)

Wiley defines Learning Objects at the outset of his paper on the current literature in the field as reusable (but not necessarily free) and states very early on, that LOs rarely build upon each other in a meaningful way which is the lynch-pin of Open Education Resources. Whether the prevailing metaphor is LEGO, molecular,Brick and Mortar or a programmers Object to manipulate, LOs are require a 'contextual glue' in order to be assembled or aggregated into something meaningful to a (re)user. They exist in multiple forms and incarnations evolving from, but not adapting of, the original resource. Learning Objects can function in a highly structured, formatted and precise, non-organic and somewhat sterile automated environment.This Wiley says is not a natural way of learning and thus provides a paradox since the highly structured Learning Resource is not how we naturally learn. His heterogeneous more flexible use of Learning objects provides a facilitated or guided direction to aggregating knowledge but is less amenable to reuse and automation. This he calls the reuseability paradox: the more bereft of context a resource is the more reusable it is but the less instructionally effective!

I like that he points out how the fight is about nomenclature, metaphors and staking out ones turf in the new Online educational milieu. In the section on Competing Definitions and Related Terms he runs the gamut of how confusing this can be for even the most well versed in the literature on this topic. I think that these debates (verbal jousting if you will) would certainly scare off the initiate to these complex topics in education and will ( and does ) intimidate a lot of others who feel woefully inadequate to wade into the mire that has been created; the cacophony being less without one added voice


Cataloguing learning resources ranges from highly structured models(SCORM,LOM, etc.) which requires highly technical skills and time consuming resources but are codified and efficient to search; to the cataloguing of the masses (Tagging,Metadata and RSS feeds) which carry with it polysemy (single tag many meanings) and synonymy (resource tagged with different words) and while democratic can lead to difficulty finding resources.
I like that he provided equal time for critics like Parrish and Friesen ( pedagogical and technical issues of LOs) and that he mentions how intertwined the Corporate/Military Industrial Complex is with the infrastructures over which much of this learning is to take place. As Howard Zinn said "You can't be neutral on a moving train" and to skirt the issues of net-neutrality is to in essences bury ones head in the sand to all but the relevant issues of the moment. Context, criticism and a more world-centric view with regard to many issues in these current debates may provide some clarity and practicality in the future.

Open Resources by their very nature are designed specifically to be adapted and modified by others and at their central core is the Creative Commons or GNU FDL open licensing /transaction schemes to clear all obstacles to creativity and reuse. ( not sure if everyone is following the licensing to the letter but I have yet to hear of high profile cases being made against copyrighted materials licenses in this manner ) Wiley suggests that these resources can both be aggregated and adapted but mentioned nothing critical about OERs, so I turn to the article by Friesen Reflections on sustaining Open Educational Resources: an institutional case study.


Are not the vast majority of these OERs linguistically can culturally biased and does this not carry with it a cultural imperialism of a sort (see Downes 2005). If we have no buy-in because of cultural or contextual limitations then reuseability becomes a moot issue. The content providers might not be able to "..... context and culture into account when developing and implementing technological solutions in complex social systems" due to
Content re-creators may not have the technical skills or language skills to adapt highly technical information to specific needs so much more time and money will have to be invested to support OERs in countries other than the US( 1700 courses in the US vs. 950 in all China, Japan and France since 2006 (Wiley) attests to this). Given the global economic downturn this seems unlikely to happen. When big business hurts, post secondary institutions ( and funding) get crippled.

Most OERS also rely quite heavily on traditional revenue sources to be successful. Not just any institution can follow MIT's lead, which Friesen suggests that all educational establishments should emulate for lack of money or talent or technical expertise surrounding getting such an endeavour off the ground. I suspect that what appeared to be quite successful OERs in 2002 or 2003 (such as CLOE and ARIADNE) fell victims to one or more of the limitations of the project management triangle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Management_Triangle

To sustain OERs, As Karen mentioned is a very hotly debated topic and has caused it share of divisiveness in the academic world I'm sure . But as I read the paper by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (LINK) (ISKME) I realized that there are best practises that can occur world-wide as long as people are willing to contribute freely of their own volition and support mechanisms for collaborative authorship are maintained or enhanced for (re-)creators of content. Additionally a recurring theme in all these representative best-practise case studies funding. All success is predicated on stable and secure ongoing funding models (see rant to follow) of More interest to me was the explorattion of the aspects of engagement by users of Curriki, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Teachers Domain projects. I think if they can identify key uses and interest patterns they may be able to target and increase traffic more successfully and thereby secure the necessary funding. The advertising component is after all a necessity (either for prestige or monetary gain) in order to maintain the altruistic goals espoused by most OER projects leaders.

It is very sad to see every human endeavour enslaved to capital, but that is our current system; a system based on class and debt regardless of the country you live in. I think that the free democratic open courseware /resources movement is unsustainable and fails within the 3 year time period because it is at odds the the power structures and corporations that commodify every aspect of life including (free, online , or otherwise) education. Even if there isn't a profit motive, the contributors must still work and live and work within the hierarchy and control of the few. Thus for world-wide acceptance on a paradigm-shifting scale of this very democratic educational ideal , we need to fundamentally undo the existing systems of control as proposed by the edupunks, Paulo Freire, Marx & Engels,Chris Hedges,John Ralston-Saul, Howard Zinn, Martin Luther King Jr., Noam Chomsky,Naomi Klein and a host of others who speak truth to power.

MADLat 2010

This year's Manitoba Association of Distributed Learning and Training annual international conference at the Red River College Princess Street Campus was a roaring success by reckoning. The workshops by Darren Kuropatwa from MECY and Stephanie Chu from Simon Fraser University provided many educators with Web based online learning tools they hadn't previously known about. But my thoughts on both of these workshops, as I am familiar with many of these tools, was towards the comments about the establishment of a great student-teacher rapport and the liberation and sharing that occurs when collaborating online.This is oft touted as the main pedagogical reason for incorporating social networking and Web 2.0 technologies in your classroom. I must concur that this can and does happen, but does it also not l take place between and effective teacher and his students without being in the public domain? If it is indeed beneficial to share with others and post all of your students work (akin to a WorldWide Bulletin Board) why can it not be on the school intranet or in a WAN set up for that purpose.This would then be inclusive for not only the students but also parents and other stakeholders who have a vested interest in particular student's creativity and work; as the neologism goes, a 'walled Garden. Not everything that is created is in, or belongs in, the public domain! I suspect that the answer to why all things must be posted to the web lies in the fact that everyone is looking for either their 15 minutes of glory ( students) or some shameless self-promotion and aggrandizement (teachers). I know of many very effective and superb teachers and professors that accomplish all their curricular outcomes ( and then some) without excessive or even ANY use of the current social networking tools.In many cases they either have no access to PCs due to scheduling not the number of computers or in a lot of cases they choose not to spend all the extra time required to implement and administer the online/application technology for the same outcome that can be achieved much easier. My wife is one such person and I would not classify her as a Luddite in the least. She is just trying to be effective and maintain balance in her (our) life. Many instructors and teachers do not examine the pedagogical grounding for incorporating a technology into their classroom and so either use it because of the 'neato' factor or to show they are incorporating ICT into their coursework, thereby placating their superiors who have invested large sums of public funds in said technology and infrastructure. He who mandates technology is not interested in mass-adoption of technology but rather has ulterior motives . We as educators need to exercise the critical thinking skills we are expected to instill in our students and question if and why at technology should be incorporated in our class and how it fits with our education and teaching style.
As we learned in the Emerging Tech course, people learn best socially anyway. This would explain why the luminary thinkers of yore, without Facebook, email or even any means of video or audio capture, still managed to create enduring works that we are still remixing and recreating today. As Steven Covey's 7 habits suggests the character and real substance lays beneath the surface (roots) not in the facade presented to most people.Unfortunately we are immersed in a culture of immediate gratification, the trivial and vain.When my boy says to me after I tell him to stop going from screen to screen (T.V, Computer, DS, WII....) "Dad! That's what we do!", I am saddened because he is right; that is what they do. They do not engage much in the use of their imaginations or any active 'creating' of learning materials, for sharing or otherwise. They are passive consumers. And this I think is the overarching societal condition that is leading to the results that are evident in the BU study.





Dr.Michael Power from Laval University was this year's keynote speaker and a very engaging one at that. I thought he was from Newfoundland as his accent seemed to attest to, but he is from Nova Scotia.(He's 'caper', they threw rocks at the seagulls to create NFLD ya know) .He talked about Blended Online Learning Design (BOLD) which prompted some lively discussion within the post secondary set of instructors. I saved my questions until after they were finished as a lot of what applies to post secondary institutions does not have the slightest bearing on High School; namely funding, student motivation, institutional barriers to technology and a myriad of others factors which have unique parameters within our domain. I asked him how his theories would be adapted and incorporated at the secondary level and he gave pointed me towards a PhD candidate who is working with BOLD concepts and implementations in the high schools of Newfoundland ("DA ROCK Brudder")

My primary reason for attending this year though was to find out more about the work by Mr. Michael Nantias and his colleague Dr. Glenn Cockerline on the abilities, or lack thereof, of Digital Natives based on the survey work they did at Brandon University last year. Their session, Are Millennials Digital Illiterates? Busting the myth about the current cohort of post-secondary students, was very well attended and the discussions could have went on for longer than the prescribed hour. Their research paper (Adobe Acrobat pdf file p.57) is here http://www.mern.ca/reports/Journal-V3.pdf. Basically it states that last years education students at B.U., some of whom are post-graduates, are sorely lacking in the skills that ,we are constantly told, are needed for the 21st century. The limited skills they do have are acquired from using the ubiquitous devices of our age in conjunction with the Internet purely for entertainment purposes, the skills being ancillary to the fun. This was a theme followed up by Dr.Keengwe later in session 31 in which he attributed the same to his graduate students in is classes in North Dakaota. One of my perceptions that I shared with the presenters was, that these are merely technical skills in which one must become proficient so that creation/recreation and personal learning with OERs (or offline materials) may take place in some meaningful, deeper manner; the presumption being that students all ready have the the higher order thinking and reading skills required to be successful critical thinkers online.

If, by their own admission, this filtered and elite subset of post secondary students is the best we can hope for in the turning of the pedagogical tide towards ( blended ) online learning , or in fact inculcating these skills in our youth as educators, then we are a very long way off from the paradigm shift that much of the current literature says is imminent. A mass-movement towards engaged learning in a remixed culture of participatory learning and sharing cannot happen without the masses and this study shines a pragmatic light on this whole area of learning with some serious ramifications for teaching as well. But like all things antithetical to the accepted wisdom ( Tapscott,Prensky etc.), it is heretical to criticize or even bring a 'questioning mind' to the discussion on the 'new' technologies. Indeed you are either seen as anti-technology or a gadfly who wishes nothing but to take an adversarial position for some sort of perverse pleasure; not as someone seeking some scientifically quantifiable measurement which will actually be of use beyond selling the next technology as a panacea for all our educational deficiencies. I feel that is why the literature in this field is so sparse and why the work of Mark Bullen et.al. , Douglass Ruskoff , Mike Nantais and Larry Cuban, to name a few, is so important. It lets us know there are some persons who have the 'rose-colored' glasses removed and are staring down the microscope for our benefit. Thanks guys.

Open, Educational, and Resource -Definitions

Week 2 of our course on OERs required all students to blog about what they thought the definition the title terms above were. I have fell behind in the course but, because of the magic of asynchronicity in these courses, I can catch up without much of the course content (except being interactive with my colleagues ) being lost. I can (and have seen) however that this can caused much grief and has actually caused some persons to loose course credit due to the insurmountable amounts of work that accumulated. This online medium for learning is for the highly motivated, who at times have great difficulty keeping up.

Without searching the web or reading my course-mates blogs I am going to define Openness as a state that can be chosen or forced upon a person. I can choose to share my photos or other creative work, my course development work for the speciality computer courses I teach (although it technically property of the Brandon School Division), or my video lessons for those same courses. If I post them on the WWW then they become common property for which not many professionals I know, feel the least compunction about taking and using without permission, let alone giving credit where it is due. With professionals acting this manner, students simply follow that which is modelled.

Forced openness is a little trickier to define but it is around us everywhere. When we renew or vehicle licenses, get a passport or take out a loan or mortgage, we are forced into divulging more about ourselves that Facebook or any other social networking application can ever hope to collect. There is little wonder online social media and other businesses wish all of our most intimate details; they are simply following their offline counterparts. This in order to commodification permeates not only education but all other human pursuits (which is apparently the pinnacle of our achievements). Whether we know it or like it, forced openness is with us through mechanisms in power structures beyond our control.

Defining the word 'Educational' has gone on for millennia and is an epistemological debate to which I can add very little that has not already been pondered by the great thinkers. I would just say that something worth knowing has to be of practical use or else it becomes trivial. The pursuit of esoteric knowledge may lead to a greater practical goal, but it ultimately has to be useful to some group or person in order for it to remain a valid pursuit. A lot of our curriculum's at the secondary level is the fitting of 'portioned-out' knowledge by content experts into knowledge receptacles. Again, after being pointed towards the writing of Paulo Freire I cannot but think of how our modern educational system, while giving us technological wonders to make our life easier and to endless entertain us, has somewhat diminished the true knowledge many of us need. here in the western world and in the developing world alike.

Lastly, 'Resources' can be anything that is useful to an individual in the pursuit of the betterment of himself or others. It can be an educational learning object, a tangible good, or a idea of thought shared with others. The terrestrial type of resources, of which we care quickly running out, are important but are finite. The creative and renewable online (and offline ) resources are where we need to focus our imagination and creative efforts, so that we will not only share, recreate,expand, improve and transcend but also so that we will never be in a situation where there is scarcity, real, manufactured or perceived.

Further to the implementation issues in the developing world I have provided a few links to some resources I accessed in the Intro to Emerging Technologies course.

Providing content and facilitating social change: Electronic media in rural development based on case material from Peru by Robin Van Koertrom at the University of Illinois at Chicago is a very interesting paper and better articulates the limitations on OERS and their practical use. No better place to find out about how OERs work thani in 'field trials' from people who are trying to implement them.

Also check this podcast from UIC http://www.firstmondaypodcast.org/audio/open2_final.mp3

For another similar perspective see George Siemen's Connectivism site where he discusses

Challenges faced by African Universities in technology integration

Online Educational Resources - The Capetown and Budapest accords

The course I am now enrolled in at the University of Manitoba is for me going to a further examination of OERS from both a critical and a practical view. From what I learned in the Introduction to Emerging Technologies course about OERS they are very English Language and High bandwidth oriented endeavours. On Stephen Downes blog (for example We Learn, Thoughts on Solutions, & OERs Moving On ) and Chris Lott's blog there are carefully thought out arguments on OER implemetation which are much more eloquent and erudite than I could ever hope to produce in this blog. Of course these postings have to be read after much foundational reading and rumination about OERs in order to have any value to us as educational professionals. (This I find true for all the courses I have done in the Emerging Technologies field;staying current, posting and sharing has to be a passion in order to stay engaged at a professional or graduate level and even then is hugely time consuming given our off-line life commitments )

But to the point of the course I guess I did not sign either of the two initiatives that are mentioned in the title of this blog and probably wouldn't have anyway for some of the following reasons

1. I wasn't aware of them


2. I have a philosophical and semantic issue with the definition of freedom and openness


3. It seems difficult to get educators and administrators in our economically privileged hemisphere to 'buy in' and engage in the new participatory learning models using OER therefore, how can we expect the whole world to sign on to a declaration of something that has no meaning for them
4. Anything that has George Soros' name attached to it cannot be a free endeavour devoid of attached strings. To short the English Pound and make 10 billion dollars does not sound like the actions of an enlighten philanthropist ready to change the way the way works (economically or otherwise). While I agree that money has to push innovation and mass acceptance I think this is counteractive to OERs ultimate goals for the world's education paradigm shift
   

While I agree with the principles espoused in these declarations and feel they need codified in some manner it seems, as with many things regarding the online learning communities, it is done by a relatively small cadre of over-committed and hyper-productive individuals; well meaning, idealistic and often times right in the convictions of what must take place The number of signatories (2328 for Capetown & 5228 for Budapest) attest to this. Not quite slacltivism but certainly not a deluge of participation of global scope. While these individuals may be influential thinkers and educators they will not be the ones to force change but I laud there efforts. It will have to be a mandate from the masses who have yet to engage in large enough numbers to create a critical mass for change in education ( and the others ....ecology, economics, politics.......)

They will have to 'buy in' in huge numbers which means they will have to have easy and fast access in huge numbers and see this 'product' as valuable to them in their own circumstances.

This being said I do agree with what the Budapest Declaration said regarding peer reviewed articles. If Shakespeare's plays not be widely disseminated and were treated only as a means of increasing wealth for his family (he'd be a corporation it today's world) we would have been greatly diminished as a species. Thus I think is essential to share and give away our knowledge and expertise. But I don't agree that the peer-review is the best or only type of shareable or worthy knowledge as they contend. A lot of what is valued is on the deep or hidden web; Intranets and wall gardens of corporations, schools and individuals. Also it presumes that a lot of persons in academia are willing or able to share their research because of institutional or corporate intellectual ownership.


To put my preceding comments into context I must diverge from the topic questions proivded to us by Ms. Keiller

Most people, myself included, lurk and learn without fear of embarrassment , loss of grade, etc. We take and use that which is useful to us and leave the rest. As I have learned from my readings by Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, we cannot impose solutions pedagogical or economic, but rather they must be created and consumed by and for the end user. If they are not producing then they are not actively engaged in the collaborative process that we all take for granted as the coming wave in education. The learning materaisl have to be set in context, practical and adaptive to be meaningful and adopted en mass. This is the antithesis of our 'systematic' and institutional approach in the west. Our 'hammer and nail' solutions are not practical in the underdeveloped or emerging world (notice they are always defined in term sof economics)

I have to admit that all of my thinking on matters in education have not only been colored by the above educational philosophers, but also by the likes of Naomi Klein( Shock Doctrine), Howard Zinn (People's History of the United States) and Chris Hedges (numerous books and online writings). They have greatly influenced my thinking on how matters of education are always circumscibed by the economic and political factors enveloping our global village. I think the paradigm shift for Open Education and its democratic principles supported by the freedom of the delivery method ( Internet) suggests nothing less than the dismantling of our whole capitalist/corporatist system of control, a mighty tall order indeed.

Digital Nation

There is a very interesting and disturbing trend to unchecked exhuberance for all things computer-related. PBS recently aired a documentary called Digital Nation, which among other things, showed how Korea is now feeling the effects of Internet addiction. Also of interest in the show was the interesting study done at MIT. If MIT grads function at diminished cacpacity while 'multitasking', where does this leave the continual partially connected secondary school students awash in a sea of information they are unable to decode. I am indebted to Chris Lott who is not only a great creative and thought-provoking blogger, but who also challenges the accepted wisdom of the masses when it comes to the wholesale acceptance of technology without questioning existing power structures that dominate all societies, corporatist, captialism and socialist alike.

http://chrislott.org/story/concentration-and-imagination-in-the-digital-age/

No Child Left Thinking – Dr. Joel Westheimer

Dr. Joel Westheimer is presenting a public lecture at the University of Regina on Monday, January 25th, 3:30-4:45 (CST). I will doing my best to stream the event live via this Ustream channel.

Details of the session are found below.

“No Child Left Thinking: Democracy at Risk in Canadian Schools”
Dr. Joel Westheimer from the University of Ottawa will be delivering a free public lecture to the university and broader community on Monday, January 25th, 2010 3:30pm-4:45pm Education Auditorium (U of R) on the topic of social justice, citizenship, and democracy. His talk is provocatively entitled: “No Child Left Thinking: Democracy at Risk in Canadian Schools” .

Hayes Carll and Steve Earle

Steve Earle is still battling his demons in more ways than one. Friday night at the Burton Cummings Center in Winnipeg, the reformed heroin and whiskey addict was battling that legacy yet again. A certain number of 'fans,' who still identified with pre-jail era Earle, seem to think that by recreating a drunken, drug-induced stupor, they were being as rebellious as him in his 'bad ol' days' and that this by extension was some sort of homage or flattery that Steve himself would appreciate. It was most decidedly not.
These boorish louts exhibited their undying allegiance to Earle's previous (and their current) lifestyle by continually interrupting in their self-induced 'Tourettes Syndrome' style by screaming for songs when he was trying to relate some solemn affair or detail of his hard worn life. The first shouts for Guitar Town (and many others to follow) brought the response from Earle,
"What are you? Retarded? This is acoustic. Just me and the guitar buddy."
Later he tried to make jokes about it by saying "I remember my first beer too buddy" and "This is the second drunkest audience I've played for in a while", but his humour vanished quite quickly and he said "I won't play Guitar Town because of you. Later on, when he apologized for losing his cool during an encore he did play the song so that"The asshole wouldn't killed on the way out" to quote Earle.

During his talks about his intimate knowledge of a friendship with Townes Van Zandt that most people came to hear, there were drunken moronic shouts and instead of Steve being allowed to share his personal insights and quiet reflections about his and Townes hard ridden lives, he was constantly staving off yelling and badgering requests for other songs.
To say the least, Earle was disgusted and he apologized to the "people who actually came here tonight to hear the music" for the idiots who ruined it for them and for himself.

Near the end he even asked why the house- policy was to serve booze throughout the concert and warned that "It'll be very hard for you to get a beer the next time I come here.You guys can't handle it."


Where were the Security that would not intervene to save both Earle's show and assuage the true fans who almost universally called for the expulsion of the riff-raff.We commiserated in frustrated mumblings while the security quietly admonished the churlish children who were 'acting out' to 'please please, PLEASE' behave. Even a misbehaving child would have been sent for a time-out. The Guardians of this venue obviously haven't been to that parenting class and these gin-soaked brats continued to verbally abuse Earle and those who were trying hard to be attentive patrons.


Shame on the Burton Cummings Center staff for not respecting Steve Earle's repeated requests to do someting about the rabble that were ruining the show. We'll not likely attract many more of his stature if concerts are treated as a wrestling-type event and in fact he himself may not ever return with such a repugnent assault on his talent and his fans. I also pity the poor patrons of upcoming events at the BCC, who will, it appears, have to be be subjected to drunken hillbillies' antics far and away more worse than any loud expository on a cell phone. So much for Friendly Manitoba! I don't think Steve Earle used those words to describe his reception in Winnipeg last night.The ignominious experience should make both the Burton Cummings Center, and Winnipeg in general, re-examine their place in the music scene across Canada and in North America. As Johnny Cash told us "Well bad news travels like wild fire...."