Archive for the 'ocwc_logan08' Category

Wednesday Quick Hits

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on October 1, 2008
in ocw consortium, ocwc, ocwc_logan08, opencourseware and opened2008
. 2 Comments

I don’t know if it’s just due to the recent conference, but there’s been a huge uptick in discussion about OCW in the past couple days, and in an attempt to keep up with it I’m providing these quick hits:

First, there were a bunch of excellent posts about conference sessions.

Ken Udas on why individual membership to the OCWC is a great idea. Stian on presentations he found helpful (and some he found confusing).

Willem Van Valkenburg (of TU Delft) covers the WikiEducator presentation, and gets a shot of the slide I have been wanting to talk about but not had the time to yet — the quality assurance model of the project. This social QA bit was the really interesting bit of the presentation for me — how to avoid the overbearing paternalism that Wikipedia has got into lately while still providing some level of quality control (The solution, according to Wayne, is to allow tiered levels of content, which you can see on the slide Willem has captured). Wlliem also covers the Board composition (although I think Brandon is included in the list by mistake).

Through the glory of twitter, Stian Haklev notes we may have the first Italian OCW. I’m a little disappointed it uses Flash, which is unfriendly to hacking and things like Google translation — but given they use the ND license, I suppose this is partially by design (Stian notes the ND with a “Come on!”. Yup.) I seem to be saying this a lot lately, but I’ll try to find out more about this project and post it here. To my knowledge, they haven’t talked to the consortium.

Speaking of the glories of Twitter, Jared Stein seems hours away from having his Moodle OCW mod done, at least as I read his recent tweet (updates protected). I saw this demo’d at the conference. Very sweet, and very simple — works the way you would expect it to work. Which anyone in software knows is a difficult thing to accomplish. He’s promised me a screencast when complete (nudge, nudge).

There’s more, but I’ll have to post later…

BYU’s Loosely Coupled Gradebook

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 28, 2008
in ocwc_logan08, opencourseware, opened2008 and presentations
. 0 Comments

We’ve known for years that if we want to move learning environments forward we need to move to loosely coupled assessment. We need to separate gradebooks and rosters from course materials and communities. Scott Leslie argued this point eloquently over a lunch I shared with him and others at OpenEd, and I’ve argued similar points much less eloquently in the past.

In OCW production, the need is particularly strong. At least some of the duplicated work in OCW production is necessitated by the fact the course materials have to be produced in an LMS (because that’s where the student roster lives) as well as on the broader web (which can’t talk to the roster).

One sustainable model would have the OCW site replace the repository function of the LMS entirely. In such a system, certain materials might be made available only to rostered students because of IP concerns, but these materials would live side by side on a single courseware site, and eliminate the “double-entry book-keeping” issue that many institutions currently have.

But to get to this LMS-free world, professors need access to the one piece that has traditionally been the sole domain of the LMS — a gradebook. And if developers of courseware want to structure permissions based on that roster, the gradebook needs to be able to communicate with multiple systems.

Luckily, Jon Mott is working on just such an application. He took a moment at the conference to talk about it with me:

Jon later commented on the crowdvine site for the conference that the feedback he got on this project at OpenEd was extremely positive. We’ll let you know more as the project progresses.

What the OpenEd/OCWC Conference Is About

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 26, 2008
in edupunk, ocwc_logan08, opencourseware, opened2008 and presentations
. 3 Comments

We have plenty of video and reporting on the conference coming soon, but this, to me, was the sort of thing the conference was about — getting people from different areas together to find common cause.

In this clip, if you can hear over the ambient noise, you’ll see Brian Lamb giving a presentation on edupunk approaches to course publishing.

Christine Geith, who has been in distance education since 1989, is excited. But when Brian says it deals with everything but the gradebook, Christine (quite rightly) wants to know how that is handled. At which point John Mott, standing next to her listening to Jim, describes a new grant funded project that he is working on at BYU — a separable gradebook application that can work as easily with WordPress as with Sakai or Blackboard.

Christine remarks that it reminds her of way back, when people first began using online threaded discussions, and it was such a simple powerful presentation mode that made so many things possible.

I’m a big proponent of replacing a lot of face to face interaction with distance technologies. But when you see three people who have never heard of each other brought together like this — well, you can’t beat it.

And the OCWC Conference tag is… ocwc_logan08

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 4, 2008
in OCWC Conference and ocwc_logan08
. 0 Comments

OK, I’ll admit it’s a mouthful. But it was between that and the overly clinical OCWC_908, which sounded sort of like a vitamin supplement.

For those just joining us: in the comments of our last post, Stian pushed us to get together a tag for any writing people wanted to do regarding the OCWC conference. The idea here is that:

  • Presenters can blog on their own blogs about what they plan to do at the conference, and we’ll catch it in aggregation
  • People attending can write before the fact about what they’d want to get out of it, and we’ll catch that
  • People can respond to what they got out of the conference and will be able to get that on the radar as well
That’s just the briefest overview of what we might get out of tag-based aggregation (add to that photos, resources, twitter feeds — this is really open-ended). But the point is if you are talking about anything regarding the upcoming Logan OCWC event, tag it somehow, via Wordpress, del.icio.us, Digg, flickr, whatever.
In the next couple of days we’ll provide someway to track such tagged materials (although don’t let us stop you from tracking it using your own tools), and for the more hieracharchly inclined we will be throwing up information on the wiki about the individual the sessions (watch this space for more info).
But please, tag, tag, tag!

Sharing and the OCWC Conference

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on August 29, 2008
in OCWC Conference and ocwc_logan08
. 7 Comments

Great post today from OCWC board member Phillip Schmidt on the iSummit event he attended — what went well, what might have gone better. As a communications guy getting ready for our own conference in September, this graf, on how best to share the conference with the larger community, was particularly thought-provoking to me:

The natural response to this would be: “place more emphasis on documentation and share audio/video/text online”. However, having facilitated the documentation efforts at the iSummit 2007 I know how hard it is to collect all the images and notes from participants, and how much (tedious) editing is required to bring it together into a useful resource. Yet, I am not sure how many people actually go back to the notes beyond trying to find email addresses of people they met, or links to projects that were mentioned. In 2007, Mark and I knew we were going to write an article about the event, so having very detailed notes was more important than this year.

So I would suggest, that rather than trying to document everything that is going on during the event, we create a rich list of contact details, URLs, and links to everything that comes up during the discussions. Every time someone mentions a project, it needs to be added to a list of resources on the wiki. That’s relatively easy to do, even if we ad short annotations which makes the list so much more useful, and this could easily live on after the event.

Like most people reading this, I’ve seen sharing efforts at these sorts of things done well and done poorly — and found that there’s not necessarily one right way. It depends on who your conference audience is. I’ve been to academic conferences where almost everything put online was done centrally (and what was put online was not much). On the other hand, I’ve presented at a digital democracy events where people liveblogged your presentation as you spoke.

My sense is our community falls between those two extremes, and in the next couple of weeks we’ll be figuring out how best to assist in documenting the event in a way appropriate to our resources and audience. But we’d love your help. What sort of things have you seen that have really worked — and have not added that much overhead? What have you seen that has failed?

And the big question: what sort of approach to documentation would you like to see us employ in Logan?

[and remember this question is as much directed to those who will not be in Logan as those who will, Consortium members and non-members alike -- share your thoughts!]