wallen's blog

Colin Currie, writing in this quarter's Educause Quarterly, offers a quick survey of the history of open education, beginning with Britain's Open University.The OU's forty-year evolution (amazing list of delivery methods) reached a new and exciting phase with its OpenLearn initiative: Free education and free educational resources for teachers around the world.

A similar move at Canada's Athabasca University (Open AU). An additional move at Athabasca is the AU Press, an open source university press. At the same time the Canadian government is considering extensive changes to copyright in Canada.

Back in '05 I posted a number of very short "things overheard" during the summer SAC meeting. I was infected by the things I was hearing and wanted to share them. After a few postings I got a public and private protest that the one-liners were inappropriate for a blog. I suppose that is true. What I really needed in '05 was Twitter. Alas, not available.

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.With that begins one of the most exciting and provocative reads I have seen in a very long time. The document is the work of two faculty members leading the Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities: Todd Presner (UCLA) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford).  The Manifesto is available at

Digital Humanities Blog

 The Manifesto is reflective

The economic collapse has not yet hit Arkansas. Not badly yet. At least that seems to be what people in power are saying. (I do see lots of foreclosure notices in the paper, but those are not people in power).

Our forest too will start falling. State budget cuts will come. Rather than doing one big cut, Arkansas likes to nibble. We will get three or four budget cuts. Athletics will be fine. But the rest of us will suffer.

I fear that the decisions about computing resources will be made quickly and not visibly (well, we like to have meetings to let people talk and then let the people in power go ahead do what god has told them to do).

Some exciting initiatives will pause and maybe disappear. Some initiatives that appear to promise help to the aims of the chamber of commerce will get support.

None of this is surprising. What keeps me awake is not the fact that important things will cease, but that this crisis will further erode education, further turn us into training and community development places.

That's what keeps me awake.

The economic downturn is not as down in Arkansas as it will be later this year. As of now we deal with the economic situation by not talking about it. When state revenue recedes and universities take round after round of cuts, we will acknowledge that down is here. What I fear is that enormous turf battles will erupt over computing resources. Standing at the clock tower I can see the silos that will be as whole as possible and I can see the pea patches that will be lucky to have electricity.

In the proposed stimulus package includes infrastruture at universities, I hope that it will come some and come with substance. I hate watching adults fight.

As best I can determine my university has entered into an agreement with a private company to produce and market online programs and perhaps individual courses. As described to me by a colleague, a professor will tape a semester's worth of lectures, using PowerPoint to create main points. Once these lectures are recorded the company takes over. A company person with a higher degree in the field, will serve as go-between for students and the professor. The professor will never be in direct contact with the students. The success of the venture lies in marketing by the company; create very high enrollments in order to produce impressive income for the institution and the company.

I wonder how many universities have signed on the dotted line with such companies. I also wonder how many such companies are out there.

I see that Blackboard recently improved its LMS by adding an outcomes widget. Outcomes. Assessment. A culture of assessment. Continuous assessment. I'm not sure that it really matters what one teaches; the teacher's mission is to engage in a culture of continuous assessment.

I keep hearing that to live the life of assessment (or is the life of outcomes?) the teacher must have specific goals and objectives and how one measures the outcome of the goals and objectives and that this is best achieved by stuffing things into a rubric. Why does the word "rubric" always sound obscene? At any rate I think of a rubric as three-dimensional though I find it odd that the people who most often speak of rubrics are fairly two-dimensional people.

Presumably all this outcomes measurements activities goingson have to do with taking minds and adding to them. People who speak of outcomes and assessments also tend to use the phrase "value added."

An interesting experience from the classroom:

Most of us beyond our early '20s use a term, social networking, to identify activities that have become second nature to Web 2. In a class I determined that I would introduce some scholarly social networks in order to expand their comprehension of social networking.

Luckily, I began by asking "what is social networking?" The class was large and students are often shy about speaking in front of many people. I repeated the question. No raised hands were evident. I changed the question. "How many of you do not know what social networking is?." Now I saw many raised hands.

I pursued the top a bit asking if they knew about or used Facebook, MySpace, or other sites that joined hundreds or thousands of people in communication. Most students participated in social sites.

Suddenly I realized what was happening. My students had been using social networking as a normal and  frequent activity. They were social networking as a matter of course and never needed to be told what we older folk needed a term to comprehend the activity.

I teach a survey of art history class. I use digital images in the classroom and online. While I have several thousand of my own images, my collection is far from comprehensive in chronology and in geography. Arkansas State University twice purchased digital images under a contract with Saskia and others that places severe restrictions on where and how the images may be used (they may be seen only by faculty and students of the university under a secure sign-in system).

I discovered that Flickr has a large store of digital images that may be used for educational purposes. Of these hundreds deal with art and architecture (mostly architecture and sculpture, but with some surprisingly good images of paintings). I never prepare a presentation for my students without checking the holdings of Flickr. Additionally, when I find a particularly good source of images, I bookmark it in del.icio.us so that I may quickly find the collections (under imagearchive) and also share what I have found with others.

A highly de-centralized image management system exists and is also under development at Williams College. Academic Commons published the interview between AC and Henry Art, Biology/Environmental Science, Williams College. Also participating was Jonathan Leamon from Instruction Technology.

Art has thousands of Kodachromes and scans these as needed. He admits that he finds the slides better images but likes the convenience of modern digital images. Prof. Art does his own metadata tagging. Leamon says that Instruction Technology will help faculty with setting up a system for their images. He describes the image management system thus