Elearnspace

Across the full spectrum of education – primary, secondary, and higher – we are witnessing a race to develop platforms for content, learning, teaching, and evaluation. As liberating as the web is, tremendous centralization of control is occurring in numerous spaces: Google in search/advertising/Android, Amazon in books/cloud computing, Facebook in social networks, etc. I use a smaller range of tools today than I did five years ago. And the reason is simple: companies are in a landrush to create platforms that will tie together previously disconnected activities and tools.

I did an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education on Why Universities Should Experiment With ‘Massive Open Courses’. Thanks to Jeff and Warren for the opportunity to share some of the work that Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Alec Couros, and a growing number of educators have engaged in over the last four years.

We are several weeks into the Change open online course. We have an outstanding speaker list. But, unfortunately, we’ve had issues every week with our live online sessions. We’ve looked at WizIQ, Vyew, and Big Blue Button. All have been terrible failures. So we tried FuzeMeeting today. Another horrible crash and burn. It’s getting embarrassing and frustrating as a MOOC organizer.

For people who have been involved in online education for the past 15 years, or distance education for the past 40 years, the current hype and energy around learning at a distance must be a bit odd – like waking up to discover that your life’s work is suddenly being “discovered” by others and labelled as “new”. I’ve been playing with online learning since late 1990?s, but colleagues at Athabasca University and other open university systems have been at it much longer under the term of “distance learning” or “distance education”.

I’m a fan of dichotomies, recognizing very well the weaknesses they hold. A dichotomy is a way of pinning points of thought. Hopefully, once these points have been pinned, we can start to explore the nuances and gradients that exist between these positions.

This call for chapters for a text on open online courses (.doc), edited Rita Kop, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, might be of interest to readers. The two-page abstract of prospective chapters is due Oct 31, 2011.

Higher education faces a value crisis. Value is a fuzzy concept. In theory, I can purchase a $3 steak that isn’t a good value. Or a $20 hamburger that is a great value. Similarly, I could purchase a house for $500k that was a great value pre-2008 and is suddenly a terrible value in 2011. With physical objects, value is based on what you receive in relation to what you spend. The transaction always occurs in some context where value is a function of numerous inter-relating entities (stock market, economy, demand).

OECD has released the 2011 version of Education at a Glance. It’s available for free download. This is an outstanding resource – review and have handy the next time you’re in a conference and a keynote speaker drones on about educational change, relying on opinions rather than stats. Most of the hype and declarations about the end of schools, universities, classrooms, etc., rely on listeners accepting a possible future state as inevitable reality.

Seb Schmoller has been following the Stanford AI course (now with over 225 000 registrants) closely and recently shared this link on whether the course is a launch point for a commercial venture. A company Know-Labs appears to be behind the course:

In 2006 I published a book – Knowing Knowledge – (.pdf version for download here). I’ve never really tracked how many copies it has sold – a few thousand at best. I stopped tracking pdf downloads about two years ago as it was approaching 1 million (far, far less have actually read it, I’m sure). It has been translated into various languages (Spanish, Chinese, and a few others that I forget at the moment).