Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein

I began the following Google Wave yesterday as a means of orienting myself to its functionality and features, but more importantly as a way to move past the more mundane and obvious applications for education. As you will see, I invited a number of colleagues and contacts to join, then made the Wave open to the public (more…)

Earlier this week my boss asked “what I had” on capping class size in online courses. I had nothing, but it’s an interesting question. In Distance Education at UVU we have seen online class sizes vary from just one student to hundreds of students–the decision is made by the academic department chair in consultation with the instructor. This question is therefore pertinent for our academic department chairs, especially as UVU moves to reduce enrollment-based instructional compensation. Administrative pressure to free up class space and meet students’ demand enlarges this issue. However, a review of recent and available articles reinforced what I already suspected: there is no single optimum size for an online class; instead, class size should be informed by learning objectives, curriculum, instructor load, and teaching philosophy (more…)

In my Web Essentials online course I facilitate a discussion on the future of internet technologies. One student focused on how education is, and, as you’ll see here, should be affected:

The internet is a rebel and a bully, threatening to destroy the established system of education that dictates how we learn. Shocked? Well, this is a good thing any way you look at it (more…)

A member of the ITForum mailing list asked about the legality of using Audacity to create MP3 files for an educational project, because patents on the MP3 technology are claimed by various different companies and organizations (more…)

In David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education course students were asked to randomly choose and then examine 5 MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and 5 Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) courses. I’ve done random examinations of OCW/OER in the past, so I changed this up a bit to fit my own inclinations: first, I made my choices semi-randomly (more…)

I’ve suggested that “open education” should not be seen as synonymous with various related efforts. Just as there are only approximations at a manifesto for the open education movement, there is no single definition of what efforts constitute or contribute to open education, and open education can not be fairly defined by more granular efforts for the production of open educational resources, opencourseware, etc. That is as much due to conflicting definitions of “open” as it is to organizational motivations (more…)

When I think of open education I tend to think of it at a granular level, in terms of open educational resources (OER), opencourseware (OCW), or even the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC). At these more limited levels engaging in open education makes a lot of sense to me, and offers very attainable, short-term goals which serve bot the “target audience” (whoever that is) and my institution. But OER, OCW and open education are not synonymous. Open education, though often referred to as a “movement” is a broader philosophy, one which prescribes aspects of the creation, release, and access to education (more…)

WebCT was infamous for it’s calculated column formula textarea that you couldn’t type in. When John Krutsch developed a clever Javascript hack for it (just one of several cool IE-only hacks packaged as WebCT PowerTools), crafting unusual formulas was suddenly more viable, and we began dropping not just the lowest score, but several low scores (more…)

Darren Draper stirred up another conversation on his blog yesterday (Hacking the Curriculum) which intersects a number of my interests: independent study, reusable course content, and open education, and reiterates the question, what is not replaceable in teaching? In the live classroom? In individual instructor-developed curriculum? And how far can we stretch the re-usability of online educational materials? (more…)

The OpenShare block in Moodle

Tonight I’ve released the first all-new version of the OpenShare modification for Moodle 1.9, which I demonstrated last week at OpenEd 2008.

You may view OpenShare documentation or simply download the OpenShare mod now.

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