Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

The bitter cold and a late bus did not prevent me from attending David Wiley’s IPT692R course today. And though the class period was set aside to choosing “classes” for the rest of the course, several discussions bubbled up that were noteworthy (more…)

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that sustainability is an elephantine problem for current and future OER projects. But it’s a problem that may take several perspectives and ideas in order to condense workable solutions (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…)

During the past month my unit’s offices have been affected by construction in the building in the form of diesel fumes filtering in through the HVAC system. Today a couple of staff members who were toughing it out were told by doctors that they have high levels of carbon monoxide in their blood and the offices have to be cleared out. This might explain (1) my fatigue, and (2) the pleasure I’ve been finding in spending a little more time out of doors as I walk across the BYU campus to David Wiley’s IPT 692R. Today’s topic: Media Issues begins with the question,” what is ‘open’?” and examines the 4 Rs of Openness (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…)

At 11 o’clock this morning I decided to sit in on David Wiley‘s Intro to Open Ed course, so after a trudging drive to the heart of Provo I parked my car at the public library and walked three blocks and up a delightful hillside path to the BYU campus. (more…)

Today we received the official word that UVU is willing to support and approve publishing faculty-authored content as opencourseware or open educational resources through our well-planned UVU Open project. This decision is limited by an administrative final approval process, but at least the process is there, and the President is willing to let us join this international experiment of sharing (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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Today I am presenting at the SFo MoodleMoot on how Moodle can be used to deliver Open Educational Resources, especially through our modification of Moodle, the Open Meta Mod.

Presentation slides are now available and you are welcome to participate in the backchannel through the chat window provided below.

Presentation Slides

openmod.ppt

Web Sites Referenced

• OpenCourseWare Consortium
• Open Educational Resources Commons
• David Wiley’s OpenContent Wiki
• David Wiley’s OpenContent blog
• Utah Open High School
• Creative Commons licenses
• MIT’s “Making the Case for OCW”
• Why a Reputation Economy?
• UK’s Open University LearningSpace
• OpenContentDIY
• Leigh Blackall’s slide on Another Way

P.S. After my presentation was over, I came back to my hotel to find this bus in the parking lot. It’s nothing less than a sign for a questioning open education convert.

It looks like I’ll be presenting at the 2008 MoodleMoot San Francisco, June 9 – 11, 2008 South San Francisco Conference Center on our Open Mod for sharing open educational resources. I’ll be dragging Kenneth Woodward along to explain the technical facets of the mod, and to delve into the community of Moodle developers.

Of course, prior to the conference Ken and I will have to work pretty aggressively with Clark Nielsen and John Krutsch to ensure that the mod’s features and functionalities are stable and presentable.