Activity 7 Exploring OER Issues #h817open

I firmly believe in the Open Educational Resources philosophy outlined by Downes (2007) as a collective social product to be shred universally. The OER movement has foundered on the over-engineering of the learning object and metadata technologies used in the disparate repositories. It seems to be pointless to continue to plough monetary resources into the current OER implementations.

The three problems from my perspective are:

1. Re-usability. The unit of a whole course is too cumbersome and over complex, and by its very nature will have non-useful, specific institutional context that immediately impacts on the OER being re-purposed elsewhere.
2. Granularity. Recordings of typical university lectures 1-2 hours in length are simply not useful for students. One aspect that MOOCs have shown us is that video lengths of up to 10 minutes only are effective. The same remarks apply to slide shows, audio, animations and simulations, and of course text readings. Keeping them small and reasonably standalone allows for remix to suit local requirements.
3. Onerous metadata and storage. The complexity of the OER objects and their metadata from the perspective of preparation, deployment, discovery and reuse means the technology is expensive in terms of time and expense. A major rethink of the technologies employed is needed with an emphasis on instructor self-publishing models with automatic sharing and hashtag-like metadata.

The problems of IP and copyright will inevitably remain until CC BY becomes the norm for all educational materials - a distant hope at this point in time.

Refs
Downes, Stephen (2007), 'Models for sustainable open educational resources', Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, vol. 3. Available from: http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf

Note: For a MOOC there should be an iron rule, all readings must be open access on the web. Many of the Academic References on the Cloudworks suggested OER reading list failed this test miserably. Even those with URLs are not marked as links on Cloudworks. A typical student on a MOOC is unable to access closed academic journal papers.

Activity 3 #h817open

My synopsis of open education for Activity 3 in the Open Education MOOC #h817open

Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

Studying the Open Education MOOC from OU UK

As an avid supporter of MOOCs will form the future of all open education I have enrolled as a student in the Open Education MOOC offered by the Open University UK. The distinguished education technology guru +Martin Weller is the lead instructor. I hope to learn about the pedagogy behind MOOCs for my own talk to my local higher ed institution where I hold the honorary position of Adjunct Prof.

To regular readers of this blog please note that all posts tagged with the #h817open label are work items submitted to this MOOC. Such posts may not be directly relevant to cloud matters per se but will be of interest to cloud education at least.

Netbooks live on in Chromebooks

I loved netbooks and actually still use my Samsung N210 occasionally. Over a period of 4 years I owned 3 models of Eee PCs, an HP (free at a Microsoft conference) and the trusty Samsung. Yes they were slow and all but the Samsung keyboards dodgy, but they were small, light and rugged (great for conferences/meetings). You could also buy 3 or 4 netbooks for one laptop. Being a cloud fanatic my latter netbooks interacted with my documents and data online, the browser being my most used locally installed app.

As I suggested almost 2 years ago we now have Chromebooks with the same form factor (although as a consumer I can’t buy an Australian version yet). They are much, much more responsive, more secure and allow you (force you) to live in the cloud.

A significant number of manufacturers are jumping on the Chromebook bandwagon. With the announcement of the HP Pavilion Chromebook we see the screen size grow to a weighty 14 inches. Such developments are starting to scare the tablet- and smartphone-toting users, see Jared Newman’s Time article entitled ‘Please, Chromebooks, Don’t Turn into PCs‘. He gives a good summary of Chromebooks available in the US when talking about the HP Chromebook:

The device is available now for $330. That’s pricier than some other Chromebooks like Samsung’s Series 3 ($250) and Acer’s C7 ($200), but cheaper than the Samsung Series 5 550 ($450), which is far and away the best of the bunch. Lenovo makes a rugged $429 Chromebook, but it’s for schools only.

It is definitely time for the Chromebook naysayers to wake up. I can’t wait to order one of the above.

ICE appears - the integrated cloud environment

I have long been a proponent of integrated development environments like Cloud9 which allow cloud app development via the browser. Now out of private beta we have Icenium from the well-respected Telerik stable.

Icenium Mist allows development of cross-platform iOS and Android apps using only HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and your Github repos. Development and testing can be done from any Internet-connected machine running modern browsers. Also available is the Icenium Graphite Windows desktop development environment working to the same cloud backend.

The ice on the cake comes in the invention of a new term for this type of development - ICE, the integrated cloud environment. Long overdue.

Famous Last Words on MOOCs Perhaps

Time Magazine has given MOOCs credence today in a lengthy, provocatively named article entitled ‘College Is Dead. Long Live College!’ by Amanda Ripley. On the fourth web page we find a quote from the University of Phoenix but one that is typical of many senior managers in higher education today:

Still, it will be a long time before companies besides high-tech start-ups trust anything other than a traditional degree. That’s why hundreds of thousands of people a year enroll in the University of Phoenix, which most students attend online. Says University of Phoenix spokesman Ryan Rauzon: “They need a degree, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.”

I wonder whether these are yet another example of famous last words.

Chrome Social Media Hub–Android v iOS

I am on my 3rd iPad model but acquired a Google Nexus 7 a couple of months ago or so on its release in Australia. In that relatively short time I now use the Nexus three times as much as the iPad on a daily basis. There are obvious differences but today I just comment on the use of Google Chrome on the two platforms as a social media hub. This use occurs when I browse a web page and need to disseminate the link and a comment across my social media assets that primarily include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and now App.net. Add to that list the asset repositories Diigo and Instapaper.

On iOS Chrome when you want to share the page link the menu is shown on the right. It is basic but useful, especially the Google+ link which for me is important as I am tending to use Google+ rather than Facebook as my first choice. Of course most of my social media channels feed into Facebook by choice so I rarely need to go to Facebook directly.

Contrast this with the equivalent menu on Android Chrome. The vastly different extensive list of sharing locations is not built in to Chrome per se. Rather a mechanism is provided to allow any app installed on Android to register itself to be a source of sharing. This can be a little overdone of course as you see some unlikely sharing locations that I will never use. like Godaddy mail.

Note that the Power Note app saves the link to Diigo. Hooha is the portal to App.net. For those unaware the Remember the Milk app is a great Aussie task manager.

The ability to save to the cloud storage systems such as Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive is also a huge bonus.

Evernote has become my lifeline with data accessible on every portable device I carry so its inclusion is a lifesaver at times.

Flipboard and Skype are added bonuses which I am yet to explore.

Which platform would you choose for your social media hub? Android has become my first choice.