Tom's Two Cents

From the Digital Media & Learning competition website:

This Competition focuses on building digital badges for lifelong learning. The Competition is designed to encourage individuals and organizations to create digital tools that support, identify, recognize, measure, and account for new skills, competencies, knowledge, and achievements for 21st century learners wherever and whenever learning takes place.

Some notes from Jackie Hood:

Mozilla and MacArthur emphasized that this is an international competition.
Stages of the badges competitions $10,000 to $200,000

• Call for content
• Call for badge design (sets or systems)
• Matchmaking between content and design winners – one month of collaboration off-line and then a 2-day f2f including a pitch

All must be part of the Mozilla badge infrastructure or interoperable with it: See http://www.dmlcompetition.net

Research competition $5000 to $80,000: Interest-driven learning.
Not everyone loves the idea of badges: the panel moderator summarized these objections that showed up in tweets as “trivializing education” and “a badge for everything including showing up”. See #dmlbadges [for discussion via Twitter].

I’m not surprised to hear about objections to badges. Established models of education and credentialing are being challenged. To anyone satisfied with the existing paradigm this is not a happy thing. Meanwhile my 10-year-old nephew is watching lots of Khan Academy videos on his own time, trying hard to earn the Moon Badge. Bring it on!

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A comment left by Andy Duckworth on my last post got me thinking about how a more open, persistent LMS might be as beneficial to institutions as it is to students. Andy’s favorite feature of the Instructure’s Canvas LMS is “the ability for students to create groups that can persist outside of a specific class.” Canvas does a lot of clever things (integrating collaborative goodies such as Google Docs and DimDim), but persistent groups is my favorite feature too.

As an instructor at Utah State University I hated getting the emails from the Blackboard administrator telling me that all courses before X date were being deleted to create room on the server for new courses. Not that those courses were open anyway, but it reminded me of the ephemeral nature of those courses. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I think most folks would agree that there is value to making a course available to students beyond the semester/quarter in which they enrolled. It could be a good reference for them in higher level courses, etc. But could there actually be value for institution?

I get calls each year from the alumni associations of the various schools I attended. They usually want me to donate to something. I find it ironic that those same institutions have effectively LOCKED THE DOORS to the online learning I once enjoyed. If they want me to stay involved as an alumni, why not do something to keep me interested. I’m not talking about a tailgate party. If I could come back to the lectures, notes, groups I once participated in I would come back to (some of) them year after year. YOU ARE A SCHOOL. Your best marketing tool is (hopefully) the LEARNING you provide. STOP THROWING IT ALL AWAY.

The next time I get hit up for a donation by an alumni association, I will refer them here. Bottom line: Open your learning and I’ll open my wallet.

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Sorry if this comes off as bragging, but I am very grateful for all the media mentions and other opportunities that have come my way over the past couple months. I’ve decided to do a brain dump here before I forget everything. Here we go:

1. MIT, USU, eduCommons, and enPraxis were all mentioned in the January issue of EDU TECH, a higher ed magazine in India. The entire magazine is available here: http://issuu.com/eduindia/docs/january_2010.

2. The local Herald Journal newspaper did a nice article on the TwHistory.org project in January: http://news.hjnews.com/news/article_82e18eda-2b7e-56b8-9f0d-b31cb9acd272.html.

3. There was another article in the Herald Journal a couple weeks ago on some efforts I got involved with via Stanford to use Web 2.0 ideas to help provide crisis relief in Haiti and Chile. They had me talk on education, but I mainly touched on my vision for micro-learning in the short term. I spoke of “Train the Trainer” types of activities that could be implemented to spread basic skills and knowledge so the progress doesn’t stop when the aid workers leave. http://news.hjnews.com/features/article_7b8e2eda-2b9f-11df-9864-001cc4c002e0.html

4. Last week I interviewed Martha Kanter, Under Secretary of the US Department of Education last week about Open Educational Resources (OER). It’s a long story how I got this opportunity, but I think it’s significant. Under Secretary Kanter is directly under Arnie Duncan in the Obama Administration, responsible for higher ed. The interview was published today in the OCW Consortium March 2010 Newsletter. I have attached a PDF as well. It is noteworthy that with the passage of the Health Care and Education Affordability Act, approximately $3 billion in federal funding ($600,000,000/year for 5 years) has been allocated to states, non-profits, and other institutions for educational programs and projects to boost the college graduation rate and lower cost of post-secondary education. Open Educational Resources projects such as Open Textbooks fall into this category. Interestingly, Martha Kanter has been involved with OER efforts for over a decade, so it is likely that some OER programs will get a big boost from the current administration.

5. I co-wrote a grant proposal with Marion Jensen (another INST PhD student) to the Talis Incubator (a private organization that is funding innovative projects in Open Education space) to develop TwHistory.org, a site for online historical reenactments using Twitter. Our TwHistory proposal has made it to the final round, and was one of only eight proposals selected to advance.

6. I also helped write another Talis grant proposal with enPraxis, this one is focused on converting content packages between educational repositories. It too has advanced to the final round. I am thrilled that USU has two of the final eight spots in a very competitive round of Open Education funding. I expect that three of the eight finalists will be funded.

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(Note: This blog post is meant to be read while listening to Midnight Oil’s “Sell My Soul.”

Dear Google,

I just want to say thanks for the wonderful Buzz you have given me. Not that you haven’t already cached and parsed every tweet I ever made on Twitter, but Buzz has helped me to recognize and accept my sole reliance on you. You know who I email. You know who my friends are. You know where I am all day long thanks to the GPS in my Android phone. I’ve sold my digital soul to you in every possible way (except photos — Flickr is still better). Now I’ll be coming to you every few minutes for the Buzz I need to get me though my day. Finally, I look forward to the day when you will use all the information I have happily given you to serve me ads for all sorts of wonderful things — before I realize how much I need them. I thank you in advance for this. You already know how much I hate shopping.

Your Truly,

Tom

PS – I am not kissing up because my Gmail storage is more than half full. Of course, if you magically added, say 10 gigabytes, it would help me to know that you are really listening (or parsing, at least).

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Looks like something was Stollen, originally uploaded by caswell_tom.

I share all my flickr photos freely under a Creative Commons attribution-only license. If you don’t know what this means I’ll sum it up for you: You can’t steal my photos because I am already willing to share them with you. Do what you want with them. All I ask is that you give me credit if you use them. I guess I’ll never know if you don’t comply, but why not play nice? The terms are really simple. Just mention my Flickr username, caswell_tom. Give credit where credit is due.

I have a Google Alert set up to alert me anytime the words “caswell_tom” and “flickr” appear on the web together. You may need to adjust this to fit your own situation. I added the word “flickr” to my username to filter out all the unrelated alerts I was getting. I had to add the work When I get a Google Alert email letting me know one of my photos has been reused, I add a link to the place it got used in the comment section of that picture. I also add the “reused” tag to that photo in Flickr. It’s an easy way to keep track of my reused photo collection.

It’s fun to see how my amateur snapshots get reused. I feel like a proud parent, seeing my photos accomplish new and interesting things. I guess you could say I collect reuse. Of course, you have to tag your photo with useful keywords so other can find them. That’s the trick behind the magic of reuse.

You might wonder why I share my photos, blog posts, and other creative works so freely. Well, why not? The worst that can happen is nothing (which is exactly what would happen anyway if I kept them to myself). The best case scenario is that someone else gets to do something interesting with my photo and I get credit for the original photo. Who knows?

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