Scott Dennis and I presented at NorthWest eLearn in Vancouver, WA last Thursday and Friday. As usual, I threw my slides on SlideShare before the presentation. On Sunday I got an email telling me my prezi was “hot” on SlideShare. 5300 views later I am wishing I spent a little more time on those slides, but glad so many people have been exposed to the great work being done by the faculty of the Washington State colleges. The first 42 shareable courses of Open Course Library will be available on October 31, 2011. These course materials have already saved WA students hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we’re just getting started. Can’t wait to share it at the 2011 Open Education conference next week.
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WA Representative Chris Reykdal supporting textbook affordability at the Textbook Rebellion #txtbktour11 @chrisreykdal
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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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From the College Open Textbooks blog:
To spur authors to openly license their work, the Saylor Foundation will offer a $20,000 award for submitted textbooks accepted for use in our course materials after a round of peer reviews. To be eligible for the award, the author(s) must agree to license the text under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license.
The Saylor Foundation will formally launch the Challenge just after Labor Day so please visit the Saylor.org site at that time and keep your eyes out for more information. The challenge aims to license open texts for over 200 courses currently residing on Saylor.org used in twelve of the most popular college majors enrolled in by U.S. students.
This is exciting news, as we have several faculty in our system who will likely be eligible. I hope this will tip the scales for others developing textbooks and considering going open.
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It may seem strangely ironic that a project like the Open Course Library received the People’s Choice award for “most accessible” since our finished product is not yet available. (If it’s so accessible, where is it??)
Let me explain. Accessibility and universal design principles have been a priority from the first day of this project. We are also working to share our project design and progress using social media and a wiki that describes our process.
So over the next couple months as some people may be tempted to ask, “Where are your courses, Mr. Most Accessible OCW Winner?” I’ll just tell them about how we are adding captioning to several hundred YouTube videos, trying to make our open courses a little bit more accessible. I can’t wait for our official launch at the end of October. It’s going to be great!
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