According to an article in the Chroniclethe United State Open University couldn’t make a go of it. Open will close. Too bad. The Open University in the United Kingdom, which was the parent of the American version, has a good rep.
Another good article from Stephen Downs on synchronous learning on the web. This is something (for various reasons) that I’ve been investigating a lot recently myself. Audio- and video-conferencing will remain problematic for education until bandwidth is as cheap and irrelevant as megahertz are today. (Does bandwidth follow Moore’s Law? I don’t think so…), as is application sharing. I think application sharing is an underrated educational tool. Anyone know of some scholarship, research, or models on the use of synchronous application sharing in education?
I stumbled across another good article (about learner-centered learning) (should that be “learner-centered teaching”???) by Stephen Downes of OLdaily. Downes’ makes a prediction that “as online learning takes hold, fewer and fewer people will opt for traditional courses and classes, opting instead for less formal learner driven forms of learning.”
I think that’s only true in the sense that as online learning takes hold, there will be more opportunities for learning, hence “traditional classes” will make up a smaller slice of the overall education pie. The raw number of “traditional classes” won’t decrease much, but the proportion of “traditional classes” to other forms of education, including online learning, will dwindle dramatically. Which I was independently writing about the day after Downes posted his comments. Synchronicity!
I came across this article via a SiT link to comments on the article made by Jay Cross of InternetTime which bizarrely lifted entire passages from the Downes article. Poor attribution!
Peter Suber has published the Guide to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Movement. The FOS Movement is ga “generic term for scholarly literature in the sciences or humanities available free of charge on the internet.” Lots of interesting resources here.
…And Nomic: On a totally unrelated note, Peter Suber is the inventor of the game Nomic. Nomic is a game where the purpose of the game is too change the rules, sorta like a highbrow Calvinball! In Nomic, players propose rule changes and vote on which proposed rule changes are accepted. Beyond that, pretty much everything is up for grabs…and the voting process is up for grabs, too, for that matter. The game models self-amending legislation, one of Suber’s areas of research (he’s a legal philosopher).
Some Nomic games go on for years and develop enormously complex rules, economies, sub-games, etc. E.g. Agora Nomic has been in play since June 1999. I’ve played in several online, email-based Nomic games, most recently B Nomic, hosted at Nomic.net. I withdrew from that one recently because an e-mail based Nomic generates lots of email; I just didn’t have the time to keep up. Oh, for those carefree grad school days when I had time to read hundreds of emails a day…
FOS and Nomic. Peter Suber is pretty cool.
Is peer-to-peer the next hot trend in e-learning? Uh…no.
The article (from Learning Circuits, a great online e-learning magazine from the American Society for Training and Development), and it answers it’s own question with this comment: “If all of the resources (data) are located on a few centralized servers, then implementing P2P on an enterprise level might not make sense.”
For better or worse, education is centralized. The data (knowledge) is stored in a few centralized locations, usually textbooks or professor’s noggins. Before peer-to-peer will take hold in education (or any highly structured organization, for that matter), I think the organization will need to start to decentralize first (a la Tom Peters).
Peer-to-peer isn’t the agent of change for this; peer-to-peer is the tool to make that change effective once it has begun.
You gotta love the Patriots. What a great Super Bowl. That’s how Super Bowls should be — great comebacks under pressure and won in the last few seconds.
But, is it just me or did the commercials really suck this year? So many ad execs are getting fired this morning….
Websites that use javascript to disable right-clicking. I’m sure somebody might want your crappy graphics, but really all I want to do is spawn a second window.
While posting the last message, I leaned back in my desk chair . . . and the chair part separated entirely from the wheely pedastal part! I flipped over backwards and landed on my back! If that’s not a pet peeve, I don’t know what is.
For a chair I rescued from an alley back in my poorer days, it gave me several good years before dumping me on my ass. Now I have to buy a new desk chair. Or start scrounging the alleys again. Still . . . I think it’s time I moved away from the Modern American Yard Sale style of interior design.
Real estate developers’ websites that require you to give them your name, email, address, and phone number before they’ll even let you see a floor plan. Guess I won’t be buying from them.