When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

When the Bat Signal calls :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It: "My view is that Wikipedia and projects like it belong at the heart of a high school and college education. Instead of turning to a handful of approved sources and paraphrasing them to write a ten-page U.S. History paper that will be viewed and graded only by the teacher – who looks at a stack of papers and anticipates the same bad movie, twenty times – you can be asked to demonstrate a sustained and original contribution to a Wikipedia article on an important topic, having to contend with conflicting sources and others’ arguments, learning to discern and then defend truth amidst chaos – and to refine your own view in light of what you discover. There are few things as devastatingly disarming to others as admitting when you’re wrong."

Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Hunting, Gathering, and Growing Open Educational Resources: "A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. These resources could include books, lesson plans, syllabi, slide shows, etc. There are several examples of individuals and institutions providing open educational resources. The open education movement is introduced, and we discuss how to find and organize open educational resources, specifically within the context of the Open High School of Utah."

Hunting/Gathering/Collecting

John Hilton is emphasizing the reusability component of open coursware, something I brought up during the roundtable discussion with instructure. I hadn't made the important reusability/open content connection before now.

Reusable content needs to be modified for particular contexts, rather than phoning it in. Someone, maybe Gladwell, wrote about art that is created through gradual refinement rather than in a burst of genius (see Chris Lott post) and open courseware's reusability would tend to promote this sort of growth.

David Wiley's 4rs of Openness:

Reuse

Redistribute

Revise

Remix--take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource (e.g. take audio lectures from a course and combine them with a slideshow from another course to create a new course).

** Creative Commons is a key enabler of open educational resources

-attribution
-share alike
-noncommercial
-no derivative works

Commercial schools, teaching for profit, can't use many Open resources.

Q: what's the relationship between fair use and open content?
A: (me) Fair use is being eaten alive by corporations

Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange Build your Audience like a Virus: "Learn how one small professional development program has taken advantage of free and low-cost Web 2.0 and text messaging technologies to keep in touch with our core participants, reach out to previously untapped audiences and expand our “viral marketing” efforts"

I'm attending this session at #ttix. Victoria Williams is moving through a list of technologies that she's used to promote UEN's offerings.

Blogs: kind of stagnant, and no dialogue ensued
Youtube: 250,000 hits, but few of them from the core audience
Text alert systems: 200 subscribers. Using http://www.txtwire.com Sent out text alerts to promote under-enrolled courses.
Facebook: haven't really exploited that much. 49 "fans."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW0nWJaB4g

Chick-Fil-A asked the user who created their facebook page to administer the site, because the corporate approach doesn't always work. "They just come in with the MBA approach" Of course, education isn't chicken sandwiches.

A lot of corporate involvement in social media consists of barging in on other people's conversations. [yes].

**** Use facebook to LISTEN to what your audience is saying. Not as sold on FB as a dissemination tool.

Twitter: 26 followers. Ugh. "We haven't really got a huge strategy for using this."

"tech tips tuesday" and "websites wednesday"

Most hardcore twitter users are posting ten times a day. The weekly strategy seems anemic.

using http://twitterfeed.com

Is hoping to combine twitter and blogs. It strikes me that, after three years, there need to be cultural changes to encourage participation. Everyone wants to have fun.

"I can usually see a spike in registration within 24 hours of a newsletter going out" (magnet mail, a paid service)