Open Everything

OpenLearn started out with 900 hours of learning material, rising to 5,400 by the end of the pilot and still growing. There are over 500 study units now available, covering 40% of the Open University (OU) course offering. In the first month we saw 70,000 visitors and regularly saw over 400,000 visitors a month during 2009, totaling 8 million unique users to date.

There have had 10 million visits to OpenLearn since launch in October 2006.

The OU was the first UK University to make materials available at this scale. They received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. They are now a national support center for OER, and OpenLearn is expanding in the coming months to be an online media hub, with a more community-focused front-end featuring more interactive content.

I first wrote about (P2PU) back in 2008. It has taken them longer than originally planned to actually launch the project, but they are now ready and offering offering enrollment for the first courses.

Peer 2 Peer University is an “online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”. They use the Internet, social applications, open educational resources (OER) with structured courses. The hope is to offer high quality courses at low or no cost. The model is similar to OpenLearn’s LabSpace allowing users to remix and reuse Open University (OU) course materials. P2PU will be using for the pilot a pbworks site but may transition to another platform. (OU uses a combination of Moodle and Drupal as its platform.)

These first courses are free but P2PU plans to have a pricing model including a fee for sign-up after the pilot.They also plan to seek accreditation for coursework.

The pilot "semester" has registration through August 26 and the courses will start on September 9. The semester is 6 weeks.

These classes are small groups chaired by a volunteer who organizes and disseminates the syllabus, study materials and schedule.

The courses being offered are: Introduction to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making--Copyright for Educators--Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature--Land Restoration and Afforestation--Open Creative Nonfiction - Take Away Narratives--Poker and strategic thinking

P2PU is currently run by volunteers and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation for basic start-up costs and receives administrative and legal support from the University of California at Irvine.

One for the weekend.

Here's a great example of how our government works - or at least how it moves forward (or backwards) in the area of information technology and the Internet.

This transcript excerpt comes to us from a Town Hall Meeting to Announce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State in Washington, DC on July 10, 2009

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)


SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can --

QUESTION: It’s free. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.

There's some humor in that portion of the meeting as shown by the (Laughter), but like most humor, it also contains some truth. Even free applications require support.

If it's you using Firefox or Chrome, Moodle, Ning or Twitter, Linux or any other open program, the cost is probably your time. You need to download, install, run updates etc. But if it's your school or company and there are fifty or hundreds or thousands of users, that time is money. Though I am certainly an advocate of open everything, one fear I do have when schools look at "free" products, they avoid looking at support.

For example, downloading Moodle is free, which compares very favorably with a commercial product like Blackboard. But if you're on the team that is going to support faculty and students using it, you know there is a lot more to it.


Transcript (and video!): http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/125949.htm

The first Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25/26 at New York University. The event is hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be giving one of the keynote talks.

It is a two-day weekend event. Participation will be free, and everyone is welcome, but active Wikipedians/Wikimedians are especially invited to attend. The organizers also hope for participation from members of the Free Culture movement and from cultural institutions interested in developing Open Education projects.
The event will be a modified unconference - a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

Lars Rasmussen, a software engineering manager at Google, first connected with the company when, in 2004, Google took an interest in a mapping startup called Where 2 Tech that he founded with his brother Jens. They joined Google and helped to create what would become Google Maps.

What next? They realized 2 big killer apps - email and instant messaging - basically imitate analog formats. Email is based on "snail mail" and IM follows the model of phone calls. Taking into account what has come since - blogs, wikis, collaborative documents and much improved computers and networks - got them thinking about their next project.

They codenamed it "Walkabout" and we now know it as Google Wave.



We have seen a demo of what it is intended to be. It attempts to erase the lines between email and chat and conversation versus documents to a single web continuum. It doesn't start by imitating non-electronic forms, but by thinking through the digital potentials.

A "wave" itself is a combination conversation and document. I suppose it rolls on like a watery wave but of flowing photos, videos, maps, and more. You catch a wave, then you add people to it. That's not something ocean surfers enjoy, but its a collaboration that digital surfers would enjoy. Everyone riding your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, feeds from other web sources, insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Because it is synchronous rich-text editing, you will see the results on your screen nearly instantly when your fellow waveriders are collaborating. Now, this is cool. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The code for Wave will be open source to encourage the developer community to get involved.

There are 3 layers to Google Wave: product, platform, and the protocol. The product is the web application people will use to access and edit waves.

You can also think of Wave as a platform with open APIs that allows developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

The protocol is more geeky. Lars Rasmussen describes it this way:

"The Google Wave is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave. So, this leaves one big question we need your help answering: What else can we do with this?"

What else do you think we can or should do with the Wave in educational settings?

There are more options all the time for free and open source tools to design websites and online applications.

OpenConferenceWare is a pretty sophisticated free package for processing event session proposals and displaying event schedules if you are an event planner organizing a conference or similar event.

The system was built by Igal Koshevoy and Reid Beels. It is appropriately being used as the scheduling system for the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Oregon that starts today which is described as:

"...a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way. It’s not a typical technical conference. Here’s what makes it different: It’s entirely volunteer-run, by developers, for developers. Session tracks are technology agnostic, based instead around shared community experiences and focused on similarities between projects, not differences.The geekery doesn’t end when the sessions do. There will also be a 24-hour hacker lounge for code sprints, bug bashes, session deep dives, bouncing ideas, starting new projects or just mingling and taking in the vibe."

I have written a few times about the open textbook movement, but there are other significant efforts  beyond the sites I have discussed.

Open textbooks address problems of access, high cost, and in avoiding outdated static content. Students may be most interested in significantly reduced costs. (K-12 school districts
would also be interested in reduced budgets.) I would hope that faculty would be interested in providing more dynamic texts.



I wanted to post something today about Open Educational Resources (OER) which offers teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. The resources often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.

The kinds of materials you will find in OER includes:
- Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes.
- Interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics.
- Adaptations of existing open work.
- Electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
- Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities that are aligned with state standards.

You can do a search and generate a list of Open Textbooks curated on OER Commons on subjects ranging from calculus to Chinese and from eMarketing to physics.

Generally, an open textbook has a license allowing it to be used, shared, modified, and printed without charge to the user. They can be available to download and print in various file formats from the
content provider or an OER repository. Open textbooks include public domain books, existing textbooks with alternative licensing, and new textbooks created specifically as OER. Offered for free online, they can also include easy ways to print low-cost and customizable sections or entire copies of the book.