Serendipity35

Open Source "Swiss Knife" - illustration by Open Source Business Foundation - licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Back in 2008, I first posted here about what I was calling "Open Everything."  That was my umbrella term for the many things I was encountering in and out of the education world that seemed relevant to "Open" activities based on Open Source principles. The growth I saw nine years ago continues.

I had made a list of "Open + ______" topics I was encountering then, and I have updated that list here:
access
business
configuration
hosts
cloud
content
courseware
data
design
education
educational resources (OER)
format
government
hardware
implementation
innovation
knowledge
learning
music
research
science
source as a service
source licenses
source religion
source software
space
standards
textbooks
thinking

All these areas overlap with other categories that I write about on Serendipity35.

David Wiley makes the point in talking about one of these uses -"open pedagogy" - that "because 'open is good' in the popular narrative, there’s apparently a temptation to characterize good educational practice as open educational practice. But that’s not what open means. As I’ve argued many times, the difference between free and open is that open is “free plus.” Free plus what? Free plus the 5R permissions." Those five permissions are Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. Many free online resources do not embrace those five permissions. 

A colleague sent me a link to a new book, Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. The book also crosses many topics related to "open": affordable education, transparent science, accessible scholarship, open science, and courses that share this philosophy.

That last area interests me again of late as I am taking on some work on developing courses using OER materials for this fall at a community college. These courses are not what could be labeled as "open courses." They are using Open Educational Resources. They are regular Gen-Ed courses with the traditional tuition and registration structure.
So, why remake a course using OER? 

Always on the list of reasons to lower the cost for students by eliminating (or greatly lowering the price of) a textbook and using open textbooks and resources. But there are more benefits to OER than "free stuff." This course redesign is also an opportunity to free faculty from the constraints of a textbook-driven curriculum. (Though, admittedly many faculty cling to that kind of curriculum design.)

David Wiley's warning is one to consider when selecting OER. Is a text "open" if it does not allow the 5R permissions? Wiley would say No, but many educators have relaxed their own definition of open to the point that anything freely available online is "open." It is not.

For example, many educators use videos online on YouTube, Vimeo or other repositories. They are free. You can reuse them. You can usually redistribute (share) them via links or embed code into your own course, blog or website. But can you revise or remix them? That is unlikely. I fact, they may very well be copyrighted and attempting to remix or revise them is breaking the law.

You might enroll in a MOOC in order to see how others teach a course that you also teach. It is a useful professional development activity for teachers. But it is likely not the case that you have the right to copy those mate rails and use them in your own courses. And a course on edX, Coursera or another MOOC provider is certainly not open to you retain, reusing, revising, remixing or redistributing the course itself.

There are exceptions. MIT's Open Courseware was one of the original projects to offer free course materials. They are not MOOCs as we know them today, but they can be a "course for independent learners." They are resources and you were given permissions (with some restrictions; see their mission video) to use them for your own courses.

I didn't get a chance to fully participate in the OpenLearning ’17 MOOC that started in January and runs into May 2017. It is connectivist and probably seems like an "Old School MOOC" in this 2017 dominated by the Courseras of the MOOC world. It is using Twitter chats, AMA, and Hangouts. You can get into the archives and check out the many resources. It is a MOOC in which, unlike many courses that go by that label today, where the "O" for "Open" in the acronym is true. Too many MOOCs are really only MOCs.

The hosting/domain service GoDaddy sent me an email about their Website Scanner. It is a free tool that scans your website for two things: 1) Forms that handle login or payment information. 2) The installation of an SSL certificate.

Both are good things, though not necessarily things that people doing blogs or personal websites know much about or deal with regularly. The thing is that this determines whether your site will display warnings to visitors who are using the latest Google Chrome browser version. Those warnings will scare many users into thinking your site is insecure or a phishing scam.

Should I scan my website? you ask. I suppose you should to find out if it uses unsecure forms. If it does, Chrome 56, released in January 2017, will display a “not secure” message (like the one shown below) to visitors.

Of course, it's not a bad idea to check for unsecure forms by scanning your website to identify form fields that collect personal information without an HTTPS-encrypted connection. I ran the scanner on this site and others that I own. On Serendipity35, it returned a error for an unsecure form. The form turns out t be part of our administration settings and it wasn't really relevant to users.

On my other sites, I got back a "Chrome approves" message "Your site won’t be impacted by the Chrome 56 release" BUT also it said I should "consider getting an SSL certificate to boost your site’s Google ranking."

An SSL certificate (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer) is a global standard security technology that enables encrypted communication between a web browser and a web server. Millions of online businesses and individuals use them to decrease the risk of sensitive information (credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, emails, etc.) from being stolen or tampered with by hackers and identity thieves.

You have probably noticed the HTTPS on website addresses and a "lock"that gives visitors more of a sense of security that their information is encrypted and safe.

Of course, there are no absolute guarantees of security, but not using HTTPS and other security tools already affects your site’s search engine ranking, and in the future could result in your site actually being labeled not secure by Google and other search engines.



 

"Conversations about teaching with games (game-based learning) and learning about students through games (game-based assessment) are not new. What is new is the increasing focus on those educator and student voices at the table and an increased recognition of the importance of localized game-based education.

As work in game-based learning and game-based assessment continues in 2017, we expect the field to continue exploring ways to highlight educator and student voices. We expect more game and testing companies to involve educators and students early and often. We also expect educators to continue experimenting with methods to leverage games that were not originally designed for the classroom. We expect an increased focus on game-based education rooted in local relationships. We expect educators to share their work openly and to continue to build a community of practice around game-based education. Most of all, though, we expect the conversations to continue."

  from “Playing Together: Trends in Game-Based Education” by tech.ed.gov

I have written elsewhere about a perceived "skills gap" for current employees when it comes to using social media in the workplace. Some social media consultants have said that 90% of workers don't have the skills to leverage social media as a business tool.

It would seem logical that there would be a "market" and interest in higher education to fill in that gap, and more social media courses are being offered at colleges - generally in marketing and communications programs. But for just-in-time training, current employees are also looking to online courses, MOOC offerings and free on-demand resources.

Hootsuite is one of those providers, but it also offers a Student Program that provides educators and their classrooms free access to social media tools and resources. They have a Hootsuite Academy, which obviously uses their own Hootsuite dashboard which is a widely used platform for social media management. They also offer free certification for students who complete the program.

Because I teach social media courses at a university and I also do social media consulting, I looked into the Hootsuite Student Program as another way to integrate hands-on activities into NJIT's online program.

I also see frequent mentions online about a broader “digital skills gap” with employees who don’t know how to use, or are not aware of, the technology available to them. According to a Harris poll survey in Entrepreneur, only one in 10 American workers have mastered their employers’ tools and this gap "Bleeds $1.3 Trillion a Year From US Businesses."

Social media is just one part of this larger gap, but the “meteoric rise” of social in U.S. over the past decade to more than 2.3 billion active social media users worldwide can't be ignored.

Some of the materials in the Hootsuite program were topics that I have always included in my curriculum for designing social media. For example, having students conduct an online reputation audit on a real local gives students a better idea of creating a strategy for a brand versus their personal accounts. Students do research and present an analysis in order to create a strategy to improve their client's social marketing. They research target audience, popular content channels and types, competitor social media use, and make recommendations for future social media marketing activities.

I have students create a social media campaign with objectives, target audience, and metrics. It no longer surprises me that my students often make very little sophisticated use of social media themselves, and have a very limited understanding of how organizations are using it.

One gap I have been attempting to bridge this past year is the lack of knowledge (and interest) in social media ethics and law. That gap is not only in students but in those currently working in social media.

I believe that this learning process has value beyond making students just being able to do marketing via social media, but that creating a social strategy through research, analysis and application, and doing it in a digital world can help bridge a number of skills gaps.