Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
In this post I'm going to try to set down my current thoughts about the evolution of academic publishing. This is very much a work in progress so please excuse me if it's not entirely coherent. I came back from Science Online London fired up and this is the next stage in me grokking the tools discussed there such as Figshare and ORCID.
This work constitutes a collection of guidance documents on all aspects of Open Educational Resources (OER) prepared by the STEM project teams from a number of Higher Education Academy/JISC OER pilot projects.
The focus is however mostly on the high profile xMOOC interpretations of Coursera, edX etc rather than on the more undercover collaborative MOOCs offered by networks of teachers.
A grassroots online newspaper exclusively for, and by, those who understand higher education best, The EvoLLLution is the only place where you can find detailed opinions, news and research about the impact of non-traditional programs on the higher education industry and society-at-large.
Higher education has never been primarily about learning actual things or actual skills. It has always been (and I mean all the way to the first universities) about peer acceptance for the graduates and meeting the requirements of the institution for the students. That’s not to say that a lot of people don’t learn lots of useful things while attending university. But if that was enough lawyers wouldn’t need the bar, doctors wouldn’t need their residency and university teachers would not have to learn everything all over again when they start teaching a new subject.
Mills continued his conscilience by saying that he is skeptical about a lot of university instruction. But I think that is the wrong approach to take. University instruction has always been just abominable. The vast majority of classes most university students have attended throughout history were taught by drones more or less competent in their subject sometimes reading out of a textbook sometimes cracking a joke. If that really mattered how would have we ever gotten to where we are now? Massive innovation and erudition as far as the eye can see. Even those we disagree with (like the neocons and creationists for me) cannot really be accused of a lack of intelligence or erudition. We talk about the need for better historical education but some of the worst political decisions have been taken by people who studied history meticulously (and it’s no good saying “if they had only read that one paper I wrote on that issue”). We talk about the need for better science education but some of the best innovations have come out of school drop outs who flunked the foundational STEM subjects. Why on earth would we think tinkering around with instruction would make a dent in any of that?
Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Since last fall, we've been talking at length to various creators about their CC stories---the impact Creative Commons has had on their lives and in their respective fields, whether that's in art, education, science, or industry. We are thrilled to announce that we have cultivated the most compelling of these stories and woven them together...
This Risk Management Calculator can be used to help understand the types of factors that might determine specific levels of risk. It is likely to be of greatest use for OER (Open Educational Resources) and other projects who want help to understand the types of variables which might affect their use of materials
WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. Authors
T. Sporer, and T. Jenert. Offener Bildungsraum Hochschule. Freiheiten und Notwendigkeiten, page 39-49. Münster, New York, München, Berlin, Waxmann, (2008)