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Business models around higher education are changing based on the downward pressures of “free” digital contents and bits and bytes in the current economy—as it goes through a massive retrenchment.
Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (2009) suggests that business organizations that want to be competitive will need to reconceptualize prices and how to harness the power of digital contents and free products and services in order to offer value and connect with potential consumers ...
Continue reading Reconceptualizing "Free" and Online Higher Education
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The decision in publication has not been about going to an academic print one vs. a Web-based one because so many academic journals either have gone wholly online or archive digitally. Rather, the question now seems more to be about going for high-brow or low-brow, to radically over-simplify.
On the one extreme are the journals that require a half-year to a year of peer review before a decision is made and then rigorous publishing processes to shape an article into ...
Continue reading Going for Elite Academic Journals or More Populist Ones?
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In the span of a few days, I had gone online to download open-source free imagery for use in a newspaper article for a for-profit newspaper. I have contacted professionals using free email systems for freelance work. I have visited commercial news with stock images that are alt-texted in a way that shows that they’re stock images—either as freeware or as sold objects.
It used to be that placeholder images would be selected lightly for representations, but I ...
Continue reading For-Profit Reliance on Open-Source Contents and Freebies
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The World Digital Library offers various resources from different times and locales around the globe. The contents may well be copyrighted because this resources is contributed to from a variety of copyright holders. The items are well labeled with metadata and tagging.
http://www.wdl.org/en/
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A recent course build by a faculty member built the course foundation on resources found on the Web. Here, the instructor used links to downloadable files, simulations, and videos. She eschewed any textbooks. To create an overlay, she did add a syllabus and supplementary videos to explain the contents. She also invited professional colleagues to take part in videotaped interviews that illuminated the issues further.
It struck me that she was truly relying on the Web for her curriculum—by ...
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The research literature on innovations as they proliferate into a community is engaging. One central concept is the idea that innovations are risky for a world that may not be ready for it. Being first involves changing human attitudes and behaviors, structures, technologies, and the larger economies—for an innovation to actually “take.”
These entrepreneurial risks are important to take to move technologies forward to improve human lives. The challenge though is building to an environment that may not fully ...
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Smarter instructional designers would not get themselves into the quandaries that I sometimes do. There I was with my backpack and bicycle helmet. I was ready to head back to my office when the faculty member said: “Go watch TV and eat a doughnut!”
What would lead a health-minded kinesiology professor say that to me, while we were both within earshot of a friendly pickup basketball game in the Gymnasium?
Okay, I’ll admit that the particular ...
Continue reading Conveying Digital Swiping and ID Policies in the Same Breath
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In a short time, the college system that I teach (out-of-state) for will no longer be subscribers to a particular learning / course management system. This shift will mark an end of an era, with their long-term commitment to the use of this system and several generations of students acclimated to the resources in that system.
This changeover will also render all archived courses on that system unopenable, without additional cost and without the cooperation of the company that ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 April 2009
The idea of transferability, portability and digital learning object sharing has always been appealing and practical. It’s been years of seeing the back-end technologies to enable course cartridge uploads and templates to add metadata to learning objects….and finally, I can say that I have had a course build that has allowed me to tap into others’ direct contents.
On the surface, this would seem fairly straightforward. There are certain federal government sites that have the incentive of publicizing ...
Continue reading Not Reinventing Wheels...but Chasing Digital Contents through Bureaucracies
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This issue surfaces in the popular media every so often, when a celebrity’s medical records, police file, mug shot, or some other official information gets compromised and released to the press. The idea of “data voyeurism” is that of people who don’t have a “need-to-know” accessing information that they shouldn’t.
I ran across this term again in an article, in the context of Information Technology (IT). It seems to me that instructional designers also handle plenty of ...
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I see students in various stages of distress as they wrangle with their academic papers. They’re lying across their desks staring into the computer screens as they search for the words or ideas that they need to build the contents. They send emails about their concerns as their papers are in various stages of development, particularly when they’re stuck on a thesis or on the possible use of a particular source.
Recently, I had a déjà vu moment ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 February 2009
A recent book I’ve been reading talks about a nation’s power in part as ideational. Besides its economy and its military clout, a nation has “soft power,” the ability to influence other nations and peoples through the power of its ideas. This is about using charisma and the strength of ideas. Some of the more engaging ideas of late have involved Web 2.0 or the collaboration around shared ideas.
In that light, I’ve been thinking about ...
Continue reading The Ideational Power of Open Source and Creative Commons Releases
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Adapting to a new learning management system involves a fair amount of learning. Going live with it also means dealing with some surprises—in this case, the disappearance of student work. Usually, the default settings I have in Message Boards is to disallow student deletion of their own posts.
There are a number of reasons for that. Foremost is the need to have data integrity, so if students posted a particular message or assignment, and I responded to that work ...
Continue reading Plugging the "Student Editing" Gaps in a New LMS
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There’s plenty of excitement over open source and Creative Commons-released works. And for a long time now, there have been royalty-free contents from commercial and “amateur” providers. The question then is: What’s actually out there for faculty use? Several recent endeavors brought this challenge to clearer light.
So first, the resources. Wikipedia has plenty of sources released under Creative Commons copyright or fully released into the public domain. I’ve found quite a few cool images on ...
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From the outside, having work embargoed seems like not much fun. It’s work that only goes to a small, limited and elite audience. It’s going to sit on “ice” for any number of years—because of copyright or security or ownership issues (usually). While a person may benefit from the intellectual property of that work, it’s not really there for the public consumption. There may be a release date of sorts, or there may not be any ...
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In some fields, the lineage of digital information affects its validity, and therefore its usability in a learning context. This is true for the empirical sciences, for geographic information systems, for legal chain-of-custody, and other fields. And yet, much of this lineage information is never captured, or even if known, is not captured in metadata. Many educators create their own contents, and they just keep the information about the information lineage in their heads…and assume that it’ll always ...
Continue reading The Lineage of Digital Information for Data Quality
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It seems fitting that the first full-length text that I’ll be tackling on my desktop computer is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006), which he has made available for free off his own site at http://www.benkler.org/Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks.pdf .
This work is about ways to strengthen human collaboration on a larger scale with computer-mediated communications and to shape policies that would strengthen virtual communities.
He explains how “non-market and nonproprietary production” of ...
Continue reading The Wealth of Networks (Brief Resource Review)
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Developing a website on a shoestring budget and with many stakeholders is no easy feat. Having multiple institutions working on different parts can also be a challenge, with only partially successful distance mitigations. With the high hopes and high grant-funded ambitions, a site can easily evolve well beyond doability.
One aspect of special risk seems to be “content sustainability.” This means providing sufficient text and images and multimedia over time for the site. From a distance, it would seem that ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
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So bingo cards can draw numbers from between 1 – 75. There’s often a free spot on the card. And the cards may be 5 x 5 (25 spots – the one freebie)…or 5 x 6 (30 spots – the one freebie). The randomizer could put out as many sets of the numbers as I wanted. I needed 29 numbers chosen from the 1-75 inclusive pool, and I needed them in random order. I needed three bingo cards per sheet, so ...
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In student journalism, faculty and advisors work hard to shepherd student work forward towards publication—often locally and then in larger and larger venues. Students had a chance to evolve their work. They made mistakes in small venues before risking mistakes in the larger ones. Some of you already know where I’m going with this.
Students today often publish to the world early on. Various classes may require blogging or wiki postings. While these may ...
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In a recent professional conference, one of the speakers presented on his use of virtual fairs and expositions. As a computer science professor, he would combine these virtual fairs (which people may attend from their desktop computers) with short research assignments for students.
He demonstrated a few of these for the audience. Essentially, these were websites that put a mental frame around the delivery of pre-packaged or live digital contents. There was a screen for live or canned speeches. There ...
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I have always had a kind of reverence for books—not the fabric covers and bound paper—but for the craft of writing that goes into quality works of literature.
It’s as the wise Mortimer J. Adler wrote: “Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that ...
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Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind
By Eliezer Geisler
Hershey: IGI Publishing
2008
348 pp. hardcover
In this day of an explosion of information and the building of knowledge management systems, Eliezer Geisler (a professor of business at the Illinois Institute of Technology) has decided to get to the heart of the matter by probing exactly what knowledge is.
In Knowledge and Knowledge Systems: Learning from the Wonders of the Mind, Geisler explores the history ...
Continue reading Knowledge as Oobleck (Brief Resource Review)
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An online course, by the time it’s complete and ready for deployment, often has plenty of moving parts. It involves documents that provide an overview of the learning—through the syllabus, the course policies, and the course calendar. There are the presential materials like videos, slideshows, simulations, texts, and other forms of lectures and demonstrations. There are the assignments. There are the sample student works. There are assessments, with rubrics and gradesheets. There are research project ideas.
And then ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 May 2008
On Feb. 11, 2008, Dr. Cable Green (Director of eLearning for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges) hosted a virtual session for 42 faculty and administrators from around the US (with a cluster in Washington State) around “Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources.” This used the Elluminate technology for the virtual participants and actually had a physical location, too, at the Bellingham Technical College.
This was billed as a ...
Continue reading Developing a Culture of Sharing and Receiving: Open Educational Resources
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Several concepts have emerged regarding academic publishing that require some consideration. One is the phenomenon of born-digital texts. These are texts that totally bypass peer-reviewed for-print and go right to digital e-texts. Then, there’s the other phenomenon of academic writers who will only sign over limited rights to a publisher and retain their own rights, so their own universities will not have to pay for the use of their intellectual property in their classes. Some of the larger universities ...
Continue reading Born-Digital Texts and "Mine Forever" Copyright
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There’s something charming about being able to watch a small college come online in creating an online program. What’s even more intriguing is watching from a distance and through the framework of an online course to train the faculty, staff and administrators—using the LMS they’ve selected for their program.
Having never set foot on the campus of this college and only driven by the small town where it’s based once on my way elsewhere, I ...
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Starting out a new venture in an academic setting involves plenty of collaboration-building and consideration. Universities are complex environments, and decisions can have ripple effects and unintended consequences—even when different constituencies have been fully
So we had our first meeting to consider launching a distance learning faculty wiki out of this university…potentially through the division through which the university’s e-learnings offerings are supported, coordinated and created.
Not surprisingly, the first meeting involved some general ...
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The KU Libraries hosted a "Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities" conference back on March 7. They have published the resources of the presenters, and those may be found at the following site.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/CopyrightSymposium/CopyrightSymposiumhandouts.shtml
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Copyright in Academia: Challenges and Opportunities
The University of Kansas (KU) is hosting a day-long symposium on copyright issues in academia, with two powerhouse speakers: Tracy Mitrano and Wesley D. Blakeslee. This is a free conference for locals.
http://www.lib.ku.edu/copyrightsymposium/
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 October 2007
Chasing rights releases on digital media for faculty has made me a little more nostalgic for dealing with local media markets instead of the national ones.
Years ago, I'd take my mass media students to the local televison station, and we'd tour the premises. We'd see how live weather was captured with the meteorologist speaking to the camera in front of a green screen. We'd see how ...
Continue reading Chasing Rights Releases with National Television Broadcasting Companies
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Copyright seems to be one of those perennial issues, especially as multimedia builds get more complex and involve more diverse sources of materials.
What do you do if you're brought onto a project, and your predecessor downright took a load of writing from another site / from professional colleagues / from published sources? What do you do if a client would like to use copyrighted materials in a course curriculum (and ultimately a book) that was developed in-house, and she ...
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Many years ago when I was a program assistant at a social services agency, I did a lot of work on a grant that was submitted under the auspices of our office. It was a grant to provide service for those with HIV infections, and it actually did get funded. However, what I remember from that process was an issue with bylines. As a published writer, I assumed that bylines should go with all work in a workplace. I hadn ...
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The technology learning curve for instructional designers seems as steep as the cutting edge roller coasters that plaster your cheeks against your ears as you pull out of the starting platform and do the first loop-de-loop. There's no real keeping up. If it's any comfort, technologists will tell you that they know their areas very well, but it's near impossible to extend their expertise beyond a region of specialty. Their learning curve gets too high, too, and ...
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Too often, various educators take a very defensive stance when it comes to using copyrighted works. They'd rather borrow the concept and a snippet or two of a copyrighted work and not risk any infringement. Yet, learning about fair use may help instructors better use the plentiful informational resources out there and keep them safe from intellectual property violations. A lack of understanding of one's rights will mean that fair use is not put to good use.
Faculty ...
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Back in November (a full year ago...or rather a couple months), one of my blogs dealt with the issue of using free e-texts in lieu of textbooks (in a unique course design situation) and the internal debate about the pros and cons of that.
I thought of a colleague who told me once that she earned some $70 from selling the free book samples she got from book reps of various book companies that ...
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The fastest way to get people to scramble for something is to throw money out the window in one televised stunt. To achieve the same aims in academia, credit seems to do the trick. Getting a name on a project, protecting reputation as a "brand," and coining new terms and processes all seem to lead to a mad scramble. For many, "name" means greater access to resources, esteem, choice projects, and street credibility. The prestige piece has always been an ...
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Back in the day, when I worked with my students who were building websites for clients, the conventional wisdom was to build in-house capacity in terms of information. This meant that they would do the research and collect the information needed and make it their own. They were not advised to link out to dynamic sites with relevant information because these sites could change their contents at any time. They could take a political turn that the students might not ...
Continue reading In-House Capacity or Reliance on the WWW Wilds
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Faculty will ask, Well, if I want to use this video in a class, can't I upload it in my password protected online classroom? It'll be like me showing a video that I own in my face-to-face classroom. Another will ask, Can't I just upload an article to my online class? There are resources that I want to share with my students. In a recent grain science book, we put in the USDA's revised food pyramid ...
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"May I borrow a cup of sugar?" That quote is used as a cliche of friendliness between neighbors. It's a quote that harkens back to the days when going to the store might be an imposition and not something as simple as bicycling over to the corner store or jumping into the car.
An ID sometimes ends up asking that question, "May I borrow...?" and "May I have...?" from pure strangers who work in a particular field. The request ...
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For almost half a year now, I've been in hot pursuit of a copyright release. This release is for certain intellectual property and templates used for designing digital learning objects. The company being pursued (although they seemed to hardly notice) is a large multinational one specializing in networking. The pursuit involved lots of phone calls, some toll free and some simply long distance. It involved emails and plenty of documentation. It involved working with three PIs, with two of ...
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One way to remember an experience well is to get stood up. And there I was at the auction house looking at any number of pieces of furniture and jewelry and heirlooms being marched across the stage, highlighted under the stage lights, and shown by camera to the live audience. I was on 3rd Avenue in Seattle, and I was waiting for a colleague who hadn't shown up. (He did later, after I'd left.) He was a fantastic ...
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A number of software programs have been released to identify and head off plagiarism. Some of these archive digitized learner papers into a database against which they compare other papers. These programs will identify points of similarity. These have not been without problems---as many learner complaints and copyright infringement assertions have been made about these programs. It may well be the low-tech solutions that will carry the day.
Drs. Mary Slavin and Roseanne Torsiello of Berkeley College, presenters at an ...
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We heard Dr. Michael Wesch (professor of anthropology) talk about tags at the last IDTR. I spoke to a few people after the session, and realized they didn't fully understand about tags. This inspired me to write something about it in our blog and do some research too.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tags. If you Google the word "tags", you get some 7 million hits. But most of us, just need to understand the basics and how ...
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e-portfolios has been a term used for various digital compendiums of learner work. There are various software programs for the compilation of such portfolios. Others simply use websites and some back-end basic programming.
The idea is that learners need to "think" with artifacts that convey their thoughts coherently---mixing words, images, sound, and even video. There should be a clear sense of audience and purpose in these portfolios. To be deployed well ...
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For any number of online classes and curriculums, it's a struggle to find sufficient raw materials for the development. Finding images with copyright releases can be a challenge. People's promises of sending images may sort of drop off their mental agendas, and voila---nothing. Resources may be handed over but often without the metadata needed for integration into a project. Sometimes, an ID gets so desperate that she has to go out into the field herself with a ...
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The Web works its magic now and again. And today it was so for me. I went browsing for information on reusable learning objects after having read my fill of SCORM and Cisco RLO information parts of last week and this week.
I ran across a nonprofit organization called the Creative Commons (started in 2001 by lawyer and author Lawrence "Code" Lessig). This organization strives to build the shared commons body of knowledge through education and releases of copyrighted works ...