I want to welcome Derek Keats and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series. Derek will be sharing some of his thoughts about how the products and processes of Digital Freedom, such as personal learning environments, recognition of learning achieved, and collaborative cross-institutional virtual classrooms, have the potential to create new opportunities for education.
Derek is a marine biologist with strong interests in using technology to improve teaching-and-learning, to enable higher education to create Education 3.0, and to promote sustainable development. In addition to starting and managing a number of significant contributions to the study and improved understanding of marine plants and the application of technology in marine biology, Derek served as a director of the Cape Information Technology Initiative, a non-profit organization (NGO) focused on developing the ICT cluster and incubating new Information Communication Technology (ICT) businesses in the Western Cape. In late 2001, he was fully seduced by ICT, describing himself as a closet geek who came out of the closet.
Derek’s research interests include e-Collaboration and lessons for international collaboration from Free Software (open source) and related initiatives; next-generation e-learning systems and Education 3.0; Free and Open Source Software and Free/Open content in higher education. He is passionate about the potential of ICT-based collaboration to unify expertise within Africa and stimulate development, establishing the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources project, along with a number of like-minded colleagues around Africa, for this purpose. He has developed a number of initiatives in the fields of educational and environmental informatics, Free Software, Free and Open Resources of Education (FORE, often called OER) and has published around 80 research papers in biology and in the application of technology.
I am very excited about having Derek contribute to the Impact series and look forward to some active participation and development of dialog. Derek’s post is scheduled for June 1, 2008. Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.
Author - Derek Keats, Evolution to Education 3.0 . Originally submitted June 1st, 2008 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
Higher education institutions exist as a result of the need to aggregate resources that are scarce (professors, books, journals, laboratories). When I entered university in 1972, I had to leave my home in rural Newfoundland, Canada to go to the city 300km away because of this physical aggregation. While new opportunities exist today that did not exist then, they have mostly just changed movement, while leaving most of the fundamental processes intact.
The emergence of widespread technical infrastructure (the Internet), coupled with an abundance of Free Software and Free Educational Resources (”Open Educational Resources”) has reduced some of this scarcity, and made other models of education possible. You can now use Free Software to do almost anything, so much so that it is now nearly four years since I have used an operating system or desktop application that was not Free Software.
New approaches that build on both the products and processes of Digital Freedom are changing the way we produce and share content and other cultural products. Everything I produce, I make available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (including this posting), and there are many who do the same. The MIT Open Courseware initiative, and the movement that it has spawned is but one of many systems producing the content equivalent of Free Software (although some of the licenses used are anything but Free – particularly when it comes to disallowing the receipt of benefit from commercial contributers and benefit from contributers who may wish to allow that benefit themselves). Instead of asking textbook publishers to aggregate our scarce content, we are making it available under different models of production that do not require the aggregation of scarcity but instead distribute abundance. Content useful for learning is thus becoming more and more abundant, and available.
Of course, it is not all good. There is a deeply disturbing and absurd movement to try to accredit the so-called “open educational resources,” with UNESCO seeming to wish to do this for reasons that are of dubious benefit. Any attempt to accredit content will only serve to slow down the rate of production, and is as sensible as accrediting books on library shelves. Instead, what should be accredited is an institution’s alignment to a framework of Freedom and Openness.
Personal learning environments (PLEs) as an approach to technology for learning are also emerging, and include specialized technologies as well as established ones such as blogs. What PLEs do is to create the possibility for individuals to aggregate their own learning opportunities. In addition, new standards for interchange of learning materials and activities are creating much more scope for collaborative cross-institutional virtual classrooms that do not rely on institutions sharing the same underlying technology.
Recognition of learning achieved by institutions that are aligned to a framework of Freedom and Openness should be the new way to provide assertions of quality, not accreditation of the resources used. This can be built on the base of ‘recognition of prior learning’ which is already in place in many institutions, including the University of the Western Cape where I work.
This is a possible brave new world of education 3.0, one in which the organizational constraints and boundaries are removed, the need for aggregation is not the only model for accredited learning, and the long-tail reaches into higher education at last. I do not see it as a replacement for institutional learning as it happens currently, but as another layer on top of it that extend the value of higher education into new spaces and that enable synergy among different individuals and institutions to be created.
Is this a desirable world? Is it a world that we will see in our lifetimes? Or is it the ranting of a digitally-disturbed, hyperlinked lunatic?
Derek,
Quite a timely post for me. I just came back from the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT). The session topics focused primarily on “Web 2.0″ technologies and techniques; wikis, blogs and of course the now ubiquitous LMS.
In all of these sessions, Derek’s model for content development and delivery was evident. Many contributors using disparate tools generate content then pass the finished product through to an institutionally managed tool where it is aggregated and managed by faculty. The focus was on many contributing to a single interface: student generated content, distributed content, etc.
Derek’s model of the Personal Learning Environment would appear to provide multiple aggregation environments (equal to the number of students–potentially more) that host the independently developed content.
Only one session at CIT touched on this, “Whose technology is it anyway?” presented by Steven Zucker, Beth Harris and Eric Feinblatt of the Fashion Institute of Technology. The session description asked, “Why haven’t we, as educators, been asking this question of ourselves? Why is technology exempt from the lessons we’ve learned about involving students in their own education? Why is technology something that an institution ‘delivers’ without significant input from the students themselves?
In the presentation they displayed two screen shots, one of the campus portal that included announcements, calendar events, email, etc., what the campus felt the students needed, and the other, a student generated PLE built in their own instance of Wordpress. The idea I took away from this was that students are not only better suited to identify and organize their own content, they are better suited to define the tools to do so.
To me it seems plausible that a course’s faculty member publishes course specific content, references, activities, etc. to a course site, but the students aggregate that (and other resources they may find) within their own PLE, a wiki, a blog, iGoogle, a basic web page, etc. Really just like they used to with their own notes, folders, binders, lockers, desks, etc. These independent sites (maybe we call them “cites?”) can also be shared between students as course resources.
I noticed here that there is a link to Digg on this page. I wonder how such tools could be used to identify student “cites” as resources for the class? Could these be referenced and scored similarly where those that received multiple visits, comments, referrals, rankings, be scored (valued?) higher just as search engines, Digg, del.icio.us does. Is Education 3.0, Web 3.0 or Web2.0-2.0 (my Web2.0 “goes to eleven”) really all about integration and interoperability?
Great post (and I’m happy to have for once beaten Richard Wyles to the punch and posted the first comment - woohoo),
Patrick
Just re-read the post, I did not mean to state that the current state of course management is “Derek’s model” rather that how Derek described the current status of course and content development was evident in the conference presentations. That’s what I get for waking up early to beat Richard in with a post…
Hi Patrick,
Just a quickish response to:
“Is Education 3.0, Web 3.0 or Web2.0-2.0 (my Web2.0 “goes to eleven”) really all about integration
and interoperability?”
Education 3.0, as Philip and I conceived it in our paper
(http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1625/1540)
is not a technology but a consequence of the emergence of technologies generally recognized as Web 2.0 (I suppose you could paraphrase Microsoft, and say Web 2.0 or better), as well as changes to the way in which individuals and institutions behave. This includes recognizing learning , as opposed to recognizing crude measures of having been taught (which is mostly what we do now with some exceptions).
There is a bit more on Education 3.0, including something on the framework of openness idea in my blog at http://www.dkeats.com/blog/
Scroll down past the Sekuru and the Sharks (and perhaps past the pics I will be posting there tonight), past the twitter mashup, and you will find it there entitled “Challenges for Quality Assurance in an Education 3.0 world”. There is a slidecast as well as a PDF of the paper given at the UNESCO conference on Quality assurance.
Some of the keys to Education 3.0 are
students owning and managing their own learning;
aggregated courses are not the only way to get accredited learning;
institutional boundaries are more permeable;
processes are in place to recognize and accredit learning no matter what the source.
Hope this is useful.
Regards from a windblown and sunburnt blogger, Derek
Hi Derek,
Just had your blog passed onto me… seems we share more than similar perspectives, I’m from a once fishing village in rural New Brunswick.
Interesting stuff… and I’m particularly interested in the fourth of your ‘keys to 3.0′ the accreditation of learning. If I understood your post correctly, the accreditation universities will focus more on accrediting the ‘process of learning’ and, if the extension works, ‘the process of knowledge construction’ and not simply attempt verify the existence of that knowledge in the gray matter of one particular student. This, to me, is the critical need… at least in this transitional period between a potential open knowledge society and one that still operates on a pre-knowledge abundance mentality.
I’ll just post http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550&action=article here in lieu of typing out the rest of the article.
Looking forward to reading the rest of it. dave cormier
Hey Derek, Great to see your post @ Terra Incognita.
The University of the Western Cape is a leader in progressing FLOSS for education and FORE. I was particularly pleased to read your comment about many of the “free” content licenses being anything but free . Especially those CC licenses incorporating NC and ND restrictions.
Fortunately the free knowledge movement has made some progress in this regard, largely due to the interventions of the Wikimedia Foundation and support from the Free Software Foundation. Recently the Creative Commons have included a Free Cultural Works approved logo on the two CC licenses that meet these requirements . See for example:
CC-BY and
Increasingly, education institutions are now signing the Cape Town Open Education Declaration — which I think is a good thing. At last we are seeing a return to the true values of education — namely to share knowledge freely. However, these commitments need to be followed up with appropriate reward and incentive mechanisms at the institutional level within the academy. One example is the implementation of progressive and supportive IP policies.
I know that UWC has a progressive IP policy and has been a pioneer in this area. What advice can you give institutions who have signed the Cape Town Declaration in taking the next steps in supporting their commitments? How did UWC go about changing and implementing its IP policy? What lessons have you learned from the process?
It seems to me that once an institution commits through a supportive IP policy — the growth in FORE is impressive. A good example is Otago Polytechnic in new Zealand. They have implemented a new IP policy where all resources default to a CC-BY license. Since the implementation of this policy — free content development at the Otago Polytechnic has been prolific and inspiring.
Great post Derek — thanks. Wayne
I’d be interested to hear more about the things to be concerned about in:
Of course, it is not all good. There is a deeply disturbing and absurd movement to try to accredit the so-called “open educational resources,” with UNESCO seeming to wish to do this for reasons that are of dubious benefit. Any attempt to accredit content will only serve to slow down the rate of production, and is as sensible as accrediting books on library shelves. Instead, what should be accredited is an institution’s alignment to a framework of Freedom and Openness.
I don’t know about UNESCO, but I can see benefits in streamlining migration of people with skills and qualifications that are internationally recognised. And I see that international recognition possibly developing through collaborative efforts in OER development. What exactly are the absurdities and dubious benefits your are referring to? I think I can agree that accrediting content is a silly idea, but OER could be about much more than just content. As a friend asked me recently, does OER really refer to resources, or is it more accurate to refer to it as Open Education Reform. In that sense, OER would be about much more than content, and all about networked learning, networked teaching, group learning, student exchange programs, teacher exchange programs, and a mashup of short courses offered by a range of people and institutions that could amount to an international degree or other sort of certificate or qualification..
To try to respond quickly to Wayne MacIntosh first, and for those who have not been part of the “free” or “open” discussion before….
The notion of “open” is borrowed from the concept of “open source”, a software concept that arose mainly out of people not being able to deal with the steadfast focus on Freedom by founder Richard Stallment by some of the original proponents. The notion of “open source” really focuses on business benefit, not on the Freedoms that the software embodies. The “open” of course applies to the source code. In the case of content, that would imply that the original source files used to produce a work are available in their original (ideally open) formats. But of course, in the case of 99% of the content that is supposedly open, this is not the case. If you want to create a derivative work, you often have to re-engineer the raw materials, so they are neither open nor free.
Then there are licenses that restrict the Freedom inherent in the resources, with the NonCommercial restriction being particularly evil in this regard because it creates license incompatibilities that preclude building composite derived works. The issue is not about commercial use, but the fact that if YOU use a NC restriction, it prevents me from including some of your content in my less restrictive works, and PREVENTS the users of MY content from receiving potential benefit from people who may wish to contribute but use the works commercially.
I am opposed to anything that impedes velocity, and the NC restriction and accreditation would both impede velocity. Indeed, if they were applied to software, we would almost certainly have NO Free or Open Source Software today. The only way to overcome this, and still retain velocity, is to pump large volumes of money into it, which is of course what MIT and others have done. But that is not sustainable.
How did UWC succeed with its strategy on Free Courseware and Content? Well, we are an institution which is deeply rooted in the intellectual engagement with the issues of freedom as we were the intellectual home of the struggle for political freedom in South Africa. We understand both the tenets of freedom, and what it is like not to have it (I have my mementos of rubber bullets and teargas cannisters to prove it). As an institution we therefore have deep roots in the key concept of Freedom that most of the Open conversation seems to miss, and be shy to talk about. We are not shy. It is our life blood. Thats why we talk about Free Courseware and Free Content. To be free it must be open, but it can be open without being Free, and that is incompatible with our reason for being as an institution.
Our chancellor is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who I am sure you will all recognize as an uncompromising champion of freedom. He has personally signed the Cape Town Declaration as well. You can here him talk about freedom in the digital age at
Perhaps they will help explain where we come from.
Unfortunately, our growth in production of OERs has not been commiserate with our stance YET for a number of reasons. However, we believe that collaboration among students is the key to at least one aspect of it. Thus we have the Rip, Mix and Learn project, which has students producing content as part of their own learning, and making it available to the next crop of students. This is FORE in a social constructivist scenario, much of OER is instructivist lead.
But there is a role for that as well. In the second semester, we go live with our new learning management system, which will automatically make all of our course materials available under a CC: BY-SA license. We are also starting a podcast project that will see lectures automatically podcasted from the classroom (where the lecturer chooses to do so), and by next year, this will be in all our classrooms, thus potentially making all our lectures available under this license.
Sorry, rambling while eating my granola and yoghurt, but hope these comments are useful, Will respond to the other two posts during the course of the day.
Regards, derek
Wow, thanks for the great post and comments. I want to point back to Derek’s provocative statement about accrediting Open Education Resources, and push Leigh’s questions a bit further.
When we talk about “accrediting” open educational resources, what do we mean?
I am assuming that is has something to do with assuring quality. I suppose that there are a whole lot of quality assurance models in education. Many governments become involvement with quality assurance through public agencies, there are also regional and professional accreditation processes that strive to ensure institutional and curricular quality. I suppose that most colleges and universities have internal processes in which they “accredit” learning materials, but I think that it is usually pretty contextual. That is, factors such as teaching methods, characteristics of learners, level of the course within an overall curriculum, educational commitments of the institution, department, and faculty are taken into account together and not disaggregated. In many settings this happens within a college, department, and/or at the individual level f the faculty member – not so much by individual students. That said, in the bigger picture, I suppose that individual learners do make decisions based on their perceptions of quality and value.
In any event, it seems that it is perhaps a bit inappropriate to “accredit” Open Educational Resources in the same way that we quality assure academic programs or course instances. It seems to me though that there are characteristics that have little to do with the “content” in terms of its accuracy, relevance, logic, meaning, etc, but does have to do with other important qualities such as ability easily find, access, use, modify, and reuse the OER. Are these qualities that might be assured or at least described?
If so, how might we promote such qualities without impeding velocity?
I raise this because I think that it might be helpful to have some method to identify OER (define this as broadly as you like) that is most “usable” and “useful,” taking into account factors such as licensing, adherence to open formatting and packaging standards, and other characteristics that promote modification, reuse, and sharing (for as wide a group as possible).
Cheers - Ken
Derek, I like how you describe education 3.0 as another layer in education providing more options for individuals. E3.0 it seems is less about organizations provisioning education and more about individuals provisioning their own.
I argue that an abundance in both learning resources as well as “accreditation” is what will enable velocity. When we provision our own learning, there is an important role for accreditation in its broader meaning as a 3rd party stamp of approval.
For instance, when we travel, we can choose to travel on your own or we might go with a package deal where everything is pre-planned and quality controlled. Both forms of travel benefit from various 3rd party stamps of approval. These can be ratings and comments from fellow travelers, recommendations in a published guidebook, or the brand name of the organization offering the experience. Different trips benefit from different kinds of 3rd party recognition depending on our purpose for the trip.
Likewise, in education there are stamps of approval for all of the parts of the system: content is peer reviewed, published and awarded prizes by 3rd parties whose names are respected among a particular community; processes can be ISO certified for quality; degrees can earn approval from professional bodies that are the keepers of standards and best practices in their particular communities; institutions can be recognized by governments and accreditation bodies by demonstrating adherence to rules and practices; and individual learning outcomes can be recognized by normed exams and evaluation by recognized evaluators – to name a few.
A long tail in open learning resources benefits from a wide variety of stamps of approval from an unlimited variety of 3rd parties – including individuals. How else can we find what best suits our purpose, including the characteristics of openness, in an ever-growing abundance of good stuff?
Our purposes and contexts are not only local, but personal. We need stronger recommender systems and ways to identify useful resources fit for our individual use. I believe that velocity in the growth of resources needs to be matched by growth and variety in stamps of approval so we can make more informed choices.
IMHO -