Serendipity35

I wasn't even aware until this week that my very own Passaic County Community College had been nominated in this year's eduStyle Higher-ed Web Awards. It's "people's choice" voting and you can help recognize the best of the higher-ed web by voting.

The eduStyle site is a good way to get a look at a lot of very well-designed college websites and features. Very useful if you're considering a redesign yourself.

We are in the category for "Best Sub-site" which covers those sites that colleges use for special promotions or to drive a special audience to the main site or a program. Ours is called "Passaic County Community College - 100 Reasons" and it has one hundred reasons from serious to rather whimsical to consider the college. It has a nice Flash banner that goes through a half dozen reasons at the top and then many other reasons - people, programs, activities - some with links to interest prospective students.

You can give us a vote at edustyle.net/site.php?site=1087 or just take a look at the PCCC - 100 Reasons site if you're tired of the election process due to the Democratic primaries dragging on...

The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University may look at quick glance as a version of the MIT OpenCourseware project. I think there are some significant differences.

"Through the OLI project, Carnegie Mellon is working to help the World Wide Web make good on its promise of widely accessible and effective online education. OLI grew out of collaboration among cognitive scientists, experts in human computer interaction and seasoned faculty who have both a deep expertise in their respective fields and a strong commitment to excellence in higher education. The project adds to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence."

The MIT site offers materials from many of their courses which students and instructors can access and download. The OLI site is more involved in actually taking a course and working through an online environment.

The OLI courses include some interesting online instructional components like cognitive tutors, virtual labs, group experiments and simulations. The OLI researchers study the effectiveness and usability of the courses to improve the courses, and to contribute to effective practices in online learning environments. There is assessment and evaluation built into all courses. One objective of the project is to build a community of use for the courses in order to direct course development and improvement.

It's interesting that the courses are designed in a modular format, so you could use the courses as designed, or modify the content and sequence to fit your needs.

The first courses on the site are typical large lecture format courses (Economics, Statistics, Logic).

Will the most important impact of OLI be "increased access to education" or modeling effective online courses and course materials? The latter is something that the MIT effort lacks, so I am hopeful that OLI and other efforts will work towards both goals.

Take an online tour of the Open Learning Initiative

Every once and awhile I go to a site like YouTube and do a wildcard search. Enter an asterisk as the wild card in their search box and it looks for ALL videos. A few weeks ago it came up as 79,600,000 videos. (Just now I tried & it and maybe they are disallowing wildcard search; it said "1-20 of millions.") It's overwhelming.

And it's spring cleaning time, so I started going through my RSS feeds for blogs and deciding what to thin out. I have had to do this before. I have been a longtime user of Bloglines, but a few months ago I started adding a few feeds to my Google Reader since I use Gmail, Documents and their calendar (which now syncs with the Outlook calendar on my school office computer) every day. I'm starting to ignore my Bloglines feeds, and if you do that for a few days or weeks, the amount of UNREAD posts is frightening.

(Still not sure about what RSS is all about? Watch this simple and plain English video explanation.)

Using Google Reader means I need to snip away at my existing Bloglines feeds. But what to prune away?

Pruning #1 Right off are the blogs that post multiple short posts each day so that I can't keep up with reading. They must be part of this current interest in Twitter and other microblogs that I just don't get.

Have you tried Twitter? Users post all day with short bursts of "news" updates: "I'm having some soup; heading to a meeting; at the gym; just saw the new Porsche drive by." You can sign up with your mobile number and enter text either via the form on the site, or send text messages to the service. Depending on your privacy settings, the messages will be displayed right on their public page or just on your private page, visible only to you and your friends. I don't need to follow anyone that closely, and no one would want to follow me either.

#2 Then there are a few bloggers who have turned too commercial for me. There are two educators in particular that I have followed for a few years that I just dropped. Reason? Their posts have just become a series of tales about all the conferences and workshops they are doing. And their resource links are the same old wine in new bottles. They work hard at finding new ways to title the same talk on Web 2.0.

#3 If you want to have a blog, you have to blog. There were 7 blogs that haven't had a new post in more than a month. At least they don't pile up, but, alas, farewell.

Is Google Reader better than Bloglines? Each has some small advantages/differences. For Google Reader, for me, having in front of me when I open my Gmail is good. Subscribing and categorizing feeds in folders is equally easy. There are small things that matter (maybe just to me) like: in both I can email someone a blog post but in GR I can select my own subject line (in Bloglines, it creates an uneditable one for me. Choose either (or comment below with your own favorite reader) but if you read blogs on any regular basis, use a reader.

The headline was "Experimental Xerox Paper Erases Itself, Results In Temporary Documents On Reusable Paper."

"Xerox Corporation scientists have invented a way to make prints whose images last only a day, so that the paper can be used again and again. The technology, which is still in a preliminary state, blurs the line between paper documents and digital displays and could ultimately lead to a significant reduction in paper use."

The first thing I thought of is the Disposable Web Page site. "Blurs the line." Indeed...

A year ago, Apple launched a new version of the iTunes Music Store which included an iTunes U link and 16 colleges whose podcasts can be accessed directly from the iTunes application. Happily, NJIT was one of the initial 16 schools.

Since then, they have also opened up the iTunes U area to "educational" organizations that are not universities. You can find podcasts in the "Beyond Campus" area from the NY Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and others.

My updated list of schools below have partnered with Apple, Inc. to use iTunes U. This list was first posted in January 2007 when we launched our own instance of NJIT on iTunes.

Though I am no longer at NJIT or involved in iTunes U, I try to keep up on schools that offer a public face in iTunes U both to see what they are offering and to download materials. Although a lot of content is specific to a school (admissions, sports etc.), there are also public course materials and speakers that have a much broader appeal and real educational value.

This list is not official, definitive or complete - but I'll keep at it here until one that is appears.

If you know of a school that has a public presence on iTunes U, please add a link with a comment at the bottom of this entry and I'll add it to the list. NOTE: These are public sites, not those schools that have podcasts available in the iTunes Music Store but only as password-protected content for their own students. Of course, all these sites will require the free iTunes software to access and play or download content.

1. NJIT on iTunes U information & launch page or open directly in iTunes
2. Bowdoin College
3. Penn State on iTunes U
4. Stanford on iTunes U
5. Duke Digital Initiative - Open Duke University's Fuqua School of Business
6. Harvard Extension School
7. University of California at Berkeley
8. Sacramento State - open in iTunes
9. Arizona State University
10. Texas A&M
11. Ross School of Business at U of Michigan
12. Santa Monica College
13. University of California at Berkeley
14. Queens University (Canada)
15. Wellesley College
16. Georgia College and State University
17. Rollins College
18. Radford College - open Radford
19. Gordon College - open Gordon College
20. Lafayette College
21. Virginia Tech
22. Guilford Tech Community College
23. Concordia Seminary
24. Otis College of Art & Design
25. College of William & Mary
26. Villanova University
27. Florida Tech
28. Ohlone College
29. Texas Tech
30. Wilkes University
31. Seattle Pacific University
32. Abilene Christian University
33. Reformed Theological Seminary
34. Southwestern College
35. University of Michigan
36. Vanderbilt University
37. New Mexico State University
38. Agnes Scott College
39. Aquinas Institute of Theology
40. East Tennessee State University
41. UC - Davis
42. University of Washington
43. University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

We welcome your comments below with the URLs to other schools with public access to iTunes U. Though some schools are listed right within iTunes, there are plenty more that are not, so this list hopefully broadens the exposure of all the schools. James Welsh has created a wiki of participating schools (which is a better 2.0 idea than this post) at http://itunesu.pbwiki.com/ that you can also check out.

Free the knowledge!

"Published knowledge is old knowledge.The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledge tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

From Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (You can access that free online, but it's a 600+ page pdf so...)

That passage was written by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation.” (Steele is a former CIA operations officers and Marine Corps intelligence official whose firm, Open Source Solutions Inc., works under contract for various intelligence agencies). Educator Will Richardson quoted it on his blog last month and I scribbled it down in my notebook. Steele is writing about national security and intelligence, but I'm thinking about it as it relates to open knowledge and open textbooks and open everything else.

It's a thought-provoking line. But I'm not sure that I fully agree with it.

It's the idea that knowledge often is old as soon as it is published (in the traditional publishing sense). I really enjoyed The World Is Flat and recommend it to educators all the time - but we know that many of his statistics and examples were outdated by the time the galleys were approved and the copies hit the street.

It's also part of the reason why learning has become networked, shared and increasingly open and available.

The quote sent me looking into Robert Steele, which led me to Open Source Intelligence. OSINT involves "finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence." To the intelligence community, "open"means overt and public sources and not the covert, cloak & dagger stuff of our movie and novel imaginations. This is intelligence from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, government documents, many resources on the Web like Google Earth, blogs, wikis, geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS), conferences, academic papers, and who knows what else. (Reminds me of the character Robert Redford played in Three Days of the Condor.)

Think about that list of resources above. How different is it from where we want students to go for information?

What about that "old knowledge?" It's hard for me to not integrate prior knowledge to build the new knowledge. Some theorists might call this building schema. Schema is a good word here - from the Greek "σχήμα" meaning shape or plan. Schemas (or schemata) show up in a number of fields. Most people are familiar with a schematic diagram that represents the elements of a system using abstract, graphic symbols. In computer science, there are data models to represent the relationships of a set of concepts, or an XML schema to define the structure, content and the semantics of XML documents. Our old buddy, Kant, used it in philosophy for "referencing of a category to a sense impression through time" (and I still don't get it - I was always more of a Locke fan).

Certainly we put aside old knowledge when it is outdated or disproven. Today we have access so so much new knowledge that filtering is a key skill. We old-timers that try to keep up with the new probably have more trouble. If you just ignore the new, or if you're young and just accept the new as true knowledge, life is simpler.

Take that pesky Wikipedia (which I frequently link to here on the blog). There's old knowledge there. Lots of it, copied & pasted from all over the place. But there's also much that is new being recorded as it happens. (Check the Barack Obama history page on Wikipedia and see how often it is being updated and hacked.)

I'm convinced that we need to first educate the educators and then have them teach their students how to filter and sort the good new knowledge, remix it with the old and have strategies for interpreting the inevitable conflicts that will occur. Information literacy and critical thinking may seem to be old terms, but much of what we need to teach in those areas is brand new.

We also have to make the new knowledge known, as we have always done with the old knowledge. The mediums for transmitting that knowledge may be themselves new. Publishing the content may be posting it online.

A friend nicely told me that he was getting a little tired of me talking about "open everything" on this blog. Perhaps, I have focused on that category a bit much of late. Still, how can we discuss all that I'm talking about here and not get into open: education, textbooks, knowledge, courseware and all the rest of it?

I'll close with a return to Robert Steele and that opening quote. There's a place for the old and the new. You can download his book free online, and you can pay Amazon.com $22 for a hardcover copy of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. What I don't feel there's a place for today is only the old information, or only the new.

"The problem with spies is they only know secrets," says Steele. The problem with education is...

Reading Tim's thorough dissection today of the blog getting a million hits in April is illuminating, but it doesn't address what gives me the most pleasure from the numbers.

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "Bookmarklets and Favelets" about using social bookmarking tools and sites. It's a very average post with a useful list of links to social bookmarking sites. The week it was posted it probably has about 100 direct hits. (The number at the end of each post tells you how many people actually linked directly to that post. A hit on our home page probably leads someone to read the latest post but that post doesn't get any "credit" for that in the count.) I looked at it today - 21, 333 direct hits. The post has a life.

I thought briefly about being a journalist when I was an undergrad. If I had ended up making it to the big show - say at the New York Times - I would write pieces that people would read and then throw away. True, some pieces get reprinted, clipped out and saved (I still do that all the time), anthologized or end up in books, but the vast majority disappear. That's depressing.

This post (and hopefully some others that are much better) will be read more in the months to come than it will be read this month when it is fresh and new. I like that a lot. Traditional (and paid!) journalists are also reaping this benefit of online publishing. Their writing gets read again and again online long after it appeared in print on paper.

I guess Tim & I could think of getting hit on a million times in another way too. I checked the dictionary and found "hit on" (No, not to make, especially sexual overtures to) also means to discover or meet especially by chance. That's a perfectly serendipitous way of looking at this.

I started experimenting with wikis in early 2006. Tim and I set up a wiki using Mediawiki software. That's the open source software that powers Wikipedia and you'll find lots of other wiki sites that use it (and have a similar look). It was simultaneous experimentation with blogs, so we created Serendipity35 and Wiki35. (Why the 35?)

Wiki35 has become a metawiki, that is, a wiki about using wikis. If you're new to wikis or teaching someone about them, you might find the site useful in talking about these topics that deal with the "pedagogy" and the technical aspects of wiki use in education and even in the corporate world.

1. What is a wiki?
2. Is a wiki the same thing as a "blog"?
3. What are the benefits of wikis?
4. How are schools and corporations using wikis?
5. How do you maximize collaboration?
6. Why go public with your wiki?
7. What security options exist for wikis?
8. What wiki software is available?
9. What are the system requirements for serving a wiki?
10. How is a wiki installed?
11. How do you create content (pages) and format them?
12. Can I export content?
13. Can I add podcasts and RSS feeds to my wiki?
14. Mediawiki EXTRAS
15. Join our wiki DISCUSSION
16. Sample Wikis

    

In January 2006, Wikispaces decided to offer their Plus Plan to K-12 teachers for free as a way to get them using wikis in the teaching.

10,000 educational wikis later, they have collaborative writing projects, essays, group study guides, online lesson plans, and classroom notice boards coming alive on Wikispaces.

They want to give away 100,000 free K-12 Plus wikis. That includes all the features and benefits that normally cost $50/year - for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no advertising, no catches.

I have a number of Wikispaces sites that I either "manage" or participate in as a member. I started to collect links to Wikispaces that I contribute to or simply use so that I could share them with others - click here for the list. It's a great way to enter the wiki in the classroom experience with no or low cost and a very simple to use wiki product.

Megite Discover is a crowdsourcing service for web browsing provided by Megite, a social news aggregator. The idea is that you put in a web address and it provides relevant links of related interest. That would be a useful tool for students doing research. If it works it might pull up related areas that an ordinary search wouldn't find.

So, I asked it for connections to Serendipity35. An encouraging first look: the keywords it finds are "education" and "college." Not exactly what we try to be, but a reasonable starting place.

For connections it gives me Free Online MIT Course Materials,which makes sense, Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better ,so it must be channeling Tim's posts, 20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books, a topic we have addressed. It connected with Scratch, the programming tool for younger students from MIT that I have written about, and it also offers broader related links to each URL. For Scratch, it offers programming, free, software animation - all valid connections. Next comes Massive List of Free Education Online For Autodidacts - perfect for the Serendipity35 readers who we know are lifelong autodidacts! And there are some oddities like Tableau Périodique (French Periodic Table). Then back in line with a University Podcast Collection.

Then I put my poetry site to the test. Discover brings up writing as the keyword - which is good - but the associated links are about writing in general and not really about poetry specifically: About 100 Words, widgets for poetry generation, great novel generation, and everything in between, MLA Formatting and Style Guide, Son of Citation Machine ,Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing.

One last test. I entered the college URL (http://pccc.edu) and I get NOTHING! So I tried NJIT. That one comes ups with many links - but mostly to the college's own site (including Serendipity35). Hmmm...

How different is this from other tools that do similar kinds of matches? the easiest one for me to use is built right into the Google Toolbar.

For any page that I am viewing, I can click the "Page Rank" button and look at "Similar Pages" and "Backward Links"' (sites that link to the site you're viewing - useful to webmasters & blog owners to check who is linking to your site).

How does my PCCC test work with the Google tool? My first try drew another blank. Very odd. So, I tried using www.pccc.edu and there were lots of links (including Serendipity35 right at the top of the page because of some mentions of PCCC I have made). Hmmm#2. Let's try the www.pccc.edu path on Megite Discover. No go - still no connections.

Megite Discover did turn up broader connections and categories of related links than Google, but almost too broad. Obviously it has not indexed PCCC - a serious flaw for us - and it doesn't offer backward links or the cached snapshot of the way the page looked when Google last cached that URL (it seems to show yesterdays post when I check this blog). I'll have to give the advantage to the Google Toolbar on this round, but it's interesting to see tools that offer a way for students and teachers to find related areas and links you might not have thought to use. I'm still having some trouble figuring out that French periodic chart? Could it have known that my wife taught French? Now THAT would be an amazing tool.

Part of the appeal of open textbooks to students is obviously no cost versus the ridiculously high cost of books for classes. Students can access open textbooks on the Internet for free. But what is the appeal of the open textbook for teachers and colleges?

Open textbook "authors" put their books online for public use. Since they are also open license, instructors can modify the text by deleting and adding content. Of course, you can still print them and some campuses even offer printed copies, color versions etc. at minimal cost.

But there aren't many available at this point.

What makes it a bit more interesting for me here at Passaic County Community College is that yesterday I read that the Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week. Professors from colleges will be meeting with representatives from nonprofit groups and for-profit companies that are in the digital textbook market to talk about ways of developing and promoting online content.

Not all reviews of open textbooks are glowing. Some students find them too short and lacking the depth of traditional books. For example, some professors typically cover a portion of the text in class/lectures, but would assign or expect students to read the additional textbook material. In a course like statistics, students might welcome extra practice problems from a full textbook. The quality of available OER materials is inconsistent at this point. These books may not meet Section 508 ADA accessibility requirements. Faculty will need to check for accuracy of content of open content more than commercial textbooks. (The Wikipedia versus Britannica battle again.)

Still, as with other Open Everything efforts, customization of content will ultimately be more flexible in open content than it currently is in commercially available content. And after a few classes where you pay $100+ for a book that gets used twice in the semester, student attitudes to open textbooks will change.

The first phase of the Community College Open Textbook Project is being funded by a one-year, $500,000-plus grant to the Foothill-De Anza Community College District from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As part of the project, community college professors will receive training on how to find and customize material. Another goal is for participants to create online textbooks using existing resources. The meeting in California will have them reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability.”

Here are the first four providers of free online educational resources that will be considered, and plenty of additional resources if you want to explore more deeply..

• Connexions run by Rice University
• Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher (FWK should be offering free textbooks online in 2009)
• University of California's College Prep Online (Advanced Placement and other courses online)
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources which was founded by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and the League for Innovation in the Community College
• an article from Inside Higher Ed
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER)
• CCCOER Open Content
• Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikijunior
• No More Textbooks. What Would Gutenberg Say?
• Open Text Book is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with
• the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) and is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation

UPDATED  May 1, 2008

I'm adding this comment to the main post because I know that readers don't always bother to click the comments link. Here's a take on this topic from a commercial publisher (mentioned above) who is working with the open textbook community.

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I am the co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, the commercial open textbook publisher mentioned in the Wired Campus article. I agree with you that historically, the quality of open textbooks has been inconsistent. We are focused on changing that. My business partner and I come out of 30 years of publishing experience with McGraw-Hill, Thomson, and Prentice Hall. We have personally worked on some of the top selling textbooks in the market. It is our belief that there is no inherent reason why an open textbook should be of any lower quality that a traditional book.

I can't speak for open textbooks in general. I can only speak to our approach. We are building our textbooks just like we did at our former companies . We are being highly selective about which authors we sign (top academics, recognized in their fields). Our books are undergoing extensive peer review. They are professionally illustrated, and fully accuracy checked. They include everything a traditional book does, including problem sets. They even include more, like integrated audio and videos. We produce teaching supplements for instructors.

You get the point. These are complete, high quality books.

The difference is that we make them free online, and available forinstructors to modify to better fit the syllabus before assigning it to students.

We have a viable financial model behind this. Students can purchase inexpensive alternatives to the online book, including a print version, an audio version, a Kindle version, and .pdf printable versions.

We also work with our authors to create and sell high quality study aids tightly integrated with the book - audio study guides,mobile flash cards, web quizzes, animated problem walkthroughs, etc. Students can purchase these DRM free downloads as they need them, or in one digital package. Our authors receive a percentage of all revenue generated. The bottom line is that financial models demonstrate that our revenue, and the income generated by authors, will be more than competitive with what the traditional houses make, so we can continuously reinvest in our products. Sorry about the long post. I just wanted to be clear that it can be dangerous to lump all open textbooks together in the category of "a book somebody just put online". At Flatworld, we are a professional publisher. We just have a new and better business model, and we think that it can produce a win for students, faculty, authors, and us, the publisher. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify!

Eric Frank
eric[at]flatworldknowledge.com    flatworldknowledge.com

I have been noticing more and more informal meetups developing at the fringes of formal conferences. You attend a conference and discover that special interest groups are getting together less formally to share ideas during breaks and in the off-conference hours.

I have heard events of this type called meetups, unconferences, collaborative conferences and barcamps and I wrote about a Classroom 2.0 free meetup at the start of this year.

I want to share another one that I noticed this past week. It is occurring as a pre-conference event at the NECC Conference (National Educational Computing Conference). It is billed as EduBloggerCon / Classroom 2.0 "LIVE in San Antonio" on June 28, 2008. It's a full day meetup of educators using blogs and other collaborative technologies. They invite bloggers, blog readers and those who want to enter that world. What makes it an unconference is that it is pretty much being organized by the participants in real time on the wiki site. They are also sharing information on what sessions they plan to attend. The group does have (through the generosity of organizer ISTE) access that day to rooms at the Convention Center and free wi-fi.

I have never attended NECC - scared off by the reports of attendees of the overwhelming nature of this big conference. Does this meetup effect make a big conference seem smaller & more personal - or does it make it even busier? (Things to do during the breaks!) I'd love to hear from past attendees and unconference fans about their experiences.

Another happening is the NECC "Unplugged at the Bloggers Cafe" (also called "NECC 2.0," the NECC "Fringe" Festival, and the NECC "Unconference - I hope we settle on a name for all this). This runs over the 3 days and is also being scheduled by the participants and happens in the open lounge areas. Right now they list 7 types of sessions and it's interesting to see some new takes on the standard presentation and poster sessions format of many conferences.

1. from the more formal "Birds of a Feather" sessions which are actually scheduled by NECC
2. to "Speed Demos" - 5 minute (max) demonstrations of Web 2.0 programs or uses
3. "Short Talks" 7 minute talks (they compare it to the TED Talks and suggest "if you got formally turned down for a NECC session... now you can say you presented at NECC").
4. "Facilitated Discussions" - group discussion with volunteer facilitators, topics proposed online
5. "Panel Discussion" - find some panelists & a moderator, and put yourselves in the schedule.
6. "Success Stories" - your own success stories to showcase and for discussion in 30-minute blocks around specific topics (e.g., "Blogging with young students")
7. and finally "Daily Wrap Ups"