When I registered for the event it had quite a bit to do with the people I knew would be there and the opportunity to meet and talk through issues with those folks was key. The sessions surprised me in ways that I was honestly not prepared for, each one I attended was massively insightful and wonderfully done. I’ll do my best in this post to reflect on some of the things that jumped out at me, but will in no way be able to fully articulate the things that are still roaming around in my head as they relate to the Open Education community. What follows are notes and reflections that were started sometime during the week and have been edited on and off over the course of several days — it’ll bounce between present, future, and past tense … so try to hang in and I apologize going in about how long it is.

Arrival

New Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Opportunities

Clearly some of the work David Wiley has ben doing will lay the groundwork for informing Institutions about the relative value an OER initative will have on their long term success. The part of OER that is unfortunate to me has been listening to many top level administrators frame the discussion as one that is built solely on financial issues. Many of the people actually invested in the OER space talk about it as a “moral imperative,” related to sharing content to the World and doing good. I agree with this stance on lots of levels but it is the realities of the Institutional base that creates a strong argument against doing it. I feel like what is begining to happen is that there are people (Wiley is one of them) who are looking more critically at what it might mean to a University from both a financial and moral perspective. The other thing here is that I spend nearly all of my time thinking only about resident learning and ways to make that a more open experience. The other thing that I noticed is that most of the conversation related to OER focuses more on the more pure distant education and not resident education. This has kept on the sidelines for much of the conversation. The meeting in Vancouver made me rethink that position …

I did my best to share my thoughts related to openness from an RI perspective and tried to stress that we shouldn’t limit our activities to simply courseware, but also tools that empower openness. I think through the conversations I had I was able to talk those notions through with some people, but at times I did feel as though I was still on the outside looking in. Reflecting on the whole experience I can say I feel much better about coming at this from a slightly different perspective.

The final note I’ll make about the notion of new conversations and scholarship centers around the fact that the OpenEd conference has become an internationally known event that draws some of the most serious educational technologists in the world. The fact that I can be asked to participate in a global conversation that is really designed by ed tech people for ed tech people is relatively stunning. The place was absolutely buzzing with energy and without being too over the top, it felt to me like there is a bit of a sea change on the horizon. I think for too many years we perhaps leaned on potentially out moded forms of design that are centered on ignoring the power of the open social web. It is in that realization that I felt as though I really belonged with this group. I think that we may be in the moment where the work of the last 10 years specifically will begin to penetrate the thinking as it relates to teaching and learning. That we can drive real curricular change and challenge the notion of the behaviorist view of traditional learning design. The flexibility and openness afforded to us is empowering educational technologits to imagine new forms of pedagogy that over time could radically alter the open vs. closed conversation that dominates much of education. Again, I don’t want to make too much of it, but spending time talking through this issue is what has been the transformative moment of the event for me. Openness will happen, but I believe it will be built on new forms of scholarship and pedagogy by people who have been living their lives in the social web — experimenting, imagining, and designing learning spaces that tear down the long standing notions of top down, locked down content. That to me is more motivating than anything I can consider.

People Matter

Like I mentioned earlier, I went mainly for the people and the hope for intense conversations. I am leaving with an even greater sense of community and with new friendships. I’ll clearly leave people out, but the hospitatility and intensity of those who put this event together is inspiring — Brian Lamb, David Wiley, Chris Lott, and Scott Leslie all put their best foot forward and built something that is clearly very difficult to create — an event that is intellectually challenging paired with what I would consider a world-class collection of voices in the field. Canada has its share of thought leaders in our field, but I had no idea I would meet so many more. Some of the others who either rocked me with their sessions or just through informal conversations are listed below … in no particular order.

Alec Courous is someone whom I read as much as I can and have come to respect on so many levels over the last few years. As a faculty member he is challenging the notions of scholarship and pushing his field in new directions. While Alec didn’t present, the conversations I had with him — down to his empassioned readings of twitter messages — made me think even more critically how important it is for me to personally continue to attack my own doctorate and to press my colleagues at Penn State to follow his lead. His open course, Social Media and Open Education is a very interesting model that we may consider for our own C&I 597 course Scott McDonald and I will teach in the spring. Very cool design and the openness is amazing.

I’ve know D’Arcy Norman for years online and have even had a chance to meet him once face to face prior to the event itself. D’Arcy styles himself as just “a lowly ed tech geek from the University of Calgery …” what he is however is someone who started much of the incidental openness that has spawned the very community that gathered here in Vancouver last week. He doesn’t write as much as he used to, but D’Arcy was honestly the first voice I heard online from my own field. He didn’t intend to inspire people in our field to bypass the traditional publishing path and make our own voice, but he did. These efforts pushed many of us, including me, to start experimenting with open platforms and to start imagining how they could be used in a teaching and learning contexts. Our discussions did not disappoint and I was thrilled to see he is just as snarky in person as he is on Twitter. His talk was short, but created lots of ongoing conversation … I would have liked to have had more time.

Telling Stories by the Fire

Alan Levine‘s “Amazing Stories of Openness” session was a real highlight. Alan always pushes it hard when he presents, but this was a whole new level. Alan used the open web and made calls for amazing stories from colleagues across the country and beyond. Alan decided that instead of him telling the stories he’d light the camp fire and have a virtual panel where he moderated and negitiated his way through some of the best reflective videos I’ve seen. I think in a lot of ways his approach was more about imploring those in attendance that amazing does happen in education when you build it on transparency.

History of EduGlu

My time with Jim Groom did not disappoint. I find it amazing that Jim drives forward with everything he does with both massive amounts of energy and passion yet controls his message so well. But the thing that strikes me in a deeper way is that each time I spend time with him I see how truly innovative and forward thinking he really is. I was just as in awe of his talk, “The Design of Openness” this time as I have been in the past, but his approach was softer and more well articulated in many ways. Instead of hitting us over the head with a technological solution to a problem that may or may not exist he spent his time weaving a story that focused on the things we should be concerned about — most importantly student learning and engagement. He deflects compliments, but he is honestly opening new doors for many of us to get our message out there to people outside our specific slice of the field.

Gardner Mesmerized Us

This was my first time getting to listen to Gardner Campbell from Baylor give a talk. I’ve met Garder and he is certainly one of my daily reads. He is also a faculty member working to redesign the Honors College at Baylor and he will do it with a style and substance that few I’ve met can bring. His talk, “No Digital Facelifts” was nothing short of mesmerizing. It was the only session that I went to that felt it lasted five minutes. Articulate, smart, and a bit provactive his message really resonated with me. His delivery was masterful — as much as any of the best lectures I’ve been to … in other words, he schooled us all. It is a much watch. His ideas of students as “sys admins” for their own educational cyber-infrastructure is at first almost laughable until you start to sit back and think about how little flexibility we give students to explore and design their own online identities. His metaphor of C-Panel as the CMS was staggering upon further reflection and while there isn’t a chance in the world that we could honestly do something like that, it gives me hope that within the next 5-10 years we can make real steps in that direction. When I go back and re-read my last sentence I want to edit it … but more on that in another post.

Dave Cormier’s session title, “We’re not your [@#$%] educational resource” was masterfully delivered and articulated. I’m honestly embarassed to say that I was not previously subscribed to Dave’s blog, but that changed immediately. His claim that we minimize the importance of community as components of the OER movement was wonderfully given. The discussion and debate that occured was mind opening. On top of that, Dave is a very smart and insightful guy across a very broad spectrum. I spent way too much time hanging out talking with him about a dozen or so topics late into the night — the Railway Club was an ideal location to expand our conversations!

John Mott from BYU simply blew me away. Another must watch presentation. All I can say is this guy knows what he is talking about on so many levels it is a bit scary. The fact he does in such an unassuming way was even more humbling. Thinking about how one builds a brdige between a personal learning environment and the LMS is a critical step along the path towards taking personal responsibility for one’s own learning. Another guy who just made me smile and marvel at was Chris Lott. I’ve followed Chris for quite some time, but hadn’t had the chance to really talk to him or see him in action. Getting to hear him talk and then spend time with him in a social setting was well worth the trip.

Then there was this undercurrent of new kids coming to the party. I met Boone Georges in person after many months of watching his Twitter stream. Andre Malen proved to be every bit as smart and articulate as both Brian Lamb and D’Arcy warned me about. I think those two, if they choose to stay in ed tech, will be great leaders in our field going forward. Having the courage and confidence to not just show up, but to challenge the thinking in such deep ways tells me so much about these two. BTW, there were about a half dozen or so amazingly intellignet young people at the event that I never did quite catch their names, so I appologize for not mentioning them by name. The old guard isn’t quite old or stale enough for a total changing to happen, but this is the first new blood I’ve seen injected into the conversation in quite some time.

Finally, I was impressed beyond belief with the participation of my PSU colleagues. Brian Panulla, Stevie Rocco, Ann Taylor, Jeff Swain, and Keith Bailey all came ready to engage and challenge what people had to say. I admit to following Ann’s running notes as a cue for what was happening in other sessions and watching Jeff’s blog for his session thoughts the entire time. I saw a bit of ah-ha monets come across the face of several of them and I know that means PSU will be a stronger place with that crew amplifying the message.

Final Thoughts

I know much of that reads like a fanboy perspective, but at the end of the day these and so many other people made a profound impact on me that I had to get some of it out. The event was terrific and the city was amazing. I’m looking forward to continuing this work here at PSU and beyond over the course of the next few years. I threw out an idea to some of the people listed above about coming to PSU and taking part in an all day event designed to keep the conversation moving forward … if they are half as passionate here as they were at OpenEd we’ll be in good shape.

Jimmy Wales: Founder of Wikipedia, Berkman Fellow

“The whole concept of wikipedia is a crazy idea. It is counter-intuitive.” — Jimmy Wales

His opening salvo centers on the fact that people on the Internet are inherently bad … top down wins or you end up with a bit of a blood bath. In the era of usenet, people couldn’t fathom the idea that anyone at anytime could edit knowledge just didn’t make any sense. His scenario is this … imagine you are given the task of designing a restaurant that served steak and everyone is given the knives … the problem here is that people walk into these situations saying something like, “people with knives might stab people.” When this is the central argument we end up just putting people in cages — essentially locking them out of participating. Wikipedia changes this.

NPOV – Neutral Point of View. This is the central tenant of wikipedia participation. Even with all this, the nature of technology is that your work is always going to be changed … with this in mind as you mature in your participation in wikipedia you realize that the more biased your view is, the more other people work to change it. He calls this “writing for the enemy.” Interesting in that we’ve taken the stance with our Community Hubs is the community self corrects.

Yochai Benkler: Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies, Harvard Law School Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

“The threat is not the money, the threat is the authority over knowledge.” — Yochai Benkler

The value in the wikipedia movement is that people learn how to have real and civil discussions related to the production of knowledge. We are really start to see the move towards something that was quirky in its origins (mass editing of knowledge) towards something that is now becoming an understand model … no matter if it is about posting text, pictures, making movies, or now with the Obama campaign and its ability to let the individual to create their own donation site to help raise money.

When the overlay of human cooperation comes into focus we see a much different model for taking advantage of the network. Look at the vast differences with the old Ma Bell model and who controlled that — remember the images of the switchboard operator actually controlling where and how we connected? Compare that to the world of network centric voice services like Skype … at the end of the day, these new ideas are fundamentally changing all sorts of things — the design of systems, the notion that change and unpredictability should be comfortable, and view of the relationship an individual has with the world.

Photo Credits: wseltzer

Argument 1: The Internet allows more free speech from more people than ever before, but states are finding ways to filter and limit that speech.

• Global Voices Online … a response from the question, how do you pay attention to the stuff that is going on around the world? We’ve gotten to a place where news has gone from a supply problem to a demand problem. There are people all over the world looking at how can we take advantage of the thousands of people producing news. The problem is how to create a moment around this news that people will pay attention to it.
• As you see people use these tools (blogs) you see counties (and Unviersities) pushing back and trying to shut them down. Once the powers that be discover the potency of the tools they work to censor or pull the plug all together.
• People pay attention when mainstream media tells us to … how do we (citizen journalists) work to get people to pay attention.
• The Farsi blogoshpere is the fourth largest in the world (Iranian speaking) … a critical question is, are Iranian bloggers telling more powerful stories through the blogosphere?
• OpenNet Initiative: An online resources that shows where Internet speech is being filtered and blocked.
Amazing struggle for these countries to block content and an intense struggle for citizens in these countries to get their voice out.
• Censorship cannot simply be studied by looking at what content is being linked to/retrieved, it is also about restricting access to technology in general, it is also an issue of poverty, gender controlled environments, and the like.
• “It is not a matter of freedom of speech, it is a matter of freedom after speech.”
• We have to fix the people … the technology is not the issue with censorship, it is the people.

Argument 2: There is greater autonomy of the individual because of the Internet.

• The underpinnings of the use of social software are inherent in developed countries. The rise of the use of the technology to participate in the conversation is predated by a basic belief in a participatory culture.
• Video of a student leader criticizing the Cuban governement — this video was taken from a closed circuit channel that someone hijacked … one thing that is evident is that the next time this happens there will be many more people in Cuba who will know how to get this message out more effectively. The student speaking out, ended up being passed around via a Flash drive (not the web) and the student was arrested. Note him in this video shaking where he lies about his arrest.

Argument 3: The Internet enables new types of groups to form around interests and causes. The formation of online groups will alter the form and function of existing organizations and institutions with unknown impacts on democracy and governance.

• The Internet and social tools helps fringe candidates succeed in new ways. Ron Paul’s campaign is a prime example.

“I was skeptical of studying the Internet at a law school … it seemed like proposing to study the telephone at a law school.” — William Fisher, during the introduction of Zittrain.

“Jonathan is the Berkman Center.” — Dean Elana Kegan while introducing Zittrain.

Photo Credits: wseltzer

Time to get started … the first real talk is kicking off with Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet. I admit that I have his book resting on my desk in my office, but I have yet to read it. I am very interested in getting to it as it has been recommended by some very smart people, Lessig in particular talked at length about it during our lunch together at the 2008 TLT Symposium. Off to his talk … BTW, while some of this I really tried to capture, much of it is a collection of quotes I found interesting and want to return to for later reflection.

The network is the IT ecosystems’ dark matter. The founders of the Internet lived in a position where they lived without constraint … a very interesting insight in that as compared to proprietary networks the Internet didn’t have to bill someone or count the number of people using the service. There is something important in that as it relates to some of the services we provide to our faculty and students. Should we measure logins? Or should we be focused on just creating an ever expanding platform of “dark matter” for great things for our audiences to build on. I like that and want to return to that as a thinking point going forward.

“There is no main menu for the Internet.” Wow. “BYOC — Bring your own content” … and they/we brought more content than the proprietary providers could (AOL, CompuServe, etc).

“You cannot build a corporate network on TCP/IP.” IBM 1992 … they were telling people they needed to use their proprietary network.

“If the content people could go back in time 10 years and rub out these two guys (creators of Kazah, Skype, and now Juiced) there wouldn’t be any problems.”

On Twitter … “It does not get much more inane than Twitter…. I know that’s being twittered right now.” Blogs provoked deep thought, while Twitter changes that game into 140 character bursts of content.

Part 1, The social dimension frays … his so called, “snake in the garden” … you know, the problem. The open Internet is very venerable to the garbage that actually helped make it so powerful in the first place. He is showing the pending comments on his blog — if you have a blog you know what he is talking about. PCs are essentially designed on open faith — machines run any code we give it (or just shows up) and this is a new challenge for us all … a quarter of a billion machines around the world are running code on them that are just waiting for instructions to do evil. Scary stuff. “We would not allow our cars to be used routinely for joy riding.” When youtube got shut down in Feb, it happened b/c one ISP in Pakistan told a lie in a routing table. Imagine if 100 of these ISP

“The Internet is a collective hallucination.”

Point 2 … When we can’t trust ourselves … “This just in, the Internet is down. Can we tell anyone? No the Internet is down.”

“Kaplan has no sense of humor, no vision and no beer” — John Katzman, Princeton Review … very funny example of how people were jumping on domains back in the day. Princeton Review bought kaplan.com and when Kaplan found out they got really angry. Princeton Review offered it to them for a case of beer … Kaplan sued.

The future of all this is that, according to Zittrain, the PC will be dead — in its current form. We’ll be forced to go from an open environment to more closed systems where devices do specific things. As an example, the cell phone menu is decided upon by a select group and we get what we get. He showed an Apple commercial that emphasized how important it is that Apple holds the keys to the whole platform — essentially you are fine as long as you do all your business with just one vendor. Interesting perspective and one that Lessig discussed at the TLT Symposium — the iPod kicks ass, if you only want to buy your music from one place — Apple. Again, there are things in this argument that I want to spend some time thinking about.

Getting rid of most of the rules can actually make people safer … he is citing experiments done in the Netherlands related to traffic signals and “safety” devices. Interesting. Comparing this to wikipedia through the moderation and discussion builds collaborative buy-in — in essence, it draws people into collective norms and makes them feel like they are part of a “collective fabric.”

“This is about ethics …” related quote to the discussion of the omission of the Star Wars Kid’s name entry on Wikipedia.

I really enjoyed this and I am more interested than ever in reading his book. Much of the above content is stream of thought, but does serve as a set of sign posts if you will for the things that jumped out at me. I’ll be going back and cleaning this up — or not. Comments and discussion are encouraged and appreciated.

Throughout the day I will be doing my best to post thoughts related to the event as it unfolds. I will attempt to capture some salient thoughts that may provide some new opportunities for the work we do at Penn State and beyond. I’ll be on Twitter all day sharing some things as well and welcome any tweets @colecamplese with ideas, reactions, or questions.