Having finally negotiated the administrative paperwork necessary to proceed, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) has officially begun its open education initiative– uLearn– by becoming a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium (OCW). We don’t have a cool site to debut ala BC Campus’ Free Learning site (from which we plan to liberally crib) or even a single course put up yet! But we do have plans…

We at the UAF Center for Distance Education couldn’t spend much time on uLearn until it was approved and personnel time allotted, so the existing site is essentially just an announcement… but an announcement signaling an important step forward for UAF, representing a change in institutional philosophy about– and support for– open education. There is a strong moral imperative to embrace an open posture w/r/t learning– a force that is by itself reason enough for me. But we also needed to justify to others who will be providing resources for the project specifically why we wanted to join this growing movement and, more importantly, what we had to contribute.

I’ve written before about some of the reasons for joining the OCW and other open education resource (OER) efforts so I won’t belabor them there. But I do want to note a couple of specific offerings we intend to provide, many of which will be significant transformations of existing material or wholly new efforts whose development is guided by the fact that the materials are destined to be part of uLearn:

Information Fluency
You’ll be hearing much more about this topic from me as we are in the midst of developing a library science oriented curriculum for a beginner’s course in developing information fluency skills. Every day I become more convinced of the importance of information fluency as a framework for coherently understanding and integrating Connectivist learning theory, personal learning environments, emerging literacies, and social networks into our educational offerings.

iTeach Faculty Development Curriculum
Over the last five years of offering iTeach faculty development intensives in online teaching and learning we have developed a large amount of material for faculty who want to learn to teach better online and/or using contemporary social media and network tools.

Ocean Science Laboratory
At the Center for Distance Education we have developed one of a very few wholly web-based Ocean Science laboratory courses that will be– in its current configuration– particularly useful to faculty wishing to deliver a– or enhance an existing– ocean science course to distance students. Our geographic location and current events have demanded a particular emphasis on climate change, sea ice, and other circumpolar concerns that make this course unique. We hope to develop a version of this course that will be as useful to independent learners as it already is to those in a guided education environment.

Literature of Alaska and the Yukon Territory, Geography of Alaska
Obviously, these are areas in which the University of Alaska has a special interest– and existing, proven curriculum. Long term plans include sharing material from other geographic and institutional specialties: rural development, mining, arctic and petroleum engineering.

I think distance education programs, faculty, staff, and designers are a natural fit for open education resource initiatives, and we look forward to contributing to this important cause!

For the geeks out there…

The indispensable Foxmarks Firefox plug-in was recently updated to include optional password-syncing along with its already superb bookmark syncing between Firefox installations. I’ve never had any trouble with Foxmarks– it’s a “set it and forget it” application with an intelligent installation that just works.

I know what you’re thinking– how gauche, Mr. High-Tech! Why do I, a folksonomically enhanced instance of the emergent human 2.0 still keep bookmarks in my browser? I use delicious for almost everything except:

• Some work related bookmarks for logins and intranet/restricted sites
• Some collections that I tend to open all at once, such as “daily morning links”, which reside on the bookmark toolbar
• Most importantly, bookmark shortcuts

Between the Firefox 3 wonder bar which I absolutely love (note to Foxmarks: please make a version that syncs browser history!) and my collection of bookmark shortcuts I almost never have to bother with actually selecting a bookmark or typing an address. I’m not going to go on and on about how cool the wonder bar is– I know some people hate it. But Firefox’s bookmark shortcuts are criminally underused. It just makes sense to me to hit CTRL-L (or CTRL-T and then CTRL-L if I want a new tab) and type “g chris lott” to ego surf or “flickrcc dancing monkeys” to search for Creative Commons licensed images on flickr, etc. Here’s a list of my current collection of bookmark shortcuts and the key words I use, some of which you might find useful (if you install the OpenBook Firefox extension it is easy to right-click on the link to bookmark and create the shortcut at the same time):

• g - Google Search (duh)
• gi/gn/gb/gblog/gg - Google: Image, News, Books, Blog, Groups searches
• gcc/gmap - Google: Creative Commons, Map searches
• here - Search the current site/domain with google (this is incredibly useful– if I’m on a particular site and want to find more, I just run “here search terms”– I don’t want to give away real-estate to the Google toolbar for this kind of thing) 
• acronym - Look up acronyms
• music - look up information on musicians and bands in allmusic
• amzn - Amazon search
• word - answers.com word search
• del - delicious.com search
• dict/dict2- dictionary searches
• tcid - reverse dictionary lookup  
• flickr - general flickr search
• flickrcc - flickr creative commons licensed images search
• imdb - search the Internet Movie Database for movie titles, actors
• isbn - search isbn.nu for a book by isbn (I prefer the “neutral” isbn.nu service when linking to books)
• isbnt - search isbn.nu for a title
• mylib - search my LibraryThing library
• netflix - search netflix, natch
• oed - look up word in Oxford English Dictionary
• gmt - show local time for a city, state, country
• mp3 - search Skreemr for mp3 titles
• spincc - search SpinXpress for Creative Commons licensed media
• twit - search Twitter
• sxc - sxc photo search
• timer - set and start a web timer
• wm - wikimedia search
• wp - wikipedia search
• woord - WordNet word lookup
• weather - wunderground weather search
• yt - YouTube search

Any clever additions?

[image from WikiMedia]

The good news: our illustrious and now notorious Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty today on all seven counts of ethics violations in his corruption trial. Stevens may have started out as a good man– though his early career included a much self-aggrandized stint as a U.S. Attorney (prosecutor), so it’s hard to be sure– and he did a lot for Alaska as a territory and then as a state in its early days, but he’s become an embarrassment renowned equally for service long since expired and an incredible capacity to bring the pork home to Alaska. It’s time we Alaskans started looking for something more from our most important elected officials than the number of dollars they can bring in, things like: integrity, maturity, level-headedness, reasonability– things Stevens has rarely demonstrated recently if he ever has at all. In the long run we are better off weaning ourselves from the arrogant, ill-tempered Stevens, who appears to have lost sight of everything but his self-interest.

The bad news: Stevens is likely to retain his seat again in next week’s election, and as its unlikely he’ll do any time (which I wouldn’t support… what I would support would be a substantial fine and a significant amount of time of mandatory, serious public service) and almost as unlikely that he’ll be expelled by the Senate. The most likely scenario is that he’ll: serve out his next term, be pardoned by Bush and then not-so-tacitly anoint a new Republican heir (any Republican Stevens supports, no matter how diminished Stevens himself is, will win over any Democrat in this state). I can only hope that Sarah Palin has burned that bridge completely enough that she can’t come back in that capacity… an outcome arguably worse for Alaskans than would be her winning the VP race!

I missed doing a Friday Focus last week due to other obligations, so I present two sites to pay attention to this week:

Doug Noon’s Borderland blog doesn’t really need exposure from me– Borderland has been an Edublog award nominee and Doug also blogs in the New York Times Lesson Plans. But even if his contributions weren’t regularly thoughtful, realistic, and often deep, I’d have a soft spot for Borderland because I was able to play a tiny role in bringing Doug into the blogging world: as nominally his “teacher” in a course about social software, I helped with technology questions and pointed in some potential directions. The rest was network nature, the technology reflecting the mind of it user. In addition to Doug’s obvious strengths discussing complicated issues including literacy and politics, teaching reading, No Child Left Behind and myriad other topics at a sophisticated level of remove, he has a particular knack for getting into the personal heart of what these topics mean as an educator, community member and thinking person. I admire that. And he’s been involved in projects that teachers should pay attention to, including the student-writing site Tell the Raven and Spin the Globe, a collaborative wiki-based education project with Graham Wegner in Australia.

Education Innovation is Rob Jacobs’ blog on education and ideas. I’ve only begun reading Rob’s blog recently, after first discovering him– through friends of friends– on Twitter. But I’ve enjoyed scrolling back through his posts over the last year and particularly enjoy how he puts together his own thinking and previous reading to create interesting posts about contemporary technology and education books. I was tickled, for instance, reading his references to Seth Godin’s “sheepwalkers” which– it seems to me– involves two of my favorite motifs: Langdon Winner’s concept of technological somnambulism, and  “sheeple,” which I know has earlier origins but was completely pwned in an immortal episode of South Park.

[text art by labnol] 

Outcomes based curriculum development? Fuggedaboutit says George “The Godfather” Siemens. I’m not so sure. George’s point– that adherence to a structure or sequence can become rigid and counterproductive– is well taken. But at what point (and for whom) is this straitjacket a problem?

I think the primary issue really is organization– which has a bearing on effectiveness of course– not directly being more “effective” in the sense that “outcomes-based inherently education makes better learning.” The more important question about outcomes-based development (or any other model) is “for who?” and “at what level?”

Let me draw a parallel: when first learning how to write in a particular mode, writing with models and structures is usually good– jumping right into intuitive approaches to the overall production is effective for only a very small number of people. Which is why there’s nothing wrong with things like 5-paragraph essays and news articles structured using the inverted pyramid. Most will benefit from having that structure… those who could easily leap ahead are unlikely to be damaged (though they might get frustrated, as George’s point could be extended to). But, of course, that approach isn’t intended to last forever, or directly inform all instances of that kind of writing. Ultimately the framework either becomes one tool among many or– as is often the case with the particular development model we use with faculty– becomes a tool for introducing the concept of having some approach and a way to expose areas that may not be considered with other models or having no model at all. 

To further the parallel: the above is discussing form… what of the important matter of form and content that is intermixed, intertwingled, and symbiotic? People who have learned to write poems in forms will almost unanimously share the apparently paradoxical experience that at some point writing in a form with all the attendant rules leads to the experience of being able to express with a freedom never felt with free verse. I say “apparently” because we also have the concept that simple rules allow for complex, emergent behaviors, something that is far less often true of complex rules or no rules at all. Of course “mastering” a form then allows a writer, artist, or educator to tweak that very form into new and interesting “forms” of his or her own!

In general I’d rather err on the side of some initial confinement and less reliance on intuition than the muddle of haphazard activities that characterize much of the learning design we see coming in– particularly when it comes to technologically enhanced teaching when the temptation to use bright shiny tools is ever present. In the end, when working with groups or writing generally, we have to adopt approaches that we think will do good for the most people (or do the least harm), which makes a structured approach desirable. In the individual case that framework will usually give way– sometimes sooner, sometimes later– to an amenable compromise or an approach of informed and enlightened intuition.

 
[photo by shoothead] 

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

A few years ago a friend sent me a version of this ‘Being Poor’ list via email. “Really makes you think, doesn’t it?” he said, “Can you imagine?” 

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

I could more than imagine… many of the items in the list I could remember.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

I can remember a lot of the feelings and experiences from that list and add a few more of my own: claiming apathy to avoid field trips that would cost even a few dollars, paying for a meal out with the class using change (not to mention the concept of “small” change), simply not eating at all on a sports trip, working from 3:30a-6:3a before two-a-day practices and homework until 11p, blocks of free cheese, the looks you get bringing out food stamps (and, worse, when you are loudly informed that “welfare doesn’t cover” an item and asked if you want it put back), having someone in school recognize the grab-bag shirt you are wearing that used to be theirs…

But the worst part by a mile is the cultural claustrophobia and aspirational myopia that come with material poverty which, after all, is quite often accompanied by– if it doesn’t necessitate– intellectual poverty. I can tell you how it feels to be the first in the family to make it through high school; among other things it’s the feeling of thinking “that’s it! I did it!” and being absolutely clueless about the next step. I can tell you how it feels to discover years into an undergraduate degree at the only place I thought I could afford, after feigning disinterest in a flood of offers based on high test scores and straight-A high school grades, that when tuition is advertised as X dollars per year you can still get that education even if you don’t have X dollars in your pocket in cash when you arrive; it’s nauseating. I can share with you to this moment how a profound lack of understanding of handling money and credit can perpetuate a cycle of constant fiscal near-drowning the same way academic knowledge of swimming leaves you (if you are lucky) barely able to keep your head above water when you go overboard.

Physical hunger gnaws at the stomach and chest, intellectual hunger gnaws at the head and heart, and in both cases too much desire, too much necessity, too much static in the form of the whispering “need, need, need” makes them inordinately important and ultimately, no matter what you achieve or receive, turns them into demands that can never be met. The insatiable need and the inability to believe in achievement and self-worth– the constant perception of being a fraud– is a constant static, a kind of psychological tinnitus that one can learn to ignore but is always on, waiting to be noticed– and intruding– at the worst possible times.

Last night, a friend Twittered about a book she was reading, The Price of Privilege, which is:

A critical look at America’s culture of affluence explores the epidemic of emotional and psychological problems crippling America’s privileged youth

I don’t doubt her judgment. I don’t doubt that the book is discussing real problems. But I really can’t comprehend it. More importantly, I can’t feel it. I’m sure there’s a price for privilege… I just haven’t been privileged enough to get a chance to pay it.

A few weeks ago I was reading a voyeuristic profile of George Clooney in the New Yorker in which, at one point, he warns the interviewer after discussion of some recent troubling incident that he has to keep it in perspective and that he’s aware how ridiculous and outlandish it can be to hear celebrities complaining about their miserable lives. Even George Clooney suffers! I know it’s true, but it’s more fantastic than quantum mechanics and harder to really internalize than 6th and 7th dimensions.

But it made me think about educators… in particular “my circle” of friends and colleagues and influential acquaintances. How many of them, I wonder, have experienced poverty themselves? For how many of them would the Being Poor post strike a resonant, uninvited chord? And what does that mean to our efforts? “We” are already a select group in this context: college educated, most teaching college undergraduates or higher, working with or in academic institutions. But many of us are teaching or influencing the teaching of students who are struggling to escape circumstances of poverty and lack of privilege. Do we allow for that? Can we? If someone who comes from  relative privilege is as clueless about the needy as I am about the wealthy classes, how do we teach?