I am in Houston, Texas for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2007 Open Educational resources Grantees meeting.

Central to the event is a presentation by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, of their 

Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities.

It is a substantial report with many interesting asides and well worth a read.

They identify the following ‘key enablers’ as driving the OER movement:

• “open source code, open multimedia content and the community or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
• the growth of what we are calling participatory systems architecture; Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.
• the continuing improvement in performance and access to the underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
• increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual environments, and gaming; and
• the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both individual and community) that can informed and validated by pilot projects and action-based research.”

Central to the report is the call for the development of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) (which is not a long way form what Ray Elferink and I have been advocating in the form of an Architecture of Participation. The authors “believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning.”

They go on to say that “the proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:  (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.” The OPLI can be envisaged as “a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process.”

This is good stuff indeed – visionary but not beyond the realms of what can be achieved. Particularly welcome is the weving together of technical and social objectives. My only reservation is the continued stress on the role of higher education institutions – but maybe this is a reflection of the objectives of the Hewlett Foundation.

More tomorrow – I’ll try and post a couple of live blogs from the conference. In the meantime I’m off to the Longneck Reception and the Good Company Barbecue Dinner.

I’m trying to write a funding bid but keep getting diverted by the discussions going on on the blogs. Anyway I will write a quick entry now and then get my head down to business.

Dave has written a sad tale on the problems of open source business models. I don’t agree with him that open source is broken – far from it. I have little problem in persuading potential clients to use open source (in my experience they really don’t understand or care).

But I used to work for Knownet, and know from my bitter experience the problems of developing an income stream for a company developing open source applications for education.

Our business model was based on developing instances on use in mainly European funded projects. It worked – to an extent. But we still ended up working way to many hours and with recurrent cash flow problems. It was essentially a voluntarist model.

And of course there is money to be made out of customisation, support, training etc. But this does not fund mainstream development. The open source model is based on the benefit form many developers working together around the same code. But – in reality there needs to be someone organising, driving and inspiring such an effort. ELGG would not exist without the vision and drive form Ben and Dave.

Education is (or should be) a public good. I have written before about how the development and use of proprietory e-learning applications is effectively privatising education and is crippling innovation in pedagogy – in developing new ways and understandings of teaching and learning.

If we value open source in education – not just because it is better code – but because of the values it brings to education and learning – and if education is a public good – then open source development in education should be supported by those who support (ie fund) education. In the UK there is a great deal of money beings pent of educational technology. At least some of that money should be ring-fenced for open source development. This could be through an agency or might involve the creation of a trust or foundation to manage the development.

I think we should start a campaigning and lobbying for this. Because without such a fund I fear the issues Dave talks about will not go away.

I/ve never really got on with feed readers. Yes, I know, everyone says that on the Mac Net Newswire is brilliant. Well, I will accept its a very fine piece of software. But to me the user interface looks like an old email client and I never really got the hang of managing my feeds. They ended up a total mess with too many duplications and dead feeds et.

I had a go at using Flock but it really is too slow. I bought an account for Shrook. Oh and `I even started aggregating feeds in my ELGG account. So you see I have been trying.

For the last four weeks I have been thinking about sorting out all these feeds. then three days ago Mike sent me a link to Vienna. Man – this rocks. It looks good, it is intuitive to use and best of all is Open Source. Sadly it is only available for the Mac at the moment.

Wow – this is brilliant.

From a press release from JISC:

Worldwide call for free and open access to European research results

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.Â

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’Â

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu/

Before Christmas I wrote a couple of posts which were raising doubts about the use of Second Life in education.

Git lots of comments – mainly adverse. I thought this was a bit unfair because the reason I had written the posts was just because I do find the SL environment interesting and think it may have great potential in the future. (Tomorrow I will write another article on why the development of games and immersive environments in education is so slow).

However, getting back to the point, one of those replying to my original mail claimed that Linden Labs was planning to make the SL software available as Open source. I was sceptical but it is true. The client end software is now available under the GPL license.

Its an interesting move. The client is not the easiest interface to use and there can be little doubt Linden will benefit greatly from having OS programmers work on the software.

But it also opens up some intriguing alternatives with even Linden talking of parallel virtual worlds. According to a CNN story, IBM Vice President for Technical Strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a close student of Second Life, heard about the impending move toward open source from a Linden employee.

“They have the right thought,” he says, “which is that open source things work with the marketplace. But this is a field in its infancy that will be very competitive. Linden Lab might end up with a huge leadership position in a certain class of tools for virtual worlds, but those might not be the right tools for, let’s say, a surgeon learning a new procedure in an immersive online environment. Second Life can be wildly successful, but so can others.”

The point here is that although Linden Labs are providing access to a test server grid, they are not Open Sourcing the server end. But then again in may be possible to develop alternative server end applications fro sat a surgeon learning a new procedure using the OS SL client software.

Technorati Tags: elearning, Open source, OSS, SecondLife

Great gig last week at the danish Knowledge Laboratory. Thanks to Niels Henrik Helms for inviting me – thanks to everyone else for interesting discussions. It really is good to be in the Nordic countries – the understanding of links between knowledge development and learning in communities of practice is stunning. I think it is in these countries that we will start to see more generalised movements away for Learning management Systems towards Personal Learning Environments. I can remember six years ago being in Tampere University in Finland and be stunned to see the students accessing their email on open access computers using the Unix command line!

And whilst it is no longer trendy to talk about Action Research, that tradition still exists albeit in rarified forms.

The one thing I left out of my presentation was licenses. talking to people at lunch time, they were concerned about the licensing mess but had not heard of Creative Commons. Its a mistake to assume that just because the people on the Ed Tech speaking and conference all use CC licenses the rest of the world knows about them too,. We need to continue to show and explain how Creative Commons works.

Anyway – for any of you reading this blog who were at the conference last week – here – as promised – is the link to Creative Commons.

Technorati Tags: Copyright