e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • EDUCAUSE Openness Constituent Group

    My fellow SUNY escapees Patrick Masson and Ken Udas are up to some good stuff now. They’ve started an EDUCAUSE constituent group on Openness–open source, open standards, open educational resources, open content, open management practices, etc. Their hope is that the disparate groups that tend to care about each of these strands will identify the common strands of philosophy and practice that will help universities develop more coherent policies and ways of doing business that are both practically beneficial and consistent with the values that universities ought to support. It’s an ambitious project, to be sure, but very important.

    In concert with the new constituent group, the EDUCAUSE board has released a value statement on Openness. Here’s an excerpt:

    A central pillar of the academic community is its commitment to the free flow of information and ideas. This commitment to sharing is essential to scholarly discovery and innovation. It is also central to helping learners engage, absorb, and apply knowledge in order to advance personally and academically. Finally, this commitment to openness provides the foundation for leveraging resources, both within and among institutions, to strengthen the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge.

    The academic—and, by extension, social—value of unfettered intellectual exchange finds expression in technologies, applications, and approaches that foster sharing, collaboration, and open access to knowledge and resources. By actively encouraging collaboration, customization, and experimentation, open environments—whether social, cultural, or technological—best facilitate the free flow of information and ideas on which discovery, innovation, and high-quality higher education depend. In an IT context, examples include:

    • Open standards and interoperability
    • Open and community source software development
    • Open access to research data
    • Open scholarly communications
    • Open access to, and open derivative use of, content

    The constituent group meets at the conference this afternoon at 4:55 PM in Room W340D. I’ll see you there. And if you’re not at EDUCAUSE, you can find out more information about the effort here.

  • Check Out smARThistory

    Just want to give a quick shoutout to my friends Steven Zucker and Beth Harris for their beautiful work on the newly redesigned smARThistory web site. When I think about Open Educational Resources, this is the sort of thing that I want to see. The site is clean and well-organized with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. They also have links out to useful Web 2.0 tools like a Dipity timeline and annotated photos at Flickr. It would be nice to see those sorts of resources even more tightly and pervasively integrated with the main assets of the site going forward, but that would really be icing on the cake.

    Good stuff.

  • Going to EDUCAUSE

    I’ll be leaving for EDUCAUSE tomorrow morning and will be there until Friday morning. I’m not giving any presentations this year other than a 15-minute presentation on Oracle SAIP at the Desire2Learn booth, but I have lots of meetings and typical goings on. If you’re going to be in Orlando this week and want to track me down, just ping me.

  • Bizarre Chapter in Blackboard, Inc. v Desire2Learn

    There’s a really…um…weird story posted up on D2L’s patent blog about how the court allowed Blackboard to send somebody to poke around D2L’s conference. D2L knew about it, but it was supposed to be kept secret from the conference attendees.

    Very strange.

  • Letting Facebook Be Facebook

    My colleague Linda Feng pointed me to an interesting article about a study by the University of Liecester about how students are using Facebook and how it impacts their lives at the university. Two critical points come out of this for me. On the one hand, social networking in and of itself does seem to help students. In particular, the researchers found that it is “part of the social glue that helps students settle into university life.” Nearly three quarters of the students said “Facebook had played an important part in helping them to settle in at university.” The article doesn’t specifically mention first-year retention measurements, but my guess is that successful use of social networks can improve retention of students through their first year and into their second year. More than a third of the students also “used Facebook to discuss academic work with other students on a weekly basis.”

    On the other hand, “41 per cent of students were against being contacted directly by tutors via Facebook,” and less than a third were interested in being contacted by the university via Facebook for administrative matters. Facebook isn’t a portal and isn’t an LMS either. It can play a vital role in student success, but only insofar as universities relinquish the idea that it is somehow beneficial for them to control that space. Think of it as being like off-campus housing. It plays a vital role in university life, but it does not belong to the university.

  • Thomson Suing Zotero: More Info and More Thoughts

    Stephen Downes and Scott Leslie have both expressed concern that my original post regarding the Zotero lawsuit was possibly too charitable toward Thomson Reuters. Sadly, as more information comes in, it’s beginning to look like they were right.

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  • Thomson Suing Zotero

    There’s been a fair bit of buzz, both on some edublogs I respect and in the Sakai listserv, about Thomson Reuters suing George Mason University, alleging that the Zotero team illegally reverse engineered EndNote. My initial reaction to Thomson’s move was very negative and my final reaction may be equally negative. Even casual readers of this blog know that I am not a big fan of using intellectual property as an anti-competitive bludgeon in an already thin educational software market. I’m also not a big fan of the DMCA, a draconian law that goes way too far in an effort to stop piracy.

    However, I am withholding judgment at the moment because, after reading Thomson Reuters’ complaint, I think that it actually may have significant merit.

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