e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Opening Up Education

  • Open Education Skeptic: We Are All Prof. Gradgrind Now

    Since I have made a commitment to take the umbrella concept of open education more seriously, this will be the first post in an occasional series in which I express my concerns about open education as a way of working through the issues. It is also part of an occasional series of posts about or inspired by the book . In this case, I would say “inspired by” is the correct phrase, because although the concern I want to talk about was triggered by the chapter “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”, the authors are clearly aware of the concern I raise here (as are a number of the other chapter authors in the book). My issue is more with the naive formulations of open education that I often see floating around in the blogosphere.

    Specifically, I’m afraid that the popularization of “open education” will further reduce our already stunted notion of what the verb “to educate” means until its meaning disappears altogether.

    (more…)

  • Permissions and Openness

    I’ve been reading Opening Up Education. So far, I’m impressed. It’s hard to get all the articles in a collection like this to be consistent, coherent, and equally interesting, but the editors seem to have managed to do just that. 

    I want to comment today on the piece about Bodington by Stuart Lee. Long-time readers know that I have been a fan of this system. In the first part of a multi-part review of the system, I wrote:

    I have long complained that LMS permissions systems are usually too rigid and narrowly defined. Bodington’s permissions are more flexible than just about any other LMS I’ve ever seen. (It’s possible that dotLRN’s OpenACS-based permisions are as flexible, but if so, then they are hidden deep under the hood–typically out of the reach of most faculty members.) In most systems, you have a few pre-defined roles–teacher, student, administrator, TA, etc. These roles generally have pre-defined permissions. You can create groups that are essentially nested containers, e.g., a student group will always be a strict subset of the class that contains it. Likewise, these groups are often (though not always) mutually exclusive, i.e., a student can’t be a member of both Group A and Group B at the same time.

    Bodington works completely differently. Every object–a content bit, a discussion forum, etc.–can have an arbitrary number of groups attached to it, each group can have an arbitrary number of overlapping members, and each group can also have arbitrary fine-grained permissions for the object.

    At the time, I caught some flack for focusing on what some viewed as trivial aspects of the system. But Stuart’s essay, along with some recent comments to the Sakai discussion boards about the version 3 vision document, show that this stuff really matters.

    (more…)