Sharing Nicely

Category: ideas

OER Workshop for educators

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams from UCT’s Opening Scholarship project and I ran a short OER Workshop for participants of the ICEL 2008 conference yesterday. We split the workshop into a shorter seminar/presentation and a longer hands-on practical session and ended up having a lot of fun with participants from the Cape Town universities as well as from […]

What the #$%@ is this @#$%?

That’s the name of my imaginary podcast series in which I would share all the things I think about when sitting in my car … usually to do with birth pains of the emerging young democracy in the Republic of South Africa. Let’s assume there actually is a process that will lead to strong and […]

Joi Ito on altruism

Joi just blogged about the conversation about altruism we had a few weeks ago (it was more an interview with him, than a conversation) and the audio files are available for download from the icommons site. I had not thought of “sharing” in the way he described it as part of a broader philosophy of […]

Who cares about learning anyways?

Reading an article about “Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis”, a book by two Canadian academics, I came across this fascinating story. It does not directly have anything to do with our research on rip-mix-learn practices at UWC, but maybe we need to start asking ourselves, if (how) new ways of teaching and […]

Open Educational Resources Article on GUNI site

My article on open educational resources was published by the Global University Network on Innovation (GUNI), a think tank on higher education based in Barcelona. It’s a fairly broad introduction to open educational resources, and I raise a few key issues that are likely to keep this movement busy over the next years: a new […]

open education town meeting

I am representing the University of the Western Cape at the open education meeting organised joinly by The Shuttleworth Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Hewlett Foundation. We are roughly 30 people from around the world working on various aspects of open education. We started the day off by listing the many different projects and […]

Content as Infrastructure

David Wiley spoke of content as infrastructure at the recent UNU/UNESCO conference on higher education, “Pathways towards a shared future”. The idea resonates with my own thoughts on how we can engage with content, and what tools might support this engagement. In traditional education was characterised by a process of combining and pulling together; content, […]

How do you govern open collaboration projects?

In the past few months, I have participated in the open courseware consortium‘s governance discussions. The consortium is a network of (mostly) universities who are committed to publishing and using open courseware, and who have so far released over 4200 university level courses under free and open licenses. Until now MIT has hosted and incubated […]

Online again – Thoughts on Quality

OK – enough – time to start writing again. Partly because one has to keep those fingers busy and the mind occupied, partly because I am hoping this will make it easier to keep my PhD supervisor informed of what is going on (and make sure it is going on), partly because it’s just too […]

new models in learning

i am thinking about open educational resources, and need to start dumping thoughts — so why not do so on this blog, and maybe someone will pick it up.