It’s a first attempt at video blogging. I am still a little uncertain which types of messages and comments video is better suited for than written blog posts or audio recordings, but no better way of finding out than trying. Any comments on content, format, presentation are much appreciated.

Videoblog 1 (21 April 2010) from Philipp Schmidt on Vimeo.

A special round of applause to the lovely Birds ladies for keeping us all well refreshed and fed, and a big thank you to Helen King and the Shuttleworth Foundation for sponsoring those who could not afford to pay and making sure we had everything we needed to make the event happen.

What was it like: It sounds like a cop out, but it is hard to describe how much fun we had during 5 hours of conversations, discussions, and a little bit of presentation. We will be uploading a lot of the audio and video content from speed geeks in the next few days, and also the “hot seat interview” with Aslam Raffee about the South African Government’s open source software policy, but as a teaser, here is the introduction by Mark Surman and me on Open Everything.

Last year Gunner and Mark orchestrated us to innovate the way that tracks (now called labs) are run during the Summit, leading to almost mythical status of the Dubrovnik iSummit Open Education Track. So, I came to Sapporo with some doubts – was it going to be as exciting and inspiring? Would I meet new people, that would become friends, just as I had last time? Now, after three days of discussions, playing lots of idea ping-pong, and getting little sleep I can answer all of these questions with a resounding Yes.

The best place to look for all the work in progress and outcomes is the open education lab wiki. There were lots of ideas for projects, like a peer-review system for OERs, which could provide more formal incentives for academics to release their materials and there was enough enthusiasm in the room that I think we will see some of them become reality over the next 12 months. I spent some time discussing how to increase incentives for educators to share, and one participant raised the interesting question, how many educators do we actually need? If open education is similar to other open collaborative projects, like free/open source software or wikipedia, then maybe having a few (a few, can be a few thousand) very active people and institutions and very many people using and discussing and sending feedback. Hmmm …

One thing we did not discuss as much as I might have liked is the student / learner perspective, what Thomas from CC Brasil called “the demand side”. Delia, Neeru, Stian and myself had started working on the concept for a Peer 2 Peer University at the last Summit and we were able to identify a few more collaborators this time around – hooray! Max works with the for-profit Super Cool School and he and his colleagues are thinking about many of the same issues that we have been thinking about, and are designing interesting solutions to them. For example, there are differnet ways that participants could gain reputations (which they could signal to potential employers or friends and family) and one could be to only evaluate teaching, and encouraging students to start teaching what they have learned. Joel, who represented the Connexions project at the Summit, got involved a few weeks ago, but we finally had a little more face-to-face time for discussion.

Update: David Wiley offered to run a course on Music Theory, and Thomas Buckup from CC Brasil – whom I had just run into a week before at Wikimania – made a number of really useful comments about the concept. Thomas also came up with the interesting idea that at some point in the future we will look back at the 20th century as the period when knowledge was “strangely” locked up. Pre 20th century works are already in the public domain, and more and more recent work is shared nicely under CC licenses. There are a number of reservations why it won’t play out like this, but it’s a really neat idea!!!

So, in sum, and joining Mark Morrison, I will be humming for the rest of this day “The Return of the Track”:
(Return of the Track) it is
(Return of the Track) come on
(Return of the Track) oh my God
(You know that I’ll be back) here I am
(Return of the Track) once again
(Return of the Track) pump up the world
(Return of the Track) watch my flow
(You know that I’ll be back) here I go

This is great, because one would think it meant that the paper can be used in a class without having to worry about copyright clearance and fees. Unfortunately, copyright law and regulation in South Africa is murky on the issue of electronic distribution since it was drafted in 1978 when electronic information was not a huge issue yet (I find it particularly ironic that South African law refuses to acknowledge that some things have changed in the world since 1978). Andrew, who navigated me through a lot more legal detail than I am providing here, says the issue is clear as mud.

As a result there is uncertainty if a lecturer would be allowed to act as an “agent” on behalf of the students and make copies for all of them, or if the students would need to make individual copies themselves to avoid infringement. Andrew recommended that from the point of view of an institution, it is safer and advised to ask students to make their own copies.

Of course, this is a bit silly. First, it means that the students have to pay for the copies individually, which is likely to increase the per page cost (and the cost of education) since bulk discounts are not possible. Secondly, the end-result is exactly the same, all students have a printed copy of the paper to work with.

I increasingly feel that the law and regulation of copyright is so complicated and often runs counter to common sense, that we should seriously consider not only reforms, but maybe a clean slate approach to replace it with an alternative. Speaking to academics, students and librarians, I realise that the burden (not just cost, but also time and effort, and the significant concern that they might be doing something wrong) is too high.

In the field of patents and pharmaceutical inventions a recent bold proposal to create the Medical Innovation Prize Fund was recently introduced as a draft law by US Senator Sander. If accepted, at least in part, it would create a great precedent to  show that a radical and necessary change to the way we govern the results of intellectual activity is in fact possible.

Technorati Tags: copyright, open education, OER, south africa

However, after reading the first paragraph I was surprised by some of the statements, which I copied (and comment on) below. Further down in the draft chapter it talks about software licenses, and makes some statements about the history of the GPL and the use of open licenses (or free licenses) that go too deep into the legal details for me to fully analyse. However, I always thought the GPL was legally bullet proof and some of the statements in the chapter would make me wonder about the legal (and negative) implications of using it … I think it would be great if some of the legal experts who are part of this community could have a look at the text and send some friendly and constructive comments to Paul West (pwest at col dot org) if they feel there is room for improvement.

Examples from the first paragraph:

“Some, disliking the business practices of commercial software suppliers and publishing houses, want to replace copyright with open licences.”

This statement implies that those supporting open licenses are not commercial software suppliers. The cases of IBM, Red Hat, Jam Warehouse, and Canonical show that open source software and commercial activity are not exclusive. It also makes the “some” sound like they don’t understand the relationship between copyright and open licenses; a look around the open source developer mailing list will quickly show that this community has built up incredible expertise on copyright issues over the years, and understands that open licenses use copyright.

“Some want to allow anyone to profit from the work of others without even telling them they are doing this.”

This makes the public domain sound like some crazy revolutionary idea, rather than a source of cultural development. In the context of the developmental needs of large parts of the world, a more important question might be, why are “some” pushing for restriction to use an author’s materials 70 years after his death?

It is probably not intended, but the whole paragraph is written as if the open licenses community needed to do some research and thinking. After participation in a number of workshops and conferences on IPR (patents mostly), it is my impression that the strong IPR community is the one that largely looks past existing economic research on the detrimental effects of their policies on socio-economic development.

It’s here on youtube and (hopefully) here as well:

It seems like a useful model to think about rip-mix-learn practices, which are all further towards the “active” side of the triangle than the traditional lecture style of teaching and learning.

However, I am wondering to what extend the model has been tested and how much empirical evidence exists for the statements implicit in the triangle. It makes specific statements about a “2 week” timeframe, and assigns percentages (we remember x % of something) to different types of learning (reading, hearing about something, speaking about it, etc.). I wonder how reliable those percentages are, and how they were arrived at.

http://freecourseware.uwc.ac.za/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=rml:rimor_summary

Here is the summary:

Learners’ Reflections in Technological Learning Environments: Why to Promote and How to Evaluate
Rimor, R. and Kozminsky, E.
Proceedings of SITE 2000, February 8-12, 2000, San Diego, California, USA

This paper introduces the concept of metacognitive processes as a driver of learning, and uses a case-study of grade 9 learners working with electronic information (the paper confusingly refers to “data-base environment”) as an example. The underlying argument is that successful learners practice metacognition more efficiently and more frequently than less successful learners, or in other words: students who engage in metacognitive activity learn more and better.

Metacognition is defined as the ability to reflect upon one’s own thinking (and action) going back to Flavell (1976). It is connected to learning as an important contribution to Self-Regulated Learning SRL (Butler & Winne, 1995). In SRL the “teacher’s role has changed from being an infallible expert responsible for a final product, to being a guide who is more responsive to the context in which learning is occurring” and is thus directly based to the Constructivist theory. “This approach encourages learners to control their learning processes, reflect upon them and evaluate their results and progress in an open debugging procedure, which entails self reflection and peer dialogue.” (Note: that sounds just like what we mean by rip-mix-learn)

Students were asked to keep journals (personal reflection notes) over a period of 5 months. The journal content was then analysed and categorised into the authors’ tool for evaluating metacognitive components of students reflection (MCSR), which is based on Flavell’s three components of metacognition:
1 personal characteristics (P) (for example referring to preferences one has in regards to a way of learning)
2 task requirements (T) (for example, evaluating the relevance of the task in comparison to goals and objectives)
3 strategies for accomplishing the task (S) (for example, referring to results of data search)

Where the paper seems weak, is connecting data to the model and making a clear connection between type and frequency of personal reflection and learning progress. The authors are not examining which types of reflections are correlated with certain learning outcomes. As such, the tool remains a useful guide for categorising content, but lacks predictive or analytical power. What does it “mean” if one student shows more (or different types of) metacognition compared to other students?

For example, the authors do not go further as the following statement: “… Analysis of three [journal entries] suggest that [student 1's] explanations are better articulated, detailed and explicit that [student 2's]…Based on this analysis we can claim that [student 1's] articulation is qualitatively richer than [students 2's].” What this means in terms of actual learning is not explained – student 2 might well be learning more?

Notes on rip-mix-learn:

One thread that seems to be emerging is the issue of students’ awareness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. It could be interesting to investigate if students that can make sense of the practices used in their course will learn more than those who are questioning them. For example in Richard’s/Jay’s course, are students that are familiar with blogs and believe they are a useful tool learning more (and enjoying the learning more?) than those who do not see the value of using these ICTs for biology. The understanding of their own learning and the process they are going to could be described using the model developed in this paper. The connection to the quality of learning would be our contribution (and given that the authors did not attempt it – might be quite a challenge).