Sharing Nicely

Walking towards the conference venue on this last day of the open education track at the iSummit 08 I found myself humming along to the melody of Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” – how fitting I thought – since this was truly the Return of the Track (the Open Education Track).

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