Many thanks for this. I'd like to use this one as the "content hub" of conversations that are going on on other communities who are "treating the OER related issues" separately. So please don't think I have anything in mind apart from getting the left hands and right hands to understand how, and where, they need to collaborate.
On Sunday, 8 July 2012 09:15:48 UTC+7, Mokurai wrote: > > On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 1:02 AM, simonfj <[email protected]> wrote: > > In a word, No. > > This turns out not to be the case. OERs and computers now cost less > than printed textbooks, so that they can greatly improve education > while saving money. This is the only way we can graduate children from > high school with 12 years of computer skills, ready for information > age jobs. > > Yes. We are at the point where computers, and the networks which provide/share their content and apps, are now at the inflection point. Really, it happened in 2002 when mobile replaced landlines as the most common way of accessing networks. See slide 4 of Audey's ppt. > I can understand your political misery in an age of financial and > political malpractice on a global scale, but those are not new factors > in our history. Printing has greatly cut into political malpractice > over the centuries, and we are getting spectacular results from even > our primitive social media. There is much more to come. > > OERs are as big an advance as printed textbooks were in the time of > Gutenberg. They will have equally large consequences. > This analogy is for me the main one. All WE are experiencing is the evolution in media, and how it's produced, aggregated and dissminated. This has affected ALL institutions as it always does, with the political & edu ones being the place where the changes are implemented. As you say, "our primitive social media" is yet to be treated as "grown up". These discussions centre on the convergence of (old) broadcast and (new) interactive, where many of the habits and processes of the old have been tried to be imposed on the new, and failed. > > > OERs, as the content-centric part of a philosophy > > practice > No. OER is a philosophy. If it was a practice we would all be happy with the way they are shared and co-produced today, and have a curricula for all of them. e.g. This e-list (group) shares links with others who are interested in developing the practices of open education. The philosophy encompasses many, many others who approach this openess from their professional perspectives. e.g. Those in open gov work at developing 'open' policy in the same manner as OERers work at developing open curricula. Neither is satified with what they have because this process is a "constant beta." If it wasn't, we would be talking about "open teaching" not "open learning". > > > which is demanding more > > transparency of ALL our institutions. has about the same chance as all > the > > other "opens" = edu, gov, networks, software, science, etc. > > There are millions of children learning computer and cognitive skills > with Free Software and OERs. A recent study by Peru confirms these > gains. > > > Taken separately, as they all are, > > By you, evidently, and the financial media such as The Wall Street > Journal and The Economist, but not by all governments, school systems, > universities, and the rest. > This is the most fascinating portion of any arguement, any OERer could throw up. You talk about "all governments" as if there were some co-ordination between them. Perhaps in intent, but certainly not in implementation. And school systems, where you have some discouraging the use of wikipedia and others (according to the wikipedia blog) encouraging students to co-produce content (especially in their own language). And the networks, which provide access to edu (and other gov) institutions, all off implementing their own (non interoperable) solutions, and isolated (single institution) access points. The separations are quite endless. To say nothing of the cost of the duplications. > > they are isolated parts of a lovely idea. > > E.g. The OER concept couldn't exist if its individual projects weren't > > funded by some government or philanthropic organisation. > > Incorrect, as I noted above. > No, it is correct. I could point to various sustainable web domains (like sitepoint for webbies) who pull the eyeballs to a global, english-speaking hub of excellence (for 11 years). There are many good publically funded projects as well. But OERs, as a movement, hasn't generated it's own sustainablity yet (and perhaps never will if it remains true to its philosophy). So it must focus on reducing ALL the costs of re-inventing the education process. Because it doesn't, we are left with institution paying (separately) for the use of proprietary real time tools, like Elluminate. That's not to say that brokering, on behalf of institutions, is not going on on a National basis. http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/07/internet-2-project-to-broker-commercial.html OERers don't even consider e.g., the costs of transferring content between networks, even though it's probably THE major cost (which their network operators have overcome to a degree http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/r-networks-once-again-revolutionizing.html ) > > > So we know, as the > > GNP of most nations reduces, so will the funding for its > well-intentioned > > participants' projects. The reasons for this are quite clear. OERs is > simply > > about producing content and reducing its production, aggregation and > > distribution. So it misses the primary point (leaving out most ideas > about > > an aethestic education. i.e. education for its own sake). It doesn't > focus > > on the jobs for which an education is required. > > Incorrect, as I noted above. > This an interesting one, because I want to point at the (kind of) jobs which WILL be required, not the ones which (potentially) might exist today. They exist already of course, just do a google on "online community manager", which an OERer will probably consider to be a moderator's role. The talk (espacially in the EU) is about 'ICT skills' which are evaporating as fast as (intuitive) applications are invented. i.e. no/little coding or technical knowledge is required. Perhaps the best example is this move from (institutional) client/server, to inter-institutional cloud/ single-sign-on network architecture. The illustration is made stark on the BYOD page <http://wikieducator.org/BYOD>. On one hand we have the institutional LAN/WAN manager spending vast amounts of time and energy wiring up "their" network (and implementing all the security policies that go with implementing a network, which is only/mainly used during schools/uni hours. On the other hand we have the "real world' transition their (common) stuff (at least) to a (shared) cloud. Not sure of the cost savings but they are certainly huge. Jobs? Less technical/ more media. Bring this down to basics. Telecommunications costs (for private companies) go up, ICT costs and jobs disappear. Sorry to talk about economic growth (using the zero conspirators.) But here's this quarter's report<http://www.zerohedge.com/news/q2-winners-and-losers-who-were-top-and-bottom-contributors-sp>on the trend. > > > So the accountants can keep playing with their stimulus plans (as they > do). > > But if you want a picture of economic growth over the past 4 years, this > one > > addresses reality. > > > http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-chart-tears-apart-stimulus-package > > There is this joke of which the punch line is, "So who are you gonna > believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" Why would you believe anything from > a such a conspiracy theory financial Web site? > We'll, I like these guys because they gave this guy<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1CLhqjOzoyE>some airtime before this (4 year old) recession started crunching. Saved my pension fund. Besides, they do know where their many (conspiracy) theories end and the facts start<http://www.zerohedge.com/news/things-make-you-go-hmmm-such-transition-conspiracy-theory-conspiracy-fact>. > > > As for the picture on the other side of the Atlantic; as you know, it's > much > > worse, especially if you're under 30 (with a degree or two or three). > And > > that doesn't take into account the (30%) reduction in teaching wages and > > pensions in countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece, or municipal > > bankruptcies in the US. > > It is also quite likely that children graduating with 12 years' > experience in social media will have a different take on governance > and on regulation of the financial interest than their elders. I > cannot predict the direction they will take once they have that > opportunity, but I can quite confidently predict that the status quo > is not it. > Absolutely. That's why this transition is so fascinating. And we can't use "the wait another 12 years" approach any more. In economics, they have a nice (new) term called "innovation shock". That's where that paper on "institutions" came from. OERers, due to their way of limiting their projects to the redesign of curricula and opening the production of content, don't seem to see that their focus on other people's learning has often blinded their own. Only when their wages and pensions dry up does the shock register. Ask anyone in Greece, Spain, Portugal. The local banks, schools, unis, governments, etc have become largely irrelevant. > > > So in light of much hard evidence, and the length of time OER projects > have > > been running, I think WE can conclude that our institutional habits and > > dreams about making content freely available have become, and are > becoming, > > increasingly irrelevant to economic growth. > > You might as well say that four centuries of Catholic Church hostility > to Galileo has prevented the development of any form of modern > astronomy, or that Young-Earth Creationism is preventing the advance > of molecular biology. You might as well fault Gutenberg for not > starting an Open Access scientific journal. > No, no. It's just a belief system that (institutions can do fulfil the role they we're instituted to implement) which, socially, had to disappear before we could have implemented new ones. When I talk about WE, I'm talking about the kind of useful implementations of the OER philosphy. It has to do, primarily with media. The belief, so far as the world revolving, is that OERs revolve around* global groups of inquiry*. National institutions, and their bricks and mortar, and their 9to5, and their hopping on planes to attend conferences, and their 'publish or be damned', or their complaints about the costs of journals, or "their" NATIONAL research and education networks are just the detritus from what once worked well. I think WE all see it. OER is not the production (responsible) of teaching materials anymore, and WE is probably one of the best illustrations of open governance. I just can't see where the movement's various groups and projects co-ordinate their activities. E.g. Why WE would use a domain like wikieducator, when what we would want, in a chase for utility, is some complement to wikipedia; perhaps an entire replication like wikipedia.edu, which is accessible only through an institutional log in, or maybe a link from the open (.org or .edu) article to it's online learning group. N.B. We're (my network friends) having this discussion about this domain<http://ccirn.net/tor/>for a "global" approach as well > > > It seems to me, as I haven't the > > well-developed belief system of people of people in the > political/education > > system, that the drivers to economic growth are provided by reasons like > > this. > > > http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/03/us-europe-economics-teaching-idUSBRE86207O20120703 > > > Although this article is correct about the fatuousness of most > economic theory and all economics textbooks, I fail to see the > connection to OERs. > It's also true about the fatuousness of most of what passes for academic research these days. Back to studying those ants. > > > Mind you, I treat ALL media (like the links above) as an OER. It's just > the > > stuff which comes out of edu/research institutions which i find largely > > irrelevant, because it always relates to a National public employee's > > institution and not my (their?) Global private communities. Thankfully, > they > > DO seem to be starting to coincide. > > > > N.B. Institutions DO matter. Just not the ones we've got today. > > http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=JIE_009_0003 > > I fail to see the relevance of this article, as well. > > > regards, si > > Thanks for sharing. > Thanks for letting me get this off my chest > > > On Saturday, 7 July 2012 02:38:59 UTC+7, Cable Green wrote: > >> > >> Follow up article to the 2012 Paris OER Declaration... > >> > >> Guardian: Are OERs the key to global economic growth? > >> > >> > http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/04/open-educational-resources-and-economic-growth > > >> > >> Cable > >> > >> > >> > >> Cable Green, PhD > >> Director of Global Learning > >> Creative Commons > >> http://creativecommons.org/education > >> http://twitter.com/cgreen > >> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > > Groups "WikiEducator" group. > > To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org > > To visit the discussion forum: > http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected] > > > > -- > Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin > Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. > The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
