iSummit 2008

Return of the Open Education Tribe

This was the second year of the Open Education Track at the iSummit. At the 2007 Open Education Track, open education innovators and collaborators experienced an innovative open space facilitation methodology run by Allen Gunner and Mark Surman. As Philipp Schmidt says in his blog on the 2008 Open Education Track, the track acquired mythical status as those who participated in the track continued to work together over the next 12 months despite large geographical distances and impossible time zones.

Our aim in 2008 was to recreate a similar experience with some help of some of the Open Education Track Tribe ( a term Andrew Rens from Shuttleworth has bestowed on Open Education Track participants past and present). Using and adding a few twists to the 2007 methodology, Ahrash and I co facilitated a highly participative track at break neck speed over the three days.

Icebreakers

Ice breakers were used for each session from what colour do you feel(translucent? lime?), your western or Chinese horoscope sign or numerology sign to what Hollywood star would play you in a movie with answers ranging from Hans Solo to Groucho Marx.

To shock participants into this wacky and somewhat confronting methodology of no laptops or formal presentations, participants were taught to hongi- pressing one’s nose to another person when you meet.It is still used at traditional meetings among members of the Maori people and on major ceremonies. In the hongi (traditional greeting), the ha or breath of life is exchanged and intermingled.

Through the exchange of this physical greeting, you are no longer considered manuhiri (visitor) but rather tangata whenua, one of the people of the land. For the remainder of your stay you are obliged to share in all the duties and responsibilities of the home people.

This was a strong but spiritual way to start the track and the journey over the next three days.

Participants

There were up to 15 -30 participants in each of the sessions of the track with a core group of 20 staying the whole course. There was a great mix of people from well established OER projects and new players and emerging leaders in OER.

The old guard included vetern David Wiley COSL(US), recovering ex lawyer Joel Theirstein from Connexions (US), still a lawyer Andrew Rens from the Shuttleworth foundation (South Africa) and OER warrior Jaroslaw Lipszyc, Free Textbooks (Poland) and of course Philipp Schmidt (South Africa) champion of the Peer to Peer University.

Fresh participants came from Israel,Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Brazil, India and Puerto Rico and Japan. We had government officials such as Grazyna Czetwertynska and Aleksander Tarkowski (Poland) publishers John Guatam (India) and high school student Hung June Chung (Japan) who works at FTEXT creating Open Education Textbooks for mathematics etc and is now translating some of these textbooks into english to disseminate around the world,
The report back group to the Summit of Cynthia Jimes, Andrew Rens, Jaroslay Lipszyc and Meital Duvdevani demonstrated the diversity of discplines, culture and language. The group combined experienced and new OER contributors. This is an ever growing tribe.

Methodology

This was a highly participatory track using all the tricks learned from the 2007 Open Education track. The approach requires a lot of energy and participation- like boot camp and drama school rolled into one. To those new to Open education and to this methodology it is initially a little overwhelming but by the third day people are seeing the results of discussion and collaboration and are very focused on real outcomes.
The Track’s mantra “Everyone here knows something, no one here knows everything!

Break out sessions were the main method of interaction and discussion. In the introductory session we asked everyone what 2 things did they wish to get out of the track. Then we broke up into groups of five to workshop the top 4 priorities/issues that people wanted to discuss and then listed and mapped these on whiteboard. Not surprisingly common themes and issues were identified, including-

how do projects get buy-in? what are incentives and disincentives for sharing

how can project go global?

localisation – including natural language technologies, how many algebra textbooks do you really need?

quality and legitimacy of content – how do you rate the credibility of content?

technology – open architecture, mobile technologies, listing of e-learning tools to help people learn

blueprint on how to set-up a successful open education project

business models – how do you make money?

http://wiki.icommons.org/index.php/ISummit_2008/Education/Session_1

OER Showcases

In the second session turned into a fever pitch/speed geek of particular projects identified in the first introduction and goal-setting session.Each presenter had five minutes to pitch their project and then were given 2 mins to answer any question from the group. Time keeping was strict to ensure the presentations were short and snappy and the presenters quickly became spruikers of their project.

Set out below are some of the OER projects

Peer-to-peer University (P2PU). Philipp Schmidt. The Peer-to-peer University is an online virtual University, where peers teach each other and learn together. Learning is connected to accreditation, because all work is open and public and participants develop a reputation in the community – similar to open source software – and by linking to other accreditation service providers. P2PU is a regular iSummit idea – it first came up in a conversation between Philipp and Neeru Paharia at iSummit 2006, was developed into a more coherent concept at iSummit 2007 with Delia Browne and is now ready for implementation. At iSummit 2008 we found more people who are interested in getting involved and are gearing up to launch the project in early 2009.

Open High School Utah. David Wiley. This is partly State funded high school where only OER resources are used in the curriculum.

The Open High School of Utah is a public high school with a twist – the high school is completely online (there’s no school building) and the school is committed to using open educational resources exclusively (there are no fully / traditionally copyrighted curriculum materials used in any class in the school). As a public school the OHSU is primarily state-funded. The Utah Board of Education approved the creation of the school in early summer 2008, and the school will open it’s virtual doors to 9th grade students in the fall of 2009 (then admit 9th and 10th graders in 2010, 9-11 in 2011, and be a fully running 9-12 high school in 2012).

OER Project assessment framework. Cynthia Jimes, ISKME

ISKME has been working with six projects over the past year to help create case studies and build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in the creation, use and reuse of open educational resources (OER) within the projects themselves. The projects include: CurriculumNet (Uganda); Curriki (United States); Free High School Science Texts (South Africa); Mission 2007 Training Commons (India); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States); and WGBH’s Teachers’ Domain (United States). The findings from the case studies have been used to support the development of the OER Case Study Framework, which seeks to assist any open education project that wants to track, share, and advance their learnings and successes. A comparative analysis from these case studies will be available in fall 2008.

Connexions. Joel Thierstein.

Connexions is a platform and repository for open education resources, enabling the creation, sharing, modification, and vetting of open educational material accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime via the World Wide Web. Since 1999, Connexions has pioneered digital education. Connexions global knowledge ecosystem where anyone can create materials is free of charge. Connexions modular interactive information is in use by universities, community colleges, primary and secondary schools and life long learners worldwide. Connexions materials are available in many languages including English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, French, Portuguese and Thai. Through its partnership with innovative publisher QOOP, Connexions is part of an exciting new distribution system that allows for print on demand and accelerates the delivery of educational materials into classrooms worldwide. The content in this book can be found in Connexions.

http://cnx.org

iKnow!. Ken Young.

Combining cognitive science with the social and collaborative structure of the web, Cerego empowers people to learn faster, remember longer, and manage their knowledge for a lifetime. Cerego is working with the US Government to input their Chinese Language Learning (CLL) content within our Social Learning Platform and we will soon be distributing it worldwide for free to everyone. We are seeking similar partnerships with educational institutions that have a deep commitment to CLL to help us dramatically increase the amount of high quality CLL content available for free. If interested in learning more, please contact me (Ken Young) at: kyoung@cerego.co.jp

Free Text Book Project and Polish library project (Wolne Lektury). Jaroslaw Lipszic.

Free Textbooks

The aim of the project Free Textbooks (www.wolnepodreczniki.pl) is to create a complete set of school textbooks written by teachers and provided completely free of charge according to the ideals of free culture movement. They are distributed on a free license GNU Free Documentation License and / or Creative Commons BY-SA, so that everybody has access to them and can legally use and adapt them for their own purposes. Each free textbook goes through a strict procedure of reviewing and accepting by the Ministry of National Education (MEN).

Free Textbooks are created by a social movement of teachers – volunteers who write new manuals for Polish pupils while using the Internet. The work to write the textbooks is done on the MediaWiki platform. We are finishing the textbook for teaching Mathematics in the gymnasium lead by dr Tomasz Gliszczyński. We have engaged the voluntary society of teachers, we have also managed to achieve the patronage of the Mathematics Teachers Association. The project is realized under the honorary patronage of the Vice-President of the Cabinet Waldemar Pawlak.

Wolne Lektury

Wolne Lektury (www.wolnelektury.pl) is an internet library opened in September 2007 containing and allowing access to obligatory readings which are proposed for schools by the Polish Ministry of Education. The obligatory books can be read on-line or downloaded on a hard disc in different formats (txt, odt, pdf). The most important unique feature of the service Wolne Lektury is the possibility to define, mark and search concrete fragments of texts taking into consideration their content and literary motives. This allows to connect critical ideas to particular parts of different texts – library wide – allowing for easy comparison and analysis.

This project developed in a close partnership with the Polish National Library, which delivers digitized texts. We have governmental support for our work. Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage is a honorary patron, as well as the Polish Writers Association. We established a Honorary Committee consisting of leading literary historians under the lead of the legendary Maria Janion.

After one year of project development we made 192 literary works available (3,7 MB of plain text data). Given that most of the text needed a lot of editorial work and our payroll team consists of one editor and one technical editor, we consider it to be a success. 31% of editorial work was completed by volunteers.

A useful resource: Open Calais

Spotlight: CC Israel : Promoting Open Education in Higher Education in Israel. Meital Duvdevani . CC Israel and Haifa Center of Law and Technology has started a three year strategy to promote open education in Israel. to be executed at three levels: 1 Promoting values of sharing and exchange among academic affiliates 2. Creating dialogue: bringing the different stakeholders( academic institutions, authors, publishers ) tho the table using mediation to establish a mutual framework for collaboration.3. Legal: developing legal infrastructure to assist making teaching materials more accessible and freely available to wider community of teachers and students using CC licences. This project is seeking philanthropic funding and volunteers.

Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Andreas Bovens [andreasb@opera.com], Opera Software

Supercool Vision: To develop a learning platform capable of enabling over one hundred million online classes a year. Mission: Empowering everyone to demand, create, and participate in live and interactive online classes. Website: www.supercoolschool.com contact: Max@SupercoolSchool.com

See links below on the other sessions.

http://icommonssummit.org/summit_blog/2008/07/mapping-out-a-model-for-open-e.html

http://icommonssummit.org/summit_blog/2008/07/live-blog-promulgating-oers-ge.html

http://wiki.icommons.org/index.php/ISummit_2008/Education/Session_5

http://icommonssummit.org/summit_blog/2008/07/open-education-legal-issues-be.html

http://icommonssummit.org/summit_blog/2008/08/a-report-back-from-the-isummit.html

Each session further refined issues enabling to think of practical solutions and actions.

Goals

The Cape Town Declaration was a great resource to review and consider alongside the issues identified by the tribe. Could the CTD help to promote OER and build the OER community?

By addressing the above, the tribe refined the issues to four themes:

Participation – where do we fined OER content? ability to adapt and add, connectivity
Sustainability- how to work with existing and new media providers? NGOs and private sector exploring new partnerships; maintenance of content.
Incentivizing educators, govts and publishers- overcoming fear of legal liability, confusion about which CC licence to use and the need to showcase successful and inspiration OER projects.
Law and Licence Reform- Mapping Licence and Licence Compatibilities- possible international law reform by way of international treaty

Interestingly although legal issues in particular copyright was identified as key issue early on, the tribe quickly recognised that there was a lot of work/projects in progress already and it would be more beneficial to focus on more practical issues.

Session Highlights

I sought feedback from the participants on this question.

Loved the open space approach and the introductory hongi.
The Speed Pitch Session was inspirational to the presenters and the participants- exciting projects and possibilities and new relationships were built.
The Session did a great job promoting the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education and showcasing the uber cool Cape Town T-Shirts. Only session with its own branding!!!!
Smart and inspirational people
Learning about new projects and discovering common issues and practical solutions
Finding new collaborators
Great to have new people welcomed into the tribe.

Outcomes of the Session overall

It was extremely hard to come up with a checklist on Openness as there are varying grades of openness and this issue has still not really been generally agreed across the board. In the end the group identified the following core projects to work on in collaboration over the next year. In the end- participation and incentivising educators, students, institutions and govts ended up being the key issues.

The following actions were identified as possible solutions/projects for the next 12 months.

Development of OER Certification Mark/Logo.
Consider whether there needs to be a certifying body to certifying OER resources or a self regulation checklist which assesses openness of OER resrources .
Refereed OER journal of OER resources. A peer-review system to evaluate course materials (similar to journal publication) and publish the outputs in an open journal, which would then be recognised for promotion.
Develop a best practice guideline for a pipeline that educators can use to get credit for their open publications. The pipeline steps are: preparing materials, teaching the course, writing it up and publishing it – and then using that publication to feed into the promotion process.
Build upon existing OER/OCW guidebooks and reports to prepare a toolkit for policy makers.
Build list of contacts, urls and links to OER Projects showcased and referred to during the track.
Identify and develop practical guides to CC licences and OER for educators, students and curriculum developers and disseminate.
Consider making more Cape Town T shirts on threadless or spreadless shirts and use them to promote them at OER events around the world.
Identify opportunities to assist in the localisation of OER.

More Work to be done

Two key areas that require further research are:

IP Law Reform – what changes to International and national laws need to be made to assist Open Education
Sustainability- sustainable production of OER and the sustainable sharing of resources, improving OER values for various user communities.

Some constructive feedback from participants for future tracks

Create a rich list of contact details of participants which are available to all participants , urls and links to everything that comes up in discussion.
A live blogger for each session plus a documenter who takes notes, photos and videos to put on the wiki.
We still need to engage students in the track
Still more work to be done on localisations issues.
We must continue to remember that a lot of world still needs textbooks and have no access to broadband, internet or mobile technolology. We really need to engage with developing countries and how to deal with their issues in OE movement. This was a very poignant comment made in the tracks final round up session.

Links to participants feedbacks and blogs

http://bokaap.net/bits-and-pieces/isummit-2008-open-education-feedback/
http://aliquidnovi.org/

Delia Browne
Co Facilitator
Open Education Lab
Sapporo 2008

iSummit 2008

Return of the Open Education Tribe

The Commons