If you’ve had a look at the full program yet, you’ll know how jammed packed it is with amazing speakers and exciting projects to learn about. What to do? Especially when you can’t decide between two simultaneous talks you just have to hear.
And if that doesn’t sort it out for you, we are planning on streaming/recording all of the sessions via uStream (URLs to come) so hopefully you can still catch up on ones you missed later.
Have you asked others about sessions to attend, or even other activities to do while in Vancouver? Let us know - and remember, you can also use the conference wiki to ask such questions or post tips for fellow attendees. See you soon! Scott
Come enjoy a dialogue and discussion between two internationally known leaders in the field about a host of topics across the spectrum of open education, including:
Providing Learning vs Supporting Learning
Open Education and the Long-Term Role of Institutions
Education vs Learning and the ‘Educational License’ Debate
Models for Open Accreditation: Can They work?
Is it Ever OK not to be Open?
What Needs to Happen Next for/to/with Open Education?
We are proud to be hosting a free event that is open to the public Thursday, August 13th from 7-9 PM. “Expression, appropriation and the law” will feature clips from a number of works of art that challenge traditional notions of copyright, and be accompanied by discussion led by Vancouver-based artists and copyright activists. Details and free registration may be found here.
There is an attendee listing page now on the wiki where you can tell people how to connect with you and find others who are also attending Open Ed ‘09. Mine is the only name on their right now and it is feeling very lonely - so why not tell others you are joining what we hope will be an event to remember. Cheers, Scott
Presenters:Murugan Pal, Co-Founder & President, CK12 Foundation Eric Frank, Founder & Chief Marketing Officer, Flat World Knowledge Cable Green, eLearning Director, WA State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Barbara Illowsky, Professor, Mathematics & Statistics , De Anza College Steve Acker, Associate Professor, Ohio State University
Time & Date: 3:30 P.M. - 4:15 P.M., Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Session Description: Members of this panel will share their personal and professional experiences dealing with new textbook publishing models that embrace some facet of “open”. The emphasis of the panel will be on audience participation and open discussion, so come prepared with questions and comments to share. We focus on understanding the diversity of existing efforts, predicting promising and/or innovative textbook publishing models in the future, and examining evidence regarding effective practice, sustainability, and impact.
We have been fortunate this year to be blessed with both more quality session proposals than we could accomodate and an additional space in the conference location. To try to make the best use of both, we’ve created this Pitch Page on the conference wiki. If you have a session you’d be willing to lead (or indeed a working group or any other type of get together you want to see happen) please add some details to the Pitch Page and during the conference we will announce sessions and meetings happening in that room. And obviously if you simply want to self-organize during the conference, have at it, as this ‘unconference’ room will be generally available.
Session Title: A Conversation on Policy: Access, Quality, and Credentialing
Presenters:George Siemens & Rory McGreal
Time & Date: 12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M., Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Location: Rm. C130
Session Description: The initial wave of openness has resulted in growth of open source software, open educational resources, and open data. These important foundational changes, however, are minute compared to the potential impact of openness on the power structures of society. How does openness influence higher education? businesses? governments?
A Conversation on Policy will explore the policy implications of these changes on such issues as access to, and quality of, learning. The challenges of credentialing will also be considered in the context of the growth of higher education worldwide. This interactive session will begin with short opening statements followed by group discussion.
Attendance will be limited (but you must sign up using this form as attendance is limited). Lunch will be provided to attendees.
Sponsored by Learning Technologies Centre, University of Manitoba and Athabasca University
Time & Date: 12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C100
Session Description: Open educational resources pose a number of practical and theoretical problems for evaluators. In this presentation we will explore a number of the problems in depth and suggest new approaches to evaluating open educational resources. (Rather than gloss over the presentation in 500 words, we present one issue in its entirety.)
As an example, we first question the possibility of providing generalizable reviews of open educational resources. There is supposedly a strong demand from users of open educational resources for quality-reviewed or quality-vetted OERs, so that the best resources rise to the top” of search results. As happens in any market, a number of organizations have responded to this demand by facilitating OER reviews. But there is a significant theoretical problem with the idea of a quality review of an open educational resource: quality is not a characteristic of an open educational resource.
Item Response Theory (IRT) teaches us that difficulty is not a characteristic of a test item; instead, it is a conjoint characteristic of an item and a test taker. The same item may be very difficult for a novice, but very easy for an expert. Because this is true, we can only talk meaningfully about the difficulty of a test item in the context of a specific test taker or highly similar group of test takers.
The quality of an open educational resource is actually a conjoint characteristic of an OER and a user. An OER from BYU may be very high quality for an American who speaks English but very poor quality for a Chinese who speaks Mandarin. An algebra OER may be high quality for an eighth grader but very poor quality for a community college student. Thus, quality statements about OER are only meaningful in the context of a specific OER user or a highly similar group of OER users.
Experience has shown that digital library users are unlikely to provide feedback on resources (like OERs), and even less likely to do so when providing the feedback takes a considerable amount of time. This has led to a situation in which current OER review facilitators generally provide only the quickest, most simplistic review tools possible in order to increase the probability that they will be used. These review tools compress, collapse, and condense information about the user-OER relationship into 1-5 stars, capturing no information about the user, and attributing the rating solely to the OER.
It is easy to believe that some ratings are better than none at all, but this is not the case.
Imagine - later, another user searches for OERs and sorts the results according to their star ratings. The ratings previously attributed to the OER will only be meaningful to this second user to the extent that the second user is similar in certain respects to the first user who provided the rating. In cases where users differ significantly (say, the first user is a university professor and the second is a second grade teacher), ratings may even be inverted.
Time & Date: 12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C150
Session Description: The development of the Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) platform is an effort to create an international community of learners of all ages to explore and acquire second language skills through a wide variety of digital media channels that both create an immersive electronic learning experience and complement local informal and formal instruction. This builds upon the initial work of another Hewlett OER project, the Open Language Learning Initiative, which is currently undergoing testing in Chinese middle schools.
A consortium of partners, which includes the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Learning Games Network, The SuperGroup, FableVision, and MIT Education Arcade, is creating the web-based ISLE gaming platform as well as a series of initial games and activities to support Spanish-speaking English Language Learners in U.S. middle and high schools. This development is being pursued as part of an open strategy, which enables multiple developers and organizations to build on top of the platform.
The ISLE platform provides an underlying information architecture that allows games and activities to use vocabulary coded with multiple variables in its Global Learning Object database. With these objects tied to language-specific learning goals, data captured during game play can be used to measure student performance and generate assessment reports. Depending on learners? achievement and scoring, the system can either raise the bar and introduce more difficult words and phrases or remediate by re-populating the games with the learning objects to reinforce the basics.
As learners find themselves in diverse environments, ranging from formal to informal learning settings, the ISLE platform aims to provide opportunities in both instruction and immersion, balancing curricular scaffolding and frameworks with open-ended explorations, task-based activities, and community spaces for social and cultural exchange. The platform will also enable organic development of relationships and roles among teachers, mentors, and learners.
A key mandate for the large-scale platform is to establish its sustainability through business development efforts with open and commercial partners that can provide open and proprietary authentic media resources to support language learning, to develop a suite of services around the community, including student instructional support and evaluation, teacher training, and data analytics, and to extend the interactive media and game models to other applications.
Session Title: Telling Stories in Land and Food Systems; Future Advocates and Citizen Journalists
Presenters:Duncan McHugh, UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems Andrew Riseman, UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems Kathryn Gretsinger, CBC & UBC Graduate School of Journalism Cyprien Lomas, Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology, University of Queensland
Time & Date: 12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Session Description: Students in UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems are passionate about the environment, urban farming, sustainability and food. As applied scientists, it is crucial that they learn media skills, and this session examines their use in context. Presenters will discuss how Land and Food Systems partnered with the UBC School of Journalism to teach students how to tell stories and make their research accessible to those on and off campus. Students used open source audio editing software to create Creative Commons-licensed audio documentaries that give their work a whole new audience.
