Serendipity35

I have been an advocate for open textbooks. I think they are a good way to cut costs and put more textbooks in the hands of our students. But I'll admit that they are not widely used.

There are a number of possible reasons for that. They aren't easy to find, even though there are a number of sites that collect open and free titles. Instructors don't always trust that titles are "as good" as commercial textbooks. It also takes time to review titles for adoption.

The University of Minnesota has started its own online catalog of open books. In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development created the catalog to be reviewed by faculty members. The books are all released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license, and instructors can customize the books to fit their course needs.

Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks. The university will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, and professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500. (The money comes from donor funds.)

They hope to address faculty concerns about locating texts and having quality control over titles that have been peer-reviewed. They have almost a hundred books in the catalog.

Although it is encouraging that UM is working to get open textbooks used on campus, I find it discouraging that they need to duplicate the efforts of other repositories that are collecting textbooks and reviews on a larger scale.

What do you consider the most important criteria in choosing an open textbook for use in your teaching? Check my list and vote here.

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made an announcement recently that gave more energy to my feeling about the University 2.0 that is coming. They announced edX, a joint platform for massive online versions of their courses. See http://www.edxonline.org

These massive open online course (MOOCs) projects that I have written about before (Coursera, Udacity etc.) seem very "open" and allow online access to professors and courses that would be unimaginable to many people.

But the two universities are also describing edX as a research project on how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online.

Coursera had said earlier that they want to use their usage data to “understand human learning" too.

Stanford and MIT moved into these online projects in 2011. Other higher ed big players like Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley are also planning to have MOOCs with help from Coursera. (Coursera was started by two Stanford engineering professors and has venture capital behind it now.)

For my graduate students in "Designing Social Media" this summer, I created this list of outside reading in various aspects of using social media. Social media is a topic that is changing so rapidly that using a traditional textbook or even a popular title is almost impossible. Some of these titles are not new and are included because they not only give some historical context to the discussion, but they contain the "theory" of using social networks and media. Having students look at that theory and compare it to the current practices is valuable.

I wish all the readings could be from open textbooks and readings available online for free. I do use many articles available online and  I assign some readings from open textbooks such as The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. Benkler's entire book is available for free download at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/ 

Students are required to select a book for outside reading.The titles below have been used in previous semesters or were recommended by students and faculty. They cover a wide range of social media and related areas. Hopefully, students choose a book close to their own interest in the field - marketing, visual design, theory etc,

1. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Lon Safko


2. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site - Gavin Bell - covers moving from building a web site/application to building a social application that encourages visitor interaction
3. The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger - views social media success within a large company - Barger was the SM director who built successful programs at both GM and IBM - deals with corporate culture, legal barriers, and the kind of bureaucratic resistance that that are unique to large organizations.
   


4. Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business - Amber MacArthur - with many business examples, looks at targeting the right networks, seeding & building a community, enngaging with customers/fans and managing online "friendships"on a budget


5. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a software and design focus
6. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke


7. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


8. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.


9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li


10. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen


11. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


12. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services


13. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


14. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


15. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.


16. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins. This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.


17. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


18. What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis is his first book that looked at Google's abilities to harness the power of the Internet Age and how businesses—especially media and entertainment industries—can continue to evolve and profit by using Google's strategies.  


19. Jarvis' newest book is perhaps more relevant - Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live looks at privacy and publicness and how our new sense of publicness changes business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all. (He also has a short Kindle Single Gutenberg the Geek about the "original technology entrepreneur and disruptor."


20. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More Bodnar & Cohen - SM's specific application to B2B companies and how it can be leveraged to drive leads and revenue.

Do you have a suggestion for titles to be added? Post titles, comments or links in the comments area.

Flubaroo is a Google Apps for Education integrated tool that lets you easily grade assignments and do in-class assessments. Flubaroo is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments.

It works with Google Docs. It is more than just a grading tool. It also computes average assignment score, average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions. It shows you a grade distribution graph and gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

Join us to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future. Also join to share your experiences using this tool, and your ideas to improve it. For those interested in writing their own similar tools, we'll also spend a little time discussing how to get started writing Google Apps Scripts.

Flubaroo is an edCode.org project.


This Google+ Hangout video archive was part of the Education On Air conference on May 2, 2012. Watch to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future.




https://sites.google.com/site/eduonair/conference-sessions/using-google-apps-to-enhance-instruction

The United States Department of Education has awarded grants to "predominantly minority" colleges and universities looking to effect "long-range improvement in science and engineering education."

The grants were awarded through ED's Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program, whose aim is to promote STEM careers among underrepresented populations, including women and ethnic minorities.

Funds are used to improve college and pre-college STEM programs, fund faculty development, provide stipends for participants, support student research, and renovate facilities.

"These grants will help support the expansion of America's scientific and technological capacity to build global competitiveness by increasing minority graduates in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics," said Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education.

Additional information about the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program can be found on ED's MSEIP portal.

Worldwide shipments of tablets increased significantly in the first quarter of 2012, driven by strong sales of Apple's iPad. But owing to a slump in Android tablet sales, overall growth was weaker than expected. Meanwhile, on the smart phone front, Apple dropped to second place as Samsung more than tripled its unit shipments in the quarter to land in the top slot.

iPad Drives Tablet Growth While Android Tablets Slump

I sat in on a webinar today about how Mozilla and others are using badges as a way of recognizing and legitimizing learning and skill development that happens outside of the classroom. (I assume the webinar will be archived at connectedlearning.tv/webinar-archive.)

The concept of issuing badges is usually compared to the scouting merit and skill badges that have been around for a long time, and the badges that come for game achievements.

The main presenter was Erin Knight - Senior Learning Director at Mozilla - who currently spearheads the learning and badge work, overseeing the building of learning pathways for webmaker skills, as well as the development of the Open Badge Infrastructure.

The Mozilla Open Badge infrastructure enables any organization or community to issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners/users can then collect badges from different sources and share them across the web, unlocking new career and learning opportunities.

Here is some of what I culled from the session and the Mozilla site:

There are countless examples of learning occurring through informal channels. The web and other new learning spaces provide exciting new ways to gain skills and experiences—from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs.

While degrees do convey information about people’s skills, they often tend to be abstracted from the actual learning that has occurred. Two people with the same degree may have taken very different learning pathways or developed different skills. Many people without a formal degree possess a vast set of job-relevant skills. Badges help by providing a more complete picture, recognizing a more granular set of skills.

I good real world example of that is resumes. Resumes are documents that people write themselves and granular information on a resume is often difficult to validate. With digital badges, users can click on a given badge to access information about the badge’s issuer, how the badge was earned, and more. In other words, badges can go beyond traditional resumes by providing built-in evidence for validation.

The Mozilla Open Badge site OpenBadges.org (still beta) can get you started on using, creating and issuing badges.

Mozilla started with this project in 2010 and is now at the point of a public beta. On the Mozilla blog they discussed the Open Badges Infrastructure entering public beta which allows badge issuers and developers to have access to the software that will allow them to build badges.

Though I am viewing all this through my academic lenses (and with the idea that school credit will be changing radically in the near future), most of these badge efforts are from online or out-of-school learning situations. For example, the past year they have been used by NASA, Disney-Pixar and 4H.
The public-beta adds new features like an improved badge issuer API and new ways for users to manage their badges.

Mozilla has a "Badge Backpack” so that users can store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites in a single location. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms. There are also documentation and privacy features, including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers. The hope is that they can get from beta to version 1.0 by the end of the year.

If you want to start working with Open Badges right now, check out the developer documentation and source code.

The Mozilla project it totally new to me, but I did learn the basics about Open Badges (and earn my first 2 badges) today.

The webinar was via Connected Learning's Livestream channel. They offer a lot of education webinars using Livestream, Google+ Hangouts etc. Their Twitter hashtag is #connectedlearning.

A frightening idea was on the minds of those at a conference recently at Lafayette College. The conference was called “The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America and Its Leadership Role in Education Around the World.”

Attending were 200+ college administrators, including about 50 college presidents, from many top national liberal arts colleges. The idea that was worrying them was that elite liberal arts colleges might have to make significant changes in the next few years if they are to remain relevant (or present) in the current educational market.

Not a new idea to me or this blog and it's getting late for colleges to be just thinking about it now and not attempting to do something about it. Unfortunately, they seemed to believe the problems and solutions are economic.

But even among the fairly homogeneous group represented here, there was significant disagreement about how pressing the economic challenges are and the best ways to tackle them. And liberal arts college administrators still seem reluctant to adopt some major ways of cutting costs that other sectors of higher education have adopted.

And the solutions administrators did offer, many of which have high up-front capital costs, such as increased collaboration through technology, might not be options for the many less-wealthy liberal arts colleges (generally not represented here) that are facing some of the most immediate threats.

I would say that the cost of an education and its ratio to the quality of that education is what should be their main concern. Yes, technology is part of a solution. Colleges realize that's the case because they see that "less-elite" institutions are beginning to draw off their students whether or not they have a prestigious name or can even offer a degree.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/11/lafayette-conference-shows-concern-about-liberal-arts-colleges-economic-future