Rocket Science

Some more 2009 statistics, this time for Slideshare. 3,716 total views (of which I figure 3,000 or so are by the world-at-large), 531 average views per presentation (of which I figure 450 or so are not by me), 7 favorites (none by me), and 3 followers (who are these people?).

A while back I wrote a post about Trip Reports, and just having returned from another trip, I’m getting more and more convinced they’re good ideas. That recognition, plus a little bit of extra thinking have led me to believe that…

OEIT staff and leadership should:

• Briefing
  • Brief your team or relevant colleagues about the conference(s) or meeting(s) that you attended on the trip. I think in my group we do a pretty good job at this.
  • Better yet, write a trip report and email it to the appropriate people.
  • Even better, post the trip report to a OEIT or personal blog. (Ok, I’m not certain I’m ready to be this open yet. Though I have at least uploaded the trip reports to this blog, they’re just marked as Private for now.)
• Slides/Poster
  • Post your slides or poster in a publicly accessible space, whether it be your own personal website/blog, or an OEIT one.
  • Better yet, post a copy to Slideshare, Scribd, or other document/slide sharing site.
  • Even better, remember to make an audio recording of your presentation, and create a slidecast that gets posted to a document/slide sharing site.

So, as I mentioned above, I’ve said a bit about Trip Reports. This post is also about posting slides and/or posters. When I started working at OEIT, I decided I should finally join 2005-2006 or so and post my slides. I made the decision to post my slides on my personal website as well as at Slideshare. Why didn’t I do this before? Mostly I wasn’t sure if Slideshare would make it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to share my slides this way. But, what the heck.

My slides at Slideshare are for the world at large, the ones at my website are mostly for me. For my website, I also took the effort to post a Microsoft PowerPoint version as well as a PDF version. Why both? Because Microsoft has an annoying habit of discontinuing support for previous file formats, so PDF should allow me at least a read-only view of all the slides (all of Adobe’s software releases have been backward compatible thus far).

Sure it takes a bit of work, but I’ve got the workflow down. I include a Creative Commons license. I also make sure to include attribution/citation information as required by the Creative Commons license–something very few people do.

(Aside: One of my other long standing projects is to back convert all of my previous presentations. I’d like to upload these to Slideshare, but they have to allow me to reorder or group or arrange in some logical fashion my slideshows first.)

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The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) has hosted a meeting for the last two years bringing together “open, educational and technology experts that [get] together to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments.”

The 2009 meeting ended with an OET communiqué: Create the University of the Future.

The goal, to:

establish a new kind of university—one free from preconceptions or official constraints about how it would operate. The mandate of this new university was to provide an excellent education in an environment of open access, built on four key ideas:

1. Access to high-quality education should be available to all, and open content is a key part of providing such access.
2. Informal learning and mentoring are effective and well-proven approaches to engaging with youth and stimulating critical thought.
3. Personalized learning is critical to student success, but will require learning standards that allow students to continue their learning wherever life takes them.
4. Tools such as digital video, mobile devices, social media, and the global network all have important roles in learning and should be available to all learners.

New Media Consortium and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. (2009). OET communiqué: Create the University of the Future. Retrieved on November 16, 2009 from Web site: http://pretoria.uoc.es/wpmu/OpenEdTech_2009/files/2009/11/oet_09_communique.pdf

Looking at the document, I’d like to suggest a more practice focused interpretation of the call to action. We need to:

• Develop rich media that is designed to be multimodal (language, platform, media type).
• Develop content for mobile use from the outset.
• Implement credentialing that is based on learning outcome (not just by taking a specific course at a university).
• Understand that sharing must be part of the culture of teaching and learning.
• Understand that context and “pedagogical wrappers” are as important as content.

What does this mean for OEIT? These are all things “we” should be working toward. And I do believe that the individual projects, that maybe will form “the next big thing”, are all moving in these directions.

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