May 15, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

You don't have to wait for BCcampus

I’ve been on the road for the past 3 weeks speaking to educators in this province about the BC open textbook project attending & presenting at a number of BCCAT articulation committee meetings and various institutional and provincial faculty professional development events. There was also a trip to Houston, Texas in there to attend the 2013 Connexions conference and code sprint at Rice University, which I will write more about now that I am getting my head above water.

Generally, the reception to the open textbook project has been positive (again, I need to write some reflective debriefing posts about what I have learned in the past few weeks beyond the advice to never do a flight transfer to Victoria through Vegas). But the one point I want to make to any faculty who might read this blog post:

You don’t have to wait for BCcampus.

Sure, there is an “official” project underway in this province, and there are timelines and deliverables and all the other stuff that goes along with a project like this. But adopting an open textbook doesn’t have to happen within the confines of a formal project.

Open textbooks are open educational resources – openly licensed with Creative Commons licenses and openly available to any faculty who wishes to use them.

Go. Evaluate them. Adapt them. Adopt them. Use them.

Now, if you are faculty and want to evaluate and adopt an open textbook, you certainly can do it as part of the BCcampus open textbook project (and we are looking for reviewers of textbooks right now), but you don’t have to wait for this or for any other project to make it happen. If you are a Physics instructor and take a look at an open resource like the OpenStax College Physics textbook, for example, and find it useful – go ahead and use it. In fact, we have already heard of 2 Physics instructors in the province who are seriously considering adopting this textbook for this fall, well ahead of the timelines for adoption that we have for our project. Awesome.

That is the beauty of open textbooks and open educational resources in general. You do not have to work within structures of “official” projects. If you – as a faculty – review the resources and are happy they meet your quality criteria, use it. This is how open works. Yes, there is a bit more work involved in finding quality open textbooks – there is no wine and cheese reception hosted by open textbook authors showing off all the latest new releases. But if you find an openly licensed resource with a Creative Commons license and want to adapt and adopt, do it.

This may sound obvious to some, but over the past few weeks talking to faculty, I have noticed that this basic point is not always obvious to those coming at open educational resources for the first time. OER’s are free to use, adapt, remix, adopt. There is no barrier between faculty and resource. No copyright holders to ask permission from. No gatekeepers. These resources are meant to be used by you in your classroom right now.

This is the beauty of open.

May 12, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

Into the great wide open

Had the opportunity to channel my inner Brian Lamb and talk about open education this week at the 2013 Tourism Educators Conference at Royal Roads University. Here are the slides from my presentation, released CC-BY so feel free to download and use any you wish.

Into the Great Wide Open from Clint lalonde

May 3, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

OER and Open Textbooks presentation to Douglas College

I was invited to speak on OER and open textbooks to the Science faculty at Douglas College. This is the first time I have presented in my new role at BCcampus, and the first time I have spoken directly with a group of faculty at any institution about the open textbook project so I was very curious as to the types of questions I would get.

Overall, I think it went well, especially when I got to the bits about what students think about textbooks & the cost of textbooks for students. There were many nods of agreement and acknowledgment. And as I spoke about OpenStax College and their excellent open Physics textbook, a Physics instructor was busy downloading the textbook to check it out and declared at the end of the session that it looked “really good.” Positive stuff.

There were also some critical questions. While I was showing off some of the available textbooks, there was a question from an instructor about the sustainability of the textbook. She said that, while these textbooks may be good now, what guarantees are there that it will be good in the future? Who will update the textbooks, and how will a faculty know that the updates are legitimate and valid? I think this question was brought on because I showed an example of a Wikibooks textbook and the discussion page that included a plea from someone who had adopted the textbook asking editors to take care when editing the contents of the textbook because it was an authoritative text. While I saw that as a quality indicator sign for faculty (someone at another institution has adopted this and made it known to the community), it came across as a red flag for those in the audience because it underscored the point that the wiki can, technically, be edited by anyone. And if you are going to build your course around this wiki-based textbook, the fact that someone can edit it at anytime is a concern.

I didn’t have time to delve into the intricicies of wiki’s and how you can mitigate this. Or get into how an instructor who adopts a Wikibook as a text can actually take an active ownership role in the stewardship of that resource. But I think if I am presenting to faculty on this again, it might just be easier to remove the Wikibooks reference and concentrate on projects like OpenStax College and Open Textbook Catalog out of the University of Minnesota.

Another question came from a Geography instructor who was concerned about an American-centric perspective in the textbooks since most of the open textbooks I was showing were created by U.S. based foundations and organizations. My response to both was that these were examples of the beauty of open licenses – that we can take an American open textbook and Canadianize it. That we can update and maintain our own textbooks without waiting for a publisher to do it. That we can take ownership of these resources.

I don’t know if I got that point across really well. Something to improve upon for next time.

Here are the slides for the presentation.

OER & Open Textbooks from Clint lalonde

May 2, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

Changing my CC license

This blog used to be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license (CC-BY-NC-SA). That changed today when I decided to remove the NC and SA clauses and just make it CC-BY.

As part of the BCcampus open textbook project, I’ve been digging deep into researching the various types of CC licenses. After seeing this chart on the CC website outlining compatibility of CC licenses with each other, I realized that the chances of someone being able to reuse my stuff is virtually nil because of the restrictions I had in place.

The problem is the Share-Alike attribution. When I chose the option to force people to “Share-Alike” (SA) I imagined that this would require people to use ANY CC license for anything they created using my material. I thought this would be a good way to prompt the adoption of CC licenses if someone wanted to use things I create.

What I didn’t realize was that, in fact, what I was forcing them to do was adopt a CC-BY-NC-SA license. The SA license doesn’t mean Share-Alike with any other of the CC licenses – it means that the license of the adapted work has to match my license exactly. Therefore, if someone wanted to use my work to create a derivative work (say translate this blog into another language) , they could not license that work with any other license other than a CC BY-NC-SA license and by forcing people to adopt a restrictive CC license, I am actually limiting the reuse of my material. My original good intention of adopting a Share-Alike license to try to promote the use of ANY CC license doesn’t make sense.

As for the NC (Non-Commercial) clause. When I first choose the NC clause, I picked it for 2 reasons. First, I didn’t want people taking my content and selling it – somehow make money off it. Really, I could care less about that anymore. I mean, you’ve read what I write. To think someone would actually pay for this stuff. Heh. I am more than a little embarrassed by the hubris of the 10 year younger me. Besides, I can’t see why people would pay for something they get for free right here.

The second was that I wanted to have SOME kind of recourse (however naive this belief was) that I could use against someone who republished the content of this site to drive traffic to another, unrelated site. It is not an uncommon practice for unscrupulous websites to republish content harvested from sites to drive traffic to another site – a practice known as blog scraping. or splogging (spam blog). I thought that by adopting an NC license that might somehow someday protect me by giving me some kind of legal recourse. Well, truth is, my content gets splogged all the time, and I don’t have the energy or time to try to chase the shadows to even attempt to identify who is doing it. And, again, quite frankly I could care less anymore. In the 10+ years of publishing content on the web, that fear I may have once had has left the station aboard a trainload of meh.

Go ahead. Use and reuse.

CC license compatibility chart from Creative Commons used under Creative Commons Attribution license

April 14, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

Online interaction improves student performance. Gee, imagine that.

In a recent blog post, Annie Murphy-Paul notes the results of some recent MOOC research conducted by a group of Stanford researchers on student engagement in a Coursera MOOC. This “finding” caught my eye.

For example, in all three computer science courses they analyzed, they found a high correlation between ‘completing learners’ and participation on forum pages, suggesting a positive feedback loop: The more students interacted with others on the forum page, the better they learned. This led the researchers to suggest that designers should consider building other community-oriented features, including regularly scheduled videos and discussions, to promote social behavior.

Imagine that. Students interacting with each other might actually improve learning in an online course.

This is not new knowledge, and highlights one of the fundamental problems I have with the current crop of MOOC’s. Anyone who has examined any prior research into student success in an online course already knows this. Want successful students in an online course? Have them interact. Yet somehow in the design of a revolutionary new online course, Coursera seems to have missed this well established fact.

George Veletsianos made the point last year that the current crop of commercial MOOC’s are ignoring a large and deep body of previous work in online and distance learning. George points to a comment Sebastian Thrun made in a NY Times article where Thrun states, “I haven’t seen a single study showing that online learning is as good as other learning.” In his post, George counters:

This perception of online education as “better than” or “as good as” other forms of education (I imagine that Sebastian Thrun is referring to face-to-face education here), is rampant. I believe it is rampant because our field has not done a good job disseminating what we know and what we don’t know about online education. At the same time, individuals do not tend to go back to the foundations of the field to investigate what others have discovered.

The result: A lack of understanding that there’s a whole field out there (here?) that has developed important insights on how we can design online education effectively.

While more research into an area is always a good thing, it does underscore the fact that the current crop of commercial MOOC courses seem to be blazing a trail that has been pretty well laid out. If only they would stop and take a look at the map.

February 15, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

Royal Roads University is open!

A couple of tweets came my way today that alerted me to something that I am so happy to see come alive:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/grantpotter/status/302151989217873920″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/marksmithers/status/302210924385820672″]

Open.RoyalRoads.ca is open.

The brainchild (as so many good ideas are) of my Royal Roads University colleague Emma Irwin (@sunnydeveloper – don’t worry. I’ll wait while you go follow her…okay…) open. royalroads.ca is a one stop shop where the RRU community can share the work they do.

When people have asked me about my move from RRU to BCcampus (where I am at the end of a wonderful, mind blowing first week), I have been saying that one of the things I am sorry about is that I won’t be there to see the fruition of projects that have been in the works for awhile. This project was one of them.

Open started about a year ago when Emma came to me with an idea that she was trying to get buy-in for. At Royal Roads, we developed quite a bit of custom code for our Moodle installation. RRU is also a Drupal shop and there was some custom code that was written to extend Drupal as well.

Emma wanted to find a way to share this code, not only with the Moodle and Drupal communities, but with the wider world. She suggested setting up a code repository on GitHub, a very popular and active code community. I told her I would weigh in with whatever institutional support I could give her to help her set it up because I thought the idea of setting up a GitHub repository to share our code was brilliant. After all, if you are going to adopt “free” open source software and use it to support your operations, you should be prepared to contribute back to the wider community. That is how open source works. You can’t just take – you participate and give as well. Which is why the word free above is in italics.

There is a very practical benefit from sharing your work because sharing is reciprocal. It builds goodwill. What you share will come back to you. In the case of open source software, you can see this in the communities that spring up around projects. Those that help and those who give have a level of status in the community. They become known. And when those people need help to solve a particular problem, it is there in buckets. The community supports those who support the community. In the case of sharing Moodle & Drupal code, Emma can find developers who can help her solve the problems she is working on. In the education circles I travel, you can see no better example of this type of reciprocal effect than with the work of Dr. Alec Couros, who’s willingness to help out the network is legendary, and whose calls for help generate a massive response. People want to help Alec because he helps people.

But there is another reason why I think we should be sharing – something that gets to the very core of what we do as educators. As David Wiley points out, sharing is a critically important piece of learning:

In fact, those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem successful. Does every single student come out of a class in possession of the knowledge and skills the teacher tried to share? In other words, is the teacher a successful sharer? If so, then the teacher is a successful educator. If attempts at sharing fail, then the teacher is a poor educator. Education is sharing. Education is about being open.

As an institution that has learning as their core purpose for existing, it only makes sense to me that we share the work we do with as many people as we can. Because education is sharing.

As Emma and I talked about the importance of sharing with our respective communities, Emma asked me about the open educational resources in CTET. RRU has an open Moodle instance where (thanks to the work of Mary Burgess and funded by a grant from my current organization, BCcampus a few years ago) we were sharing some OER’s we had developed that focused primarily on faculty development. Over the years, the collection has grown to include OER’s developed by RRU faculty, and other open initiatives. As we talked, Emma said she had this vision, inspired by Open Michigan, where we could gather all of our open institutional resources and share them in one place. I told her I had a similar vision, inspired by Open UBC.

And then I left RRU to go and work on other open stuff. But Emma, like she does, kept on working and plugging away. And yesterday, open.royalroads.ca went live. And I am very happy for Emma because I know how hard she has worked to make that happen. And what benefits not only she, but the wider Moodle & Drupal communities, and RRU itself will reap from her efforts.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/302152514327965696″]

Photo: open 19 by loop_oh used under Creative Commons license

February 13, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

The ds106 snowflake

I love this ds106 data visualization put together by Martin Hawksey at JISC. This video is a representation of the community activity that occurred in ds106 – the unMOOC MOOC developed by Alan Levine, Jim Groom and the rest of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at U Mary Washington (whose innovative work I have gushed over before).

With each white circle representing a blog post, and circles clustered around individual blogs, you can quickly see just how much activity occured during ds106, and how much this beautiful visualization represents a model of learning that reflects the qualities of the internet itself – distributed, networked, nodal, autonomous yet connected. It’s no accident that this visualization looks like the internet itself. As Alan points out, ds106 was specifically designed this way.

The very essence of ds106 is that it is made of the same stuff that the web is made of, a distributed, open, decentralized connected network managed by participants in the space it inhabits. You will hear people talk about their organizations or projects being on the web. but there is more than a shade of difference of ds106 being of the web.

In an environment that has proven its resilience, growth, and capability, should we not emulate the very ideals of the internet in the learning experiences we create? For the most part, while being on the web, the majority of MOOCs are operating via a structure that is not built by nor cared for by its learners. The truly open, syndicated model of ds106 works because it acts like the web itself.

February 6, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

Academic Paywalls or It Costs HOW Much?

Open Access – unrestricted access to peer-reviewed academic research – has been popping up on my radar lately, brought on by the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. Sad that it takes the death of a brilliant young man to shine a light on the absurdity of heavy-handed copyright enforcement and the right of the public to have access to research that, in most cases, they have bought and paid for.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/dlnorman/status/298096900287115264″]

Knowledge that teachers need to educate our children, locked away and inaccessible.

And this Journal of Comparative Neurology annual subscription price for this peer-reviewed medical journal? $30,860 per year. This is the institutional price….FOR ONE JOURNAL!

Madness.

Remember, this is the amount that institutional libraries pay – publicly funded institutions. This is our money going to pay private corporations for access to research that, in most cases, WE THE TAXPAYERS HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR! We fund most of this research, and then give it to these publishers who lock away access to the research & force us all to buy the results back. It’s insane.

I have no idea what a similar Canadian institution pays, but Harvard alone pays close to $4 million dollars per year in access fees to publishers (aside: this article above contains some real and practical advice for academic researchers who wish to support open knowledge).

I understand that this isn’t an easy issue. That academics feel under intense pressure to publish in prestige journals in order to secure more funding, jobs, etc. And it was heartening to see the #pdftribute hashtag emerge on Twitter. But, as Berkley Associate Professor Michael Eisen says, academics can do more:

Posting our PDFs is all fine and good, but the real way to honor Aaron Swartz is to combat this pervasive institutional fecklessness and do everything in our power to make sure no papers ever end up behind pay walls again. We have to demand that our universities alter their policies to reward, rather than punish, free scholarly publishing, and that they stop cutting the checks that keep this immoral system afloat.

Can do more…need to do more, as Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior points out in her excellent Al Jazera article The Political Consequences of Academic Paywalls.

When an activist needs information about the political conditions of her country, she should be able to read it. When a lawyer needs ammunition against a corrupt regime, she should be able to find it. When a journalist is struggling to cover a foreign conflict, she should have access to research on that country.

Meanwhile, 15 year old Vancouver high school student Jack Andraka uses free, open access journals and comes up with a new test for pancreatic cancer.

“I used them religiously,” Andraka said, “Just because, in most online databases, articles cost about [US]$35, and there are only about 10 pages.”

“The public funds a lot of this research. Shouldn’t the public have access to it?”

The case for open access – open to use and open to reuse – couldn’t be more clear in my mind.

January 24, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on Open

The power of audience as student art project goes viral

Just listening to an interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Jian interviewed visual artist & Capilano U student Rosea Lake (aka rosea posey). Rosea’s story is a testament to the positive things that can occur when students work on the open web.

Last year, Rosea created this wonderful work as a high school project. (aside: I only wish I could embed the image here for you to see directly, but Rosea has copyrighted the image instead of releasing it under a Creative Commons license, a decision I fully understand after reading what happened below). The work sat for a year before Rosea made a decision that is likely going to change her life.

On January 5th, Rosea posted her high school art project on Tumblr. On the open web.

3 weeks later, it has gone viral.

This high school project posted on the open web has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, sparked debates and discourse (as all good art does), and has garnered Rosea much mainsteam media coverage. There has even been a controversy around intellectual property and copyright when the lingerie company Curvy Kate created an ad that was eerily similar to Rosea’s work. Rosea credits the internet to helping her find out about this unauthorized commercial use of her work.

Now, I acknowledge that “post your final project to the web” probably wasn’t an explicitly stated learning outcome in her high school art course, but why couldn’t it be? I mean, asking students to work for an audience – a potential worldwide audience – changes the nature of the work learners do. It is real. Authentic. It creates possibilities. It matters in a way that doing work just for the eyes of their teacher does not. As Alan November (via David Truss) notes:

“Students will work harder for an authentic audience than for a grade”…”Students will do more if they leave a legacy beyond a grade.”

Which is a point that Stephen Downes (speaking specifically about blogging) also makes:

blogging gives students a genuine and potentially worldwide audience for their work. Having such an audience can result in feedback and and greatly increase student motivation to do their best work.

Or this take on having students working on the open web as part of their learning. This quote is from UBC’s Jon Beasley-Murray who, in 2008, assigned his UBC students the mammoth task of collaborating on a Wikipedia article to get it to featured article status. Reflecting on the project (which has put his students work in front of thousands of people) Jon says:

And their final product is to be a professional piece of work that will be viewed by many thousands of people, a resource that is in most cases the first port of call for future researchers, whether students like themselves or any of the many millions from all over the world who visit Wikipedia. Most of these articles are, after all, the top hit (or very close to it) in any internet search of the topic.

By comparison, the usual essays and exams that we assign our students really are rather pointless busywork.

Pointless busywork. How many of you who have attended university or college have stacks of pointless busywork sitting in drawers and desks (or have gone to recycling & garbage bins years ago) unread by anyone except the person who passed judgement on them?

Remind me again why we set up barriers (both real and perceived) that prevent our students from succeeding like this? Why are we not encouraging our learners each and every day to participate in the open web? To engage with the world in the most real and authentic learning space available to us? Why do we ask our learners to hide their work away in places where the only person who may ever see that work is their instructor?

It takes courage to post your work onto the open web for the world to see. To comment on. Critique. Discuss. Judge. Rosea took that chance, and I suspect she will be reaping the rewards of that decision for many years to come. We all will because Judgments is a brilliant, thought-provoking piece that is making us talk about uncomfortable things.

A high school art project has the world talking right now because Rosea Lake took the simple step of posting her work out in the open, on the web, for all of us to see and talk about.

Brilliant.

January 22, 2013 by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

The beginning of a great adventure

Seems like it wasn’t that long ago when I wrote a post a lot like this. 2 years, almost to the day in fact, when I accepted the position I have now as the manager of Learning Technologies at Royal Roads University. It’s a position I will only have for a few more weeks.

I have a new job. On February 12th, I will be joining BCcampus as the Manager of Applied Research & Curriculum Services.

Like most changes, there are good and bad. Bad that I am leaving a wonderful position with a great group of colleagues working on some interesting projects. I have truly enjoyed the time I have spent in CTET, and would highly recommend RRU as an employer. They have been supportive and given me opportunities to grow in ways I did not imagine when I arrived here 2 short years ago. And I got to spend the past 2 years sharing an office with a wonderful person & collague who made me laugh & look forward to coming to work each and every day.

The good? I will be rejoining one of my old CTET colleagues, Mary Burgess, who is now also at BCcampus. And I have many wonderful connections with others at BCcampus, like Sylvia Currie, David Porter, and the wider ETUG community. From 2004-06 I worked within another unit at BCcampus, and there are still people I worked with at the time who I am happily going to be working with again.

And then there are the projects, including some really cutting edge robotics projects. I am just starting to get into robotics at a hacker level, playing with Arduino and controller boards like the MaKey-MaKey. In my new position I’ll have a chance to work on larger scale robotics projects with educational applications, like remote science labs as part of NANSLO.

But the project that really pulls & resonates is the Open Textbook project. BCcampus has long been a leader in our province (and beyond) on open education and open educational resources. Much of how I feel and think about open ed has come out of the work of BCcampus, and the people who have been associated with BCcampus over the years. People like Scott Leslie and Paul Stacey, who in turn led me to people like Brian Lamb, David Wiley, Alan Levine, Jim Groom, Alec Couros and other open educators who’s work in open spaces have greatly influenced how I think about education. To have a chance to work on a project like Open Textbooks that I believe has the potential to make a deep and systematic change to post-secondary education was an opportunity I could not pass up.

So, for people I am connected with in virtual spaces, like this blog (thank you), on Twitter or in other spaces I haunt online, you can probably expect to see more posts and conversations about open education, open textbooks….and robots. Since they will one day be our overlords, I might as well strike up a good working relationship with them now :).

December 20, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Open

What we can learn about copyright from fashionistas

I have a whole new respect for the fashion industry after viewing this brilliant TED talk from Johanna Blakely called “Lessons from fashion’s free culture.”

In a nutshell, Blakely’s argument is that an entire creative ecosystem and industry has developed around fashion because fashion cannot be copyright. Indeed, without the ability for one designer to copy (or be “inspired”) by the work of another, there would be no fashion industry as we know it today.

Under the law, fashion designs are exempt from copyright. You cannot copyright a design because lawmakers view clothing as a “utilitarian” product. The common good of clothing humanity overrode the rights of fashion designers to profit from their clothing. But because there is no copyright, designers have been able to freely elevate that utilitarian product (clothing) into something that is now considered art.

It is a compelling argument in support of copying as a model of ownership that encourages innovation as copying allows for the the free flow of ideas, and this free flow of ideas drives innovation. It forces those who are being copied to continually “up their game” and create unique designs. Copying forces innovation and creativity.

But this lack of copyright isn’t limited to fashion. Cars, food, furniture – these are all utilitarian items that cannot be controlled by copyright (which begs the question in my mind, when does something like a smartphone or computing device become a utilitarian device so that the silly litigation wars from Apple and Samsung?)

December 14, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

I remember Kamloops

Thanks to an invitation from my TRU colleague Brian Lamb, I was lucky enough to find myself attending A Day for Learning at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops last week. It was a wonderful day and I fear that I have taken away much more than I contributed to the success of the event.

The day underscored for me that I need to have these types of events & discussions at my institution. Set aside some space and time, bring together the right people and spend a day talking about teaching and learning, innovation & dreams. It is easy to become insular in any position within an organization, and this event illustrated how valuable it is to bring a diverse group of people from across the institution together. Personally, it came at exactly the right moment for me as I have been grappling with issues of leadership and what that means. This day was a shining example of the types of things leaders like Brian, Irwin DeVries and Christine Adam do, and something I want to recreate at my institution soon.

I also had the opportunity to meet and hang out with a couple of very smart people; Jeff Miller from UBC and one of my EdTech inspirations, Jim Groom from UMW in Virginia, who both came to TRU as a special guest speakers for this event. Although it sounds contradictory, Jeff gave (in the course of 90 minutes) an expansive, yet beautifully concise, overview of how higher education has changed, taking us back to the birth of higher ed in our province right up to MOOC’s. It was an engaging and interactive session that showed what a skilled and knowledgeable facilitator Jeff is.

Jim followed with a presentation on innovation that revolved around the wonderful Culture of Innovation video that came out of UMW a few months ago. I found the video utterly inspiring the first time I viewed it several months ago for a number of reasons, not the least of which was for the type of institutional buy-in that Jim and the DLTL crew has managed to garner with their ideas and innovations. But having Jim there to break down the video and explain (in as much detail as he could in an hour) the methods behind his madness grounded the inspirational aspect of the video for me. I want to flesh out some thoughts, especially around the concept of A Domain of Ones Own, in a future post as it is the type of initiative that aligns well with my underlying philosophy of the importance networked learning.

There were other takeaway moments. Three students sharing their observations about learning and what engages and motivates them to learn, including the revelation from a particularly focused online student who made Instructional Designers around the world gasp when they boldly stated that they never did coursework in their online courses, only assignments.

There was also a poignant and moving opening address from TRU elder Estella Moller, which evoked some pretty powerful personal memories of my roots growing up with a father who taught trades at a college in a predominantly First Nations community in Northern Alberta. As a long, but important side note, if you are interested in the history of higher education and First Nations in Canada, I urge you to watch the 20 minute documentary on the history of Portage College that shows how it came to be. It is a powerful story of determination, resistance, community action and the belief that education is a transformational experience and the key to a better life.

I think I have more to say about the ideas that came out of the day, but for now just end by expressing my thanks to Brian, Irwin and Chris for including me in the day, and hope I can return the invitation in the near future.

December 13, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Supporting what I use

This past week, I have been spending money, primarily getting ready for the upcoming holiday season. But along the way I’ve also been spending some money and supporting a few of the free online services and products that I rely on everyday.

My first stop, the Wikipedia store, where I dropped $25 on an “I Edit Wikipedia” shirt, some stickers and pin. Mozilla was next, where, for $30, I got a nice, new Firefox t-shirt. $30 at Creative Commons snagged me a t-shirt, some stickers and pins.

Now, even though I get some nice stuff out of this, I didn’t do it because of the t-shirts, stickers or pins. It’s not about the schwag (although it’s nice to have a sticker on the laptop to show support and raise awareness). And I don’t see this as charity. I am not doing this for altruistic reasons. It’s selfish, really. I want these services and products to survive because I use them – no, I RELY on them, every day. In my mind, this is a payment (albeit small) for services and products I use. They are valuable, and I would miss them if they were gone.

I financially support these organizations for the same reason I support The Knowledge Network and other public broadcasters – because I get something of value from them and I think they should be acknowledge in a way that means something to them. They need money to keep doing the work they do; work that is generally free from commercial interests, which is something that is harder to come by on the web these days, especially in education where the VC money is calling the shots on so many “innovations” revolutionizing education. Personally, I would rather pay transparently up front than have what I see as valuable become commodified and commercialized.

Last night, after reading George Siemens post (and subsequent rich conversation between George and Scott Leslie in the comments), I added Hack Education to my list and made a payment to Audrey Watters for $25. A small price to pay to someone who I (and many others) see as an invaluable, independent voice in the EdTech maelstrom these days.

Georges post also made me realize that I should be explicit about these contributions and transactions. His post was a prompt for me – a reminder that these free services we rely on need to be supported in real and tangible ways, and pushed me to action. Georges post was my prompt. Maybe this will be yours?

December 3, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on Open

And without doing anything, I created an Open Educational Resource

Last week I let loose a rant against Turnitin and a poster they sent me which painted the acts of remixing, mashups, aggregation and retweeting as plagiaristic.

Tonight I receive a pingback notification from a blog being used in an open online high school Philosophy 12 course being offered by Bryan Jackson. Bryan has included my blog post as a suggested reading for his unit this week on Ethics in his open online class for students interested in discussing the ethics of intellectual property.

I don’t know where Bryan saw this post. He might be subscribed to my blog, a colleague might have passed it to him, or he might have caught it on Twitter as we are connected there (and I have a pretty good idea where he did see it). But he would have never seen it at all if I had confined my rant to my office colleagues and not decided to put fingers to blog and post something in the open space of the web – something that another educator could find and link back to.

Which goes to underscore a point that Scott Leslie has been making for years about sharing and serendipity:

Much of the sharing that happens in my learning network happens through serendipity. People publish a blog post, bookmark a delicious link, etc, as a normal part of their own workflow,and whether through syndication or the “All seeing eye of Google,” it comes my way, as John Krutsch would say, “Right On Time.”

A normal part of my workflow is writing blog posts and publishing on the open web, then disseminating that via Twitter, Facebook, & (increasingly) G+. All that backroom posting to those networks happens behind the scenes. I’ve spent some time setting up this blog to post to those networks, where it was picked up by another educator, who then decided to use it as a resource in one of his classes.

Without doing anything extra, I managed to create an educational resource for another educator.

Okay, maybe it isn’t entirely true that I have done nothing. I did have to do a few things to make that happen. I had to create the ecosystem to make sharing possible. But that work was done years ago when I made the concious decision to publish on the open web with a Creative Commons license that allowed for reuse (which didn’t even need to be in place for Bryan’s case as he has just simply linked back to the blog post and not actually copied or reused it). But that’s it. That’s all I had to do. The simple choice of deciding to post on the open web with a license that allows for reuse means that something I create (whether I think it is useful or valuable or not) can be used by another educator.

With those 2 conditions in place – open and licensed for reuse – everything I create and publish here becomes an open educational resource, free for any other educator to link to, copy, use and modify as they see fit.

November 28, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Remix, Mashups, Aggregation, Plagiarism oh my

I am about to criticize and show examples from a copyright poster (or, for you new-fangled kids, an infographic) I received in the mail today from Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism company. Fair dealing y’all.

The title of the poster is The Plagiarism Spectrum: Tagging 10 Types of Unoriginal Work, and lists the top 10 types of plagiarism based on the findings of a global survey of nearly 900 secondary and higher education instructors. The poster ranks the severity of the offense (#1 being highest level of severity, 10 the lowest) and shows a scale of 1-10 based on how often each type of plagiarism appeared in the survey results. I tried to catch a full size shot of the poster (you can click the image for a larger, more detailed version):

Well, I have some problems with this. Let’s zoom in on the areas I find troublesome.

and

Remixing is the 4th most nefarious form of plagarism, and mashups are #7…at least according to these 900 teachers and instructors. This saddens me because I happen to consider these two activities some of the most creative and original cultural acts happening today. And to think there are 900 some instructors and teachers out there who do not recognize the creative value and sheer amount of work it takes to create something new and original out of what existed before.

Quite frankly, it astonishes me that in this day and age, remix and mashups are thought of as plagiarism. I am of the school that everything is a remix.

History is populated with examples where multiple ideas, products, music, literature, you name it were mashed-up, remixed and otherwise recontextualized to create something completely new and original. As Brian Lamb puts it in his 2007 Educause article Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix:

Elements of reuse have always been present in creative work, even though the borrowing may have been framed in terms of “tradition,” or “influence.” Artistic and scholarly works build on the work of others.

Yet, according to this study, we in education consider these acts of stealing; of unoriginal thought. Plagiarism. Laziness. Look at how lazy these remix people are. They work in bed in their pyjamas for crying out loud.

No good can ever come out of that.

If this is the true and accurate sentiments of educators in general – that remix is, in fact a form of plagiarism – then it makes me realize just what kind of uphill battle we might face here in British Columbia as we move towards creating and modifying Open Textbooks. The challenge being that if educators have this underlying core value that remixing someone else’s content to create something new is plagiarism, then they are coming into the open text book project with the preconceived notion that we have to build something from scratch; reuse is not an option because it is plagiarism.

For me, this is the wrong way to approach an open textbook project. In order for the open textbook initiative to be successful, I think we need educators to come to the table with an open mind about reuse and remixing existing materials; to modify already existing open textbooks and openly licensed content to fit their specific needs. Not only do I think that starting from scratch is an arrogant place to begin (we are the only ones who know best), I think that if we try to recreate the wheel and start from scratch, we start at the bottom of the hill and put a big boulder in the way. Anyone who has written anything at length knows that it is much easier editing and modifying than staring at a blank piece of paper in the typewriter.

I also have a problem that this:

and this:

are practices being painted with the plagiarism brush.

A retweet serves many purposes, not the least of which is attribution. If someone retweets something that I send out and keeps my Twitter handle in the tweet, I am notified. It is a signal to me that they find what I tweeted valuable – so valuable that they wish to share it with the people in their network. For the person being retweeted, this underlying message you receive when someone retweets one of your tweets is that the people in your network find that type of content valuable. It is a prompt to share more. We all know how important knowing your audience is in communication and writing, and a retweet is a signal back to the original source that someone in the audience found the content valuable, please share more like this. Retweets serve an important function in that it helps me know my audience.

Aggregation is, in essence, curation, a skill that I think is incredibly important in education. There is great skill to being a good curator of resources; a filter. I value the curators in my network. As educators, we constantly curate resources. It is one of the core learning activities we do – vet resources for our learners and point them in the direction of what we think is important. This is what aggregations is all about.

But the biggest problem I have with this poster is that it brings all of these things together in one handy, scary resource, and makes these practices appear fraught with danger, when in fact, I believe these are core skills required to create understanding in today’s world. This poster is being sent out to other educators like myself in the hopes that it will get posted in a hallway or office so that other educators will see this. The underlying message they take away after viewing this poster is that these practices: Remix, Mashup, Aggregation and Retweet are riddled with risk (thanks, Tracy for helping me articulate this). That whatever positive purpose they may serve in an educational context, the risk is not worth it. And I fundamentally disagree with that.

So, I am going to hang this poster in my office and I am going to use it to trigger a conversation. But I am going to modify it a bit.

November 24, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Open

Buzzkill (or these are not simple times we live in)

Yesterday was Black Friday. But yesterday was also Buy Nothing Day, and this post in in the spirit of Buy Nothing day.

This video keeps popping up on my Facebook feed. You might have seen it.

At first blush, this is the kind of video I love. Showing that people are basically good and altruistic.

But there was something that bothered me. I watched the video again. Then I zoomed in on the final shot where one guy passes a beverage to another. A Coke.

It’s a Coke commercial.

And then I got angry. Not that it was a commercial riding on the feel-good factor – commercials have always done that. Just don’t try to fool me and hide your message. It’s deceptive and dangerous. When people find out, they become angry and cynical and that beautiful message that the world is a great place completely gets blown out of the water and is replace by the message that the world is full of deception. Had there been a simple logo shot at the end of the commercial saying it was sponsored by Coke, I would not have felt so duped. So stupid. So cynical.

I was tempted to go back to FB and start commenting on everyone’s feed, “Nice, but it’s a damn Coke commercial.” But, you know. Buzzkill. No one likes to be the one to pop the feelgood balloon. Who likes to have it pointed out that they have been duped?

But wait a sec. Who have I been duped by?

I started to dig around and look into the organization that had their logo tagged on the end of the video, Love Everybody (where I am seeing comments that others are suspecting the same thing I am about the Coke product placement). I was certain I would find out that they were funded by Coke somehow. But if they are, it is not obvious from their website.

And then as I continued my research to try to uncover whether this was really a Coke commercial or not, I came across this version of the ad on YouTube:

Now in this version, there is a very definite Coke logo and product shot at the end. It is obvious in this version that this IS a Coke commercial and the message was sponsored by Coke. I see this version and I am okay with this. Coke has been explicit.

So, why did Love Everybody edit the video to remove the Coke logo at the end that clearly showed that it was a Coke commercial? What was their motivation to do this? Did they want to use the video as a vehicle for their own organization? Try to re-edit in such a way that they would get the feel good factor out of it? Or are they really funded by Coke and have re-edited the video to make the Coke message obscure and almost subliminal? Or are they engaging in some form of culture jamming and it is actually a sophisticated ploy to use the message of a corporation to provoke exactly the kind of negative reaction and backlash to a mega-corp that I felt? Or perhaps they are funded by the state and are trying to soften the perception that constant public surveillance is a good thing?

And here in lies the problem. Going down this road has made me start questioning what this simple little message that seemed so sincere and earnest really means. The message that the world is a good place has been replaced, and that pisses me off because I want to believe that the world is a good place and people are basically good. That may be a naieve attitude, but as a father trying to raise engaged kids who don’t end up living a cynical life steeped in fear, I NEED to believe that.

I like to think of myself as fairly media literate. I worked in that world, on both the commercial and alternative media sides and feel I have a good bullshit detector. But it reminds me that we are living in complicated media times where messages and media can easily be manipulated. For me, this is another indicator of the importance radical transparency in everything we do. We need transparency as a core value in our society today or risk creating a cynical society that lives in fear, uncertainty and doubt. We need to push at our governments, corporations, institutions, and ourselves, and believe that being open and transparent and making our motives & actions visible and explicit is the only option.

Cross posted from my other blog.

November 22, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on All the rest

Leadership

I have been thinking a lot about leadership lately.

Perhaps it is because our Director has recently moved on to another position with another organization and I (as well as the other manager in my unit) have been called upon to backfill that role. Consequently, in the past 2 months I have found myself working at a higher level in the organization than normal, sitting at the table with our senior academic leadership team & getting a firsthand view of academic leadership.

I am also fortunate to be in the enviable position of being on the hiring committee to hire a new Director for our centre (how nice to be able to have a say in who your new boss will be) and so I have been able to not only witness a number of potential leaders articulate what their vision for our unit might be, but also get a sense of what leadership qualities the other institutional leaders on the hiring committee value.

Because of these two things, I have been thinking about my own leadership role and trying to unravel the complex feelings I have about being a “leader”. I am realizing more and more that there are people that are expecting this of me and my unit. Heh. Only took me a year and a half to figure that out. Yeah, a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. There’s a good leadership quality.

Those quotes around the word leader in the above paragraph aren’t modesty. I genuinely find the thought of being a leader uncomfortable. Leaders are the ones up there at the front of the room. I am not a stand in front of the room kinda guy. Those who have met me in a f2f context would probably say I am the quiet fly-under-the-radar guy sitting over there in the corner.

There is a reason I used to work in radio. I wasn’t very good at it. I got better and could have probably forged a decent career if I had the desire to continue, but it never felt natural. It always felt like I was working against something inside me. But I took a lot away from that career that has served me well to this day. If it wasn’t for working in a highly social and public forum like broadcasting that forced me out of my shell and into the spotlight, I would probably be this Ted Kazynski-ish hermit shunning humanity and living off the grid in some cabin in the woods. Minus the crazy. Maybe.

I am the quiet one because I often struggle to do one of the things that I think a leader has to do to be a good leader – articulate a vision of what the future could look like, and then convince people to come along for the ride. It takes a level of salesmanship to sell your ideas in a room full of people.

It’s not that I don’t have a vision. I do. I just have a hard time clearly expressing what that vision is. I struggle. I lack the salesmanship. Which is probably why I have always gravitated to writing. I joke that I am an asynchronous guy living in a synchronous world, and I find it much easier to express things in writing than I do in a highly interactive social situation. But standing in front of a room and selling your idea is something a good leader does. I am sure the expression “take a stand” emerged out of being the one who stands out and passionately illuminates a different way.

I admire those people and seek them out. The ones who inspire. Who are the big thinkers. The ones who can cut through the noise and find the signal. I feel much more comfortable finding those people who have articulated a vision that matches mine – who have found the words to say what I am thinking and (more importantly) what I am feeling (I am an INFJ after all), and then saying “Yes! I want to follow you! I want to help you reach that vision.” I want to be part of your wolf pack (again, minus the crazy).

Like my radio days, there is something about being the leader that doesn’t quite align with how I see myself. But I know there are people in my organization who are looking for me to be that, and I am beginning to see that I need to spend some more time figuring out how to reach some sort of stasis with what people expect of me (and, more importantly, what I am beginning to expect of myself), and who I feel I am. It is a state of cognitive dissonance that I want to resolve because there are things I want to do and achieve that will require a level of leadership in my organization to make happen.

It is a learning opportunity, one that will require some courage and probably take me away from some of the things that I love to do in order to achieve the things I want to do. But the first step is recognizing the gap. Now to work at filling it.

Image: Take me to your leader by Zaykowski used under Creative Commons license.

November 20, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools

Create a book from Wikipedia articles

While doing some random surfing last night, I stumbled upon a new tool in Wikipedia that I didn’t know existed (but has been around for a couple of years).

You can create books (both print and e) of selected Wikipedia content.

The Wikipedia book tool is located in the left hand navigation of Wikipedia under Print/Export. Click the create a book link, activate the book creator tool and you can start compiling pages in Wikipedia.

As you go from page to page, you will see a new toolbar at the top of each page prompting you to add this page to your book.

Once you are finished, click Show Book where you can add a title and rearranging the articles.

Once you have the book tweaked as you like, you can then output & download to EPUB, PDF, OpenDocument, or OpenZIM (a format I am not familiar with), or send a copy to a print on demand service called Pediapress which, for a small fee, will print and ship you a physical copy of the book.

I gave it a try and in about 5 minutes had created a very simple ebook containing the biographies of the current Canadian mens national soccer team (sigh we came so close this time) and the current state of our national soccer program. Here is a Canadian soccer primer from Wikipedia in PDF (yikes – 13 meg) or ePub (1.6 meg) format.

Video on how to create a Wikipedia ebook.

After I tweeted this, Alan Levine & Scott MacMillan replied to me and pointed out that UBC has this feature set up on their wiki’s as well.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/270759907056304128″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/clintlalonde/status/270761315293855744″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/scottmcmillan/status/270762545047031809″]

Turns out, there are extensions for any MediaWiki site that can enable instant, on the fly publishing ebook format.

November 19, 2012 by Clint Lalonde on For Fun, Teaching & Learning

What my bike is teaching me about learning

For the past 15 years, I’ve been a bike commuter, and I try to ride to work at least a couple days a week.

I love riding my bike. I also like to tinker, but for whatever reason I haven’t spent a lot of time over the years tinkering with my bike. The city I live in is cycle crazy, and there are just as many bike repair places in town as there are coffee shops, so it has been quicker and more convenient to just let the experts deal with it. But in the past year with a longer commute, I have found that I spend more money each year on bike maintenance. So, a few weeks ago when I noticed that my rear cassette and chain were starting to slip and grind, I thought I would try to save a few bucks, teach myself a new skill, and learn how to replace the drive train.

I started doing a bit of research on the web last weekend. I found a few decent videos and websites that explained the process and tools I would need. Late Saturday, I went down to the local bike shop, bought a couple of new tools, a new rear cassette and chain.

Sunday morning, I got down to work.

It started off well, and I had the old chain broke and old cassette off in about 20 minutes. It was then I noticed I had a broken spoke. I’ve never replaced a spoke (but have many times paid $15 bucks at the bike shop to have it done – owch), and figured that since things were going well, I might as well give that a go. So, after watching a few more videos and figuring out how to true a wheel without getting into expensive gear, I went back to the bike store to buy some spokes and a spoke wrench.

“What size do you need?” asked the bike store mechanic. Uh, they come in different sizes?

Back home to get the wheel, and back down to the bike shop.

With spokes in hand, I decided to tackle the spokes first and get the wheel built before getting to the new drivetrain. Turns out, I had 3 spokes that needed replacing, and spent the better part of that Sunday getting the tire trued up.

Last Sunday night, I tackled the drive train. The new cassette went on and I threaded the new chain through the gears. I thought it went well, but when I started rotating the pedals, I heard a chunk-chunk-chunk clicking sound coming from the rear derailleur. I had threaded the chain incorrectly. So I had to break the chain, rethread it and try again.

Second time through it seemed to work. No clicking. Until I geared down to the lowest gear possible and saw that the chain was sagging. There was no tension.

Huh? I did everything that the videos told me to?

It was then that I compared the old cassette with the new and saw that the gears on the new cassette were half the size of the old one. Turns out there is more than one kind of 8 speed gear-set with different gear ratios.

So, off comes the new cassette, back into the box it goes. I spent last week without my bike.

This Saturday, I bring the cassette back to the store. I also bring the old cassette with me so I get the correct size this time. I speak directly to the in store mechanic, feeling sheepish I didn’t speak to him in the first place. He hands me a new cassette (which actually cost $15 less then the original one I bought), and gives me one of those Mike Holmes-ish smiles that says (in a very kind and empathetic way), “I’ll see you next week when you bring me your bike to clean up your mess.”

I get home, put the new cassette on and…

As I sit here looking at my sagging chain once again, I am reminded that learning new stuff is not easy. It means making mistakes and enduring moments of frustration as you struggle to figure out what went wrong. It means recognizing that you are blind to what you do not know.

It also highlights the siren song of the availability of abundant resources. Right now, I am crashing on the rocks. Nowhere in the resources I looked at did anyone speak about correct gear ratios, or the fact that cassettes can come with different gear configurations.

I am learning this the hard way. But I am learning. I am not beaten yet. I still have some tricks up my sleeve, including going to the network, which I haven’t done yet, but will soon because I know at least 4 people in my network who are avid commuters and can help me figure out what I am doing wrong.

My drive train is my bow drill. And I will figure this out.

ClintLalonde.net

Author: Clint Lalonde