Today at 1 p.m. CDT, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (actually, the Carnegie Commons branch) sponsored a WebEvent featuring Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, the editors of the new MIT Press book Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, as well as John Seely Brown, who wrote the foreword. The webcast, which I mistakenly thought would be live, is available on the WebEvent’s home page. You can also find the webcast in three parts on YouTube:

Part 1: Toru Iiyoshi

Part 2: John Seely Brown

Part 3: Vijay Kumar

The book promises to be a great resource for this urgently needed conversation. It’s available in several formats. You can buy the print version from MIT Press. Other versions are free. The 18-page executive summary is here. The full download is here. The page with chapter-by-chapter downloads is here.The contributors are heavy hitters indeed who’ve been tireless and highly influential in their devotion to the cause of educational transformation for the 21st century. I hope the book reaches a wide audience, and I applaud the Carnegie Foundation, the authors, and MIT Press for putting out a pdf version with a Creative Commons license for free download. That’s walking the walk!

I confess that I was a little disappointed by the “WebEvent” today. The webcast was not live. The “chat” was really a discussion forum, and participants couldn’t start new topics (or at least I couldn’t–perhaps we were supposed to register for an account). It was great to see an international audience on the forum more-or-less synchronously, but it was in my view not a good decision to use a discussion forum, as its strengths are largely in asynchronous participation. Given that the webcast itself was not live, perhaps Carnegie figured a synchronous chat room was not appropriate, but given that many folks including myself logged onto the chat at the same time, I think there was a missed opportunity here of significant proportions. (It was also misleading on the event page to describe the e-discussion as a “chat.”) I am pleased to see that Toru and Vijay have addressed many of the participants’ suggestions along these lines in some of the later posts in the forum–though I note that full openness, here in the sense of full opportunities for the participants themselves to organize the discussion, still presents some imaginative challenges to the organizers. My hunch is that the organizers were concerned that a chat would be too disorderly, and that it would not allow for a persistent conversation. The solution, surely, is to put together a page that mingles a live chat, the archive of that live chat, and an ongoing forum for asynchronous discussion.

But in a stunning example of what Web 2.0 affords, and what those affordances inspire in its most passionate and expert users, here’s the del.icio.us feed created by forum participant Michelle A. Hoyle, a tutor in the UK’s Open University. Actually, I’ll copy in her entire post:

I have finished posting all Twitter, blog, and web links that I saw, including to the YouTube videos, to my Del.icio.us feed tagged as “openuped”: http://delicious.com/Eingang/openuped I did not include e-mail addresses.

I attempted to add some useful (but quickly done!) annotations to the “notes” field for each one to help provide some context.

Michelle

To which all I can say is “wow” and “thanks!” Show me something in a so-called LMS that can allow a smart, creative, willing participant to step in and render such a great service so quickly and easily, and I’ll eat my trackpad. She’s even smart about the tag: “openuped” is perfect. Oh, and don’t miss Michelle’s own personal links on the del.icio.us feed, particularly her blogs: H810: Accessibility Ahead and E1N1VERSE.

As we move forward into a world augmented by these telecommunications technologies (and I was *very* pleased to hear John Seely Brown use the word “augmented” on several occasions), we will, I suspect, continue to see uneven distribution of these technologies and especially their most effective application, even at events like today’s. To be fair, the editors and at least one of the chapter authors were present in the forum, but the forum was still an awkward place for synchronous communication. I also can’t help contrasting today’s event with the launch of the MacArthur/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning event, which had a huge sense of occasion in its simulcast between the NYC press conference and the New Media Consortium amphitheatre experience in Second Life. Not every launch needs to be of that Woodstock proportion, but the more we can get to that level, the more influential our work is likely to be.

For what it’s worth, and for the record as I pursue Jon Udell’s goal of “conservation of keystrokes,” here’s the response I posted to one of Toru Iiyoshi’s forum questions today.

——————————————————-
> I believe we have a number of teachers, faculty,
> teacher educators, faculty developers here. Do
> any of you see open education as a change agent to
> transform teacher education/faculty development as
> now educators start seeing how others teach and
> learn?

Hi Toru,

Gardner Campbell here, formerly at the University of Mary Washington, and now at Baylor University as Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning and an Assoc. Prof. of Literature and Media at the Honors College. My answer to your question is yes, but I’d want to amplify the word “seeing” to get at what I mean. I think that “seeing how others teach and learn” is a difficult and complex task that involves many factors: being there in person during a class meeting to pick up on all the nuances of personal interaction, having access to materials used in preparation and execution and assessment of the learning experience, tracking both teacher and learner over time to have some idea of the longitudinal effects of the experience, and especially having the opportunity for teacher and learner to “narrate the process” by blogging, etc. And these are just a few examples. Anything that leaves a “cognitive fingerprint” in the processes of teaching and learning should be available for thoughtful reflection–assuming any necessary privacy is preserved, of course. As Jerome Bruner observes, education is also a process of intimate change.

For me, the idea of openness means that more of these things will indeed be out in the open and available to us to study and reflect on. I don’t mean to downplay issues of access–these are crucial too. But your question asks about transforming faculty development and teacher education–two transformations that must be accompanied by transformation in the way we think about educational experience and educational resources.

Thanks for putting this book together, and for the interview with John Seely Brown. I wish the event were live and this forum a true chat, as I think that would add to a sense of occasion and greater opportunities for emergence (and perhaps even transformation). But I know these things are difficult to arrange, and I very much appreciate your efforts on behalf of this crucial initiative.