This link has been bookmarked by 13 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Oct 2008, by Nigel Robertson.
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27 Dec 08
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Almost none of this holds with the average college class which has a fixed duration, a prearranged sequence of materials and problems, a disciplined border, a geographically narrowed location, etc. So, if we want to integrate these into our classes, they require
much greater flexibility in imagining what constitutes an educational context. They certainly involve developing projects which span disciplines, which link several classes together and requires students to build on each other's work, and which may straddle multiple universities dispersed in space. All of this is easier said than done, of course, but we should be experimenting with how to achieve this goals since at this point it is even hard to point to many real world examples of what this would look like. -
That said, I do not myself participate in Open Courseware. I freely give away my own content through our various blogs, podcasts, and online materials. But MIT has failed to assert a strong Fair Use defense which allows instructors to meaningfully quote from and repurpose existing materials as part of their instructional process. As a media scholar, my teaching centers on helping students understand other people's media content and if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online. MIT had an opportunity to be a leader in the arguments about Fair Use, especially given the good will they have gotten through Open Courseware, yet they have chosen to take a very timid and conservative legal approach to these matters and as a consequence, I feel like it severely compromises the goals and ideals of the Open Courseware initiative.
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20 Dec 08
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11 Nov 08
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03 Nov 08
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22 Oct 08
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16 Oct 08
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The kinds of communities I discussed in the book are what Cory Doctorow calls "ad-hoc-cracies." They emerge quickly in response to shared interests and concerns. They last as long as people need the community to work through a common problems or query. They vanish when they are no longer useful to their members.
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Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations.
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university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it
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it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".
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15 Oct 08
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It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world. They are going to be much less likely to play and experiment with the new technologies because they will be afraid of failing and looking dumb in front of classmates who will have been using these tools for more than a decade.
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As I think about what makes YouTube YouTube, I see a number of factors:
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It respects multiple kinds of expertise
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13 Oct 08
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The internet is improving opportunities for learning for at least some portion of our youth, but most of what is most valuable about it is locked outside of schools.
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Schools are discouraging young people from using Wikipedia rather than engaging with it as an opportunity to learn about the research process and to engage with critical discussions around issues of credibility.
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It isn't just that we will need to have a head start program to get them the technical skills they need to deploy these technologies. It is going to be much harder to give them the sense of empowerment and entitlement needed to allow them to feel fully part of the online world.
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They are radically interdisciplinary or I'd prefer, "undisciplined," in that they draw together people with many different expertises and they deploy social networks which observe few of the barriers to interaction we experience in the physical world to bring people together who should be working together.
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We should being supporting independent learners and providing materials to support education in parts of the world which do not have what major research institutions have to offer.
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if I can't quote from and share that content with the users of the Open Courseware, I can not meaningfully reproduce my instructional practices online.
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Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations.
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In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it.
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YouTube sees information as something that can be used, not something that is simply stored.
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Mathieu PlourdeSo, I don't know for sure what the next stage of an academic content system looks like but my own sense is that it should look MORE like YouTube and less like what university lawyers and department heads think will be "something like YouTube".
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Many universities are trying to figure out how they can build "something like YouTube" to support their educational activities. Most of them end up building things that are very little like YouTube in that they tend to lock down the content and make it hard to move into other spaces and mobilize in other conversations. In a sense, these university based sites are about disciplining the flow of knowledge rather than facilitating it.
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