I want to discuss if people think it is possible to create an international accredited institution that could give me a graduate level degree based on my completion / creation of OER (and related published research)? Maybe the international institution is a social network with a top quality reputation. i.e. if your level of scholarship is recognized by this “institution / social network” then it is considered the same as a PhD from Athabasca University… lets call it Open Access Accreditation… Isn’t this the natural progression from connectionist (see siemens) approaches?
It would seem that an institution like UNESCO or ICDE is where this could start and with the writing coming from these institutions regarding OER they (I believe) should be addressing the issue. I’ve been reading papers from these institutions for a while and everything still assumes the OER are utilized within existing institutions and existing courses and existing programs and in the end you still have to pay for assessment and the credential. In particular, the roadmap from the OLCOS http://www.olcos.org/cms/upload/docs/olcos_roadmap.pdf seems to be a deep dive into all this, yet they still assume loads of affiliations and partnerships with existing Universities. Essentially you still have to pay to get assessed and credentialed even though you are using OER created by someone only loosely affiliated with the university granting the credential. Why?
You could assume a PhD is the equivalent of 2-3 years of full-time work, for easy math lets 5000 hours. Let’s say I am prepared to work 16 hrs a week for 46 weeks a year for seven years (5152 hours total). And during this time I create a solid amount (potentially a complete Masters degree amount) of OER (with accompanying collaborative research papers) on WikiEducator and Wikiversity. Shouldn’t I be able to take all this work and be given a PhD? Universities provide honorary doctorates; why not use this same structure to offer a PhD to someone who completes what I previously suggested? Or would the reputation I created on WikiEducator and Wikiversity by collaboratively creating a PhD effort equivalent in OER be the same as having a PhD? In fact could this not be the new PhD? And in the end I would have saved myself the 40k - 100k $ that I paid to an institution for a credential (not including 5152 hrs of lost salary). And I could do all this in a truly self directed manner without having to be “supervised” by a tenured academic. When I know that most of my supervision is going to come from the social network anyway…
Or maybe what I am asking is; what role does the graduate level university play in a Connectivist world filled with quality OER, hard work and an active social network?
With such large numbers of knowledgeable and skilled people retiring, wouldn’t it make sense to have them blog (or contribute to a wiki) every day. They would create postings about the work they do and the wisdom they have before they leave the building for their retirement. Once in a blog or wiki all this knowledge could then be indexed by the internal indexing / search engine and it wouldn’t be lost.
I was asked about Agile the other day and it got me thinking again about how to get started with Agile. This what I suggested;
Here are some starting points for Agile.http://agilemanifesto.org/
http://blog.rawsthorne.org/?p=59
http://www.extremeprogramming.org/index.htmlI’ve read a number of books on the subject and the standout for me is; “User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development” by Mike Cohn; http://books.google.ca/books?id=46ZQAAAAMAAJ&pgis=1
When you start getting deeper into Agile it would be strongly suggested that you get involved with Agile Alliance and find your local chapter. If your in Vancouver we have a strong group of people involved who spend considerable time looking at Agile from many perspectives.
As time passes my appreciation for the power of Agile increases. Even though I haven’t run an Agile project for over two years, I still manifest its principles in my current enterprise architect position. In particular, what is held within the agile manifesto. I apply this by always seeking to interact with the business users where I seek to find out what is actually working within the enterprise software “ecosystem” and what the environment could handle as technology change. It is the collaboration with the business users that makes responding to change so much “easier”. For when everyone is engaged and understands the why without the surprises of top down decision making things just go more smoothly. This article begins with the following statement and sums it all quite nicely.
According to EDS, an agile enterprise reacts quickly and transforms based on changing customer demands and market dynamics.
So I was prodded into making a defense for my new role of Learning Systems Architect… Here is my rant of a response, enjoy.
Nobody apparently needs!?! Everybody needs! They just aren’t aware of it yet. But they should be, and will be. What sort of organization? Any organization engaged in the knowledge based economy and want to encourage their employees to self construct knowledge and thrive within their organization. See John Seely Brown; http://www.johnseelybrown.com/speeches.html#digitalage Their internal pain would be 1) employees seeking more interesting opportunities elsewhere, 2) a general erosion of an organizations ability to identify and create new knowledge at an ever increasing rate… 3) let your mind wonder…
A Learning Systems Architect works as the implementer and technical eyes / expert for the Chief Learning Officer. The Chief Learning Officer makes sure the organization has everything (politics, budget, infrastructure, knowledge, etc) in place to be a learning organization. Otherwise, the organization dies… The World 2.0 is here, knowledge doubles every 18 months, 1.3 billion youth will emerge from the developing world in the next 10 years to fill an estimated 380 million new jobs, only 130 million university seats exist today in the developed world, where will the 130 million (10% of the 1.3 billion) of the developing world students get their education? When all the seats are occupied by developed world students? Answer: the learning organization with a learning infrastructure built by a Learning Systems Architect…
Thanks again for prodding me to clarify… Please, prod me again. This is known as socio-constructivist learning. It is a core theory that a Learning Systems Architect builds a learning eco-system…
Main duties
Learning Systems Architects perform some or all of the following duties:
- Collect and document user’s requirements and develop logical and physical specifications
- Liaise with clients, product managers and senior management regarding the feasability and design of product development
- Research, evaluate and synthesize technical information to design, develop and test computer-based learning and instructional systems
- Develop data, process and network models to optimize architecture and to evaluate the performance and reliability of designs
- Ensure that performance, scalability and extensibility requirements of the product are gathered and met
- Plan, design and co-ordinate the development, installation, integration and operation of computer-based learning and instructional systems
- Assess, test, troubleshoot, document, upgrade and develop maintenance procedures for operating systems, communications environments and applications software
- May lead and co-ordinate teams of information systems professionals, interactive media developers and instructional designers in the development of courseware and integrated information systems
- May research and evaluate a variety of learning management systems, interactive media software products and software frameworks.
- A bachelor’s degree, usually in computer science, computer systems engineering, software engineering or mathematics
- Post-secondary education and experience in education and learning theory within K12, adult and life long learning.
- A master’s or doctoral degree in a related discipline(s) may be required.
- Experience as a computer programmer and software designer is usually required.
I’ve chosen Ubuntu linux as the OS for this Moodle project. Why Ubuntu? A number of reasons;
- There has been a lot of positive buzz about Ubuntu on slashdot and other locations
- Getting started is really easy, I also visited the redhat, suse and BSD sites and found the Ubuntu site provided the easiest UI. (I believe a products website / UI says a lot about the product.) I will also admit it was a toss up with OpenBSD…
- I like the idea of supporting a Linux product from the African continent
- I like their idea of a version specifically for education
- Their support seems to be consistent and integrated across versions and releases
I wrote this back in November 2005 it seems even more applicable now!
SEAMLESS LEARNING – Enabling you to create, store, organize, present, consume and interact with knowledge sources of all kinds; accessing, caching and viewing it anywhere you like regardless of where the knowledge resides. You should be able to share this personal knowledge base (or knowledge ecosystem) with all the others with whom you need to work and learn.
I’ve been busy driving across Canada. An amazing country with an amount
to see. We executed the trip during December so we added an additional
element of interest. If you want more about my trip across this
huge country visit the site developed to record it’s splendor.
http://www.rawsthorne.org/canada/
Microsoft Senior managment has made another call for a shared vision.
When you think about it, this is about keeping everyone in the company
moving in the same direction. They have just finished, or almost
finished, shipping a whole lot of new products. And once you ship
you need to know what you are going to do next. Microsoft has now
told their staff what they are doing next. This is excellent!
When you read through this product vision (roadmap) memo you read a
very mature assessment of the current and emerging technology
trends. This should come as no surprise, given the memo was
written by Ray Ozzie of VisiCalc, LotusNotes and Groove fame…
All this said, what I found interesting was the Opportunities section where
seamless experiences were spoken about. I though to myself that
one was missing, SEEMLESS LEARNING. Being bold, I took it upon myself
to write it…
SEAMLESS LEARNING – Enabling you to create, store,
organize, present, consume and interact with knowledge sources of all
kinds; accessing, caching and viewing it anywhere you like regardless
of where the knowledge resides. You should be able to share this
personal knowledge base (or knowledge ecosystem) with all the others
with whom you need to work and learn.
Ray Ozzies memo published by Business Week
if you really want to see the future of learning and curriculum development you need to put a few items together. First, accept the reality that the online world is having a larger impact on the digital natives than your digital immigration status lets you see. Second, accept the fact that our current educational structures are in decay. Third, look at current learning theory and instructional design methodologies combined with current gaming innovations and the crop of media (software) developers coming of age (or already have). Fourth, consider what the next iteration of the Web is. And what do you get, the future of learning.
Usually I try and stay away from cross posting, then I found this post from one of the feeds I monitor. It reminded me of a friend of mine who dropped out of school in grade nine cause he was “bored out of his tree”. He was definately an opt-out. I hope articles like this create some interesting dialogue. I like what Ontario is doing. I believe it will really meet a need. I was discussing with my wife a few weeks back about how our school system wasn’t meeting the needs of kids that were more “trades” oriented. In years past if you didn’t fit into the regular school system you could go work on the farm or with the railway or as a tradesperson. We need to get back to that.
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000630.html
A new form of technical documentation? Why not create a detailed picture of the architecture / design / algorithm / concept and attach a video or mp3 describing it. Quick, complete and the most cost effective. Remember, store these on a common share…
Every day I’m becoming more and more convinced Personal Knowledge Management is the next learning paradigm. When I consider how I construct understanding these days and the way I use all the knowledge acquisition tools and the importance of social networks / mentorship it isn’t far away where all this becomes a major force in how we survive in the knowledge economy. I need to learn fast and forget almost as fast. I need a repository for my intellectual capital. What tools will be available to store and harvest my personal knowledge and how can this knowledge be shared and collaborated over…
As a technical architect I sometimes find myself thinking about documentation. And what is The purpose of architectural documentation? I see two primary purposes for this documentation; 1) is for training purposes, so people know what is and what should be, and 2) to support sales and marketing when the potential customer asks those sticky questions about scalability and security. I call these 2nd set of documents, “marchitecture”. In an XP / Agile world we try to reduce the amount of documentation, cause it usually never gets read anyhow. As a solution I now suggest the following; for 2) video record a discussion with the architects as they describe the architecture on a white board. Store this video on disk somewhere shared. For 1) Any architectural components which are client focused should be archived into written documents. The two primary candidates for this “marchitecture” documentation are; scalability architecture and security architecture. These two are the most commonly requested architecture documents to build customer confidence during the sales and marketing efforts.
I really do think that the Personal Knowledge Managment is the e-learning road we are on. With the Web 2.0 (whatever that really is), with innovations in learning theory, with disruptions in the structures of education (we’ve got a teacher strike on in BC). It’s all coming to a head. Yes, public education practices are a freighter, and hard to get to change course. But it will happen. And it will happen through self-directed learning initiatives. And a part of all this is going to be online reputation managment. So credentials will no longer matter, only what we can do, what we know and that we have a reputation to succeed. Again, not if, but when…
If you are alive and thinking about your life long learning or if you have children, or both 
this is an article you must read. http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1
I wonder where things are going with Learning Management Systems (LMS). We’ve got a merger going on with two of the incumbents; Blackboard and WebCT. And both of these incumbents have systems that were developed during Web 1.0. And the Web 2.0 seems to be building steam. The learning theories to support cognitive flexibility and related theories are growing in depth and acceptance. And we have LMS that are targeting these new theories. Moodle is one such LMS and after taking a read of moodles proposed future, it get you thinking.
The way we learn is changing. The current discoveries in regards to how we learn, combined with the deceasing price of computers are on a convergence. Fold this together with the emergence of new learning theories and techniques. The timing of a $100 laptop couldn’t be better. It will be interesting to see the impact of these computers on the young bright minds of the emerging-economic world.