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.
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…
I am looking for a new job. I have just spent a year in St. John’s Newfoundland on a paternity leave and doing some instructional design and workshop facilitation. My family has now returned to Vancouver. I have fired up my networking engine and have begun to send out emails and contact people I know in Vancouver. One of those people; Troy Angrignon after receiving an email from me asked for me to be more specific to what I was looking for. I know what I am looking for; I’d like a job as a Learning Systems Architect. A formal job description of a Learning Systems Architect doesn’t exist, so I am going to write it myself. After some reflection and some google searches I came across a few web pages that I will use as reference to build this job description;
I’ve been giving some thought to recording lectures using a voice recorder and lapel mic. Once you get past the argument of whether you believe this is a good idea or not, here are a few suggestions;
Posting the MP3’s to odeo http://odeo.com can also be a good idea for it could attract more attention to your work.
Having lectures posted as MP3’s, slides and lecture notes provides the ability for students to review and reflect after the lecture. This provides a new way for students to deepen their learning.
I knew this day would come. I am beginning the build up of my Moodle Server. I have been watching the LMS / CMS space for a number of years now and I knew I would be taking the leap into an FOSS solution. I’ve always been partial to Moodle for it seemed the purest FOSS available and it has always grounded itself in constructivist pedagogy. What really pushed me to commit to Moodle was this report from Idaho State University. So follow along if you like, I’m starting with the build up of a LAMP server, then I will follow up with the Moodle install… from there who knows. I do know that I have been forming some strong opinions regarding where the VLE should be going.
I added a summary page of the workshops I facilitated while working with the Instructional Development Office of Memorial University. These workshops focused on the pedagogy of Web 2.0 (blogs, podcasts, wikis, tagging and social software).
I’ve created a document describing the odeo (http://www.odeo.com) set up process. I believe it to be a good read. If you want to read this document just follow the link.
Another approach to having storage capacity is to use free Web 2.0 capacity. To do this I will use odeo to host the sound files and bloglines to aggretate all the RSS feeds set up by odeo. This setup process is described in this one page document.
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.
We are in the process of setting up a virtual classroom for high school
music. And the question has come up regarding storage and bandwidth.
The variables we need to think about are disk space, number of
students, frequency of uploading and downloading, number and size of
music files created during the course. For example; lets say each
student created 40 minutes of music files per week, and lets consider
the school year is 44 weeks. Given each minute of music is 1 megabyte
(MB) that would mean each student would create 1,760 MB or 1.7
Gigabytes (GB) of music during the school year or approximately 200 MB
per month. Now consider we have 50 students, that means we will require
88 GB of disk space by the end of the year. And if all students are
expected to be listening to half of the students work we will need 5 GB
of monthly bandwidth. Now 5 GB is a low number for monthly bandwidth
and we shouldn’t expect extra bandwidth fees for this low level of
traffic. But what happens if the site becomes popular and its
popularity spreads like wildfire (which happens within the social web
2.0). We get hit with 10,000 visitors (a potentially low number)
downloading a full months worth of music, that would be 100,000,000 MB
of bandwidth or a 100 Terrabytes. Now our bandwidth fees shoot off the
scale. I think we should limit access to just the students…
As far as I am concerned, Quentin D’Souza has it right. This is iLearn 2.0.
I’ve been put back into a focus upon technology and education. I’ve been so busy blogging about my critical technology that I haven’t had much time to blog on the subject of technology and education. I have been asked to be a reseach associate for a project where we are looking at teaching music (the fiddle to be precise) online. A very interesting project where we have a very active and innovative high school teacher who loves to use technology to teach. He really doesn’t have much choice as his students are spread all around the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ll be watching what he does and make suggestions to the lead researchers and they will make the call if they introduce my ideas to him, as they don’t wan’t to disrupt his processes.
So here are my thoughts after leaving his talk from Wednesday 25th of November;