Stephen Downes

Interesting. "Learning Locker provides a destination where users can create a personal locker housing their learning data that they can then put to work for them. The data comes from a variety of sources including the web and any learning platform that exports Tin Can statements." Of course, for this to work well, you need not only to be able to export your data, but also to make it available (via an API, perhaps) to learning and other applications. Anyhow, this is a good idea, and Dave Tosh certainly has the background in e-learning to understand how it should work.

Interesting thought experiment. "If there were no students fees and higher education were free, what would that do to MOOCs? I mean, obviously it'll never happen... oh, wait, Germany just abolished student fees. Yeah, but what do they know about running an economy, right?" If I were in Germany, would my priorities be changed? I'm not sure, partially because MOOCs are as much about alternative pedagogy as they are about access (but, crucially, they are about access, and that thought is never far from my mind). But in a world of free? Most likely, as Holden comments, "possibly, MOOCs as support and community around traditional classes?" Because access isn't just about opening doors, it's also about makiing sure people are successful once they enter.

Dave Cormier follows my post last week to the MOOC Quality Project with a discussion "on the motives of different vested interests and their relationship to MOOCs." It's a good examination of the many perceptions of 'quality' and 'success' related to MOOCs. "I think it is critical that we understand the ways in which different interest groups will judge the ‘quality’ of that experience for the convenor (and their sponsors)," he writes. "What are we all in it for? What is the difference between a pat on the back and a failure for each of the different groups convening MOOCs?"

Koos, who must have seen my presentation Against Digital Research Methodologies, referred me to this stream: #overlyhonestmethods. There's also an article in the Guardian, here from last January. "scientists from all four corners of the twitterverse have not just dismantled that pure-of-thought image but demolished it with repeated 140-character salvos all bearing the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods... It all started with a neuropharmacologist researcher and blogger called Leigh when she tweeted "incubation lasted three days because this is how long the undergrad forgot the experiment in the fridge." There's 'scientific method', which is pure and abstract and unreal, and then there is science which, like me, muddles along. More: coverage from I, Science, also, the browser of a scientist, also, Tumblr images.

I think educational institutions can learn a great deal from the strategy adopted by Canada's National Film Board in 2007 to digitize its collection and move into the field of new media. "At home and abroad, the organization is fusing Canada’s traditional strengths in documentary and communications technology with its newer reputation as a new-media leader to build a uniquely accessible cultural institution dedicated to storytelling and democratic dialogue." It's hard to overstate what is happening in Canadian public media. Take a measure of Chris Hadfield, add some sniffing bears from the NFB, and add a good dose of Radio 3 attitude, and you have a uniquely forward-looking landscape. Canadian educational institutions should be in the middle of this (and so should we at NRC), not standing on the sidelines.

According to this report, "a new peering arrangement being signed today between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network." Essentially the agreement is to provide cloud access to Microsoft products; "any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365." In the comments, we read also that janet "are already working on deals with Google and Dropbox – see https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-cloud-services." In general, this seems like a good plan, especially if UK universities are able to save millions of pounds. But there is also good reason to be cautios when you see reports like this stating that "government is currently over-reliant on a small 'oligopoly' of large suppliers (and) benchmarking studies have demonstrated that government pays substantially more for IT when compared to commercial rates."

Enclosures:
- janet-cloud.pngw687h594

According to this University Affairs article, "the B.C. government said it will make available up to 20 free and open online textbooks for some of the most popular first- and second-year university and college courses... it has committed $1 million to fund the venture. BCcampus, the provincial agency overseeing the project, is rolling it out in phases. It recently released a list of the 40 most highly enrolled first- and second-year subject areas for which it is sourcing textbooks. It also identified 10 existing open textbooks, mainly first-year introductory texts. The agency issued a call for proposals to faculty members and teaching assistants to peer review the books and is making available an evaluation rubric to use for the reviews." The proposal received a good response from Tony Bates, who calls the idea "shrwed," especially as it implicates faculty in review and selection. It is estimated to save students $1000 per year. No response from publishers in the article.

This is a really useful post. It begins by deflating some misconceptions about TinCan replacing SCORM, and proceeds to offer a much wider description of ADL's overall plan. In a nutshell, writes Christian Glahn, e-learning today has become distributed, collaborative, networked, continuous (etc etc), and so, "this creates tensions with the centralised, single interfaced, individual learning, and course-centred concepts of SCORM." So by 2011 ADL decided to rewrite the specification. TinCan, or the Experience API, constitutes only the first part of this. The Training and Learning Architecture (or TLA) has, he writes, "four essential parts that are intended to extend the present capabilities of SCORM for maintaining interoperability in modern learning environments:" the Experience API and learning record stores (LRS), the content broker, learner profiles, and competence networks. See also tincanapi.co.uk and see also this response from Michael Roberts.