Stephen Downes

Some really good writing in this longish post about university admissions that ends with this: "Rather than a market response to unmet consumer demand, my data tell a story of class insecurity that is transformed into a credentialing process through marketing that sorts, and admissions processes that signal to students that a for-profit credential can provide the security they intuit they need. The success of colleges like Profit U not only responds to the individual pain points of students grappling with increasing competition for fewer good jobs, but organizationally they have responded to weaknesses — pain points — in the social structure." This is really important. It's not just about jobs and it never has been. It's also about being able to 'join the club' - only to realize, that once you've finally gotten in, there are many more inner circles you'll never get to see. (Browse the rest of the site, too, for interesting stuff, including this astonishing dispute with the Chronicle from last year). Via Matt Reed.

According to the letter signed by 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, "It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic mission." They then ask that a committee of tenure and tenure track faculty draft "a set of ethical and educational principles" that will govern their involvement. The Harvard faculty letter, writes Phil Hill, takes the approach of "viewing MOOCs as experiments in 'teaching methods that can be validated, refuted, or refined through the collective efforts of a scholarly community'." And, pointedly, not adjuncts and support staff, students, providers, funders, or anyone else.

David Wiley clarifies, and his points are worth lingering on.

• "Some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to 'Be Awesome Instead' of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open – truly open – is absolutely critical..." Quite so.
• And I am really really of the same mind as Wiley when he writes this: "For a number of years I have felt that the overwhelming majority of educational researchers are focused on the 'high quality' problem, to the virtual exclusion of the 'universal' and 'free' problem from the discourse." From my perspective, talk of 'quality' has become a useful red herring for those really wanting resources to be not open and not free. That's not to say I oppose quality (and neither does Wiley). But if it must be perfect before it is free, then it will never be free.
• "The only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others." Once again, I'm completely agreed. This is what I was trying to urge at OECD (not that they listened).

My only quibble is with his insistence on "free 4Rs permissions" - which includes allowing commercialization of free resources. Given what he has just said about opoen access, and about there being "no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen" I just can't see requiring allowing commercial use. Somewhere someone is going to have to say, "if you throw up a paywall, it's not open access, and you've broken the agreement."

Do you doubt me? If I blocked access to this website and started charging a subscription fee for OLDaily, would you consider it consisten with my long-time committment to free and open access? No? Then why would it be consistent with free and open access if someone else did it to my stuff?

Doug Belshaw has started a new blog on a new blog service / magazine called Svbtle. Here's his announcement post. "Svbtle is a new kind of writing and publishing network that takes the best things from traditional publishing and combines them with the best parts of the web." There's an application for membership, but it's not clear yet why someone would apply. Meanwhile, it has been interesting watching Doug Belshaw's transition from staid academic to hipster dude since his employment at Mozilla. (I say that just in jest, but it's still interesting to watch.)

So I spent way too much time playing this game this afternoon, which automatically makes it worth passing along. "'Data Dealer' is an online/serious/educational game about collecting and selling personal data - full of irony and humour. It's an interactive exploration of the personal data ecosystem in the digital age and targeted at both young people and adults." Have fun!

This is a set of eight presentations (slides only) from yesterday's conference on open access policies Goodenough College, London. Presentations inlcude talks from funders such as Wellcome Trust and RCUK, as well as discussion of the green and gold routes to open access archiving. Interestingly, open access includes not the ability to read a document online, but also search for and re-use (including download) the content and unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools (according to thisRCUK presentation). Some good statistics, also, from Alma Swan of SPARC Europe. See also controversy regarding RCUK's policies.

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.