Linking research & learning technologies through standards
Unattributed, Link Affiliates, April 9, 2010.

Position paper from Link Affiliates on standards for the ADL Conference next week. Link Affiliates "is a group working on promoting and facilitating the adoption of standards in e-learning and e-research in Australia." Repositories have to keep asking themselves, they argue, 'Why not Google?' They continue, "In e-Learning, the compelling case for repositories is made by a combination of the following, and repositories should be ensuring that they do a visibly better job than Google search." But that's not enough. "Users don't just expect the repository to feel like Google (or eBay, or increasingly Wikipedia); they expect it to be accessible to Google (and Wikipedia)." (Hits Today: 0 Total: 715) [Direct Link] [Tags: Accessibility, Research, Google, Australia, Learning Object Repositories, Wikipedia, Online Learning]

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Re: OERs and DIYU presentation

denherr, April 23, 2010

I am very intrigued by your work and this philosophy but would somebody please explain the long term economics of this? How is an artist, such as a musician or writer supported to create and contribute if his creations have no economic value, and his individual creativity is limitlessly remashed into collective works? How does he feed himself? I love learning from your free presentations but where ultimately does the money(or oil) come from for your beer and your plane tickets to the conferences all over the world? I'd love to come across diverse membership like, say, you and Jaron Lanier in the same personal learning network so I could learn from your conversation. What am I not understanding about this idea? [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Stephen Downes, April 23, 2010

denherr, this is an old argument, but in brief, there are many ways to pay artists without levying a per-play or subscription fee on works, and without requiring royalties. In fact, most people in the world manage to make a living without these special privileges.

Take a brick-layer, for example. Every work he creates is an original work, but he doesn't get a patent or copyright for it, can't prevent other people from copying it or selling it or giving it to friends, etc. A brick-layer is paid for the time he lays bricks.

A chef, even a famous chef who creates unique dishes, is in the same situation. Recipes are shared freely and are almost never owned (indeed, cuisine would cease to exist if no person could duplicate a recipe). Chefs don't charge royalties, don't get copyrights, and yet make a very good living.

The people who write technical documents, who create commercial jungles, who do graphic arts or commercial work are also in the same situation. They again must surrender any royalties or rights to the work they create. But they do not die of starvation or fail to pay the rent. They make very good, sometimes even wealthy, salaries.

The situation where nobody pays a musician or artist except by buying individual copies of his or her work is unique. It probably wouldn't exist at all, except that it was created by music and book publishers as a means of underpaying artists (most of whom actually do struggle to make a living - so much for the beneficial effects of copyrights and royalties!).

If it weren't for the whole publishing and copyright mess we find ourselves in, artists would probably make very good livings, earning and keeping the entire profits from their live shows (instead of repaying advances they had to obtain from their publishers). Fans and patrons would pay for specific works, and people would line up to pay enough money to sponsor, say, new Lady Gaga song.

Most people in the world get paid for the time and effort they put into something. There's no reason artists can't be paid this way, except for the fact that publishers want to keep ripping them off.

This is how I get paid. I don't sit on my work and demand royalties; I share it as widely and freely as I can. This has resulted over the years in my being hired for a series of positions where I am paid to create even more work and share it (though occasionally my employers grumble that they should sit on the work and collect royalties, not realizing that this would in fact restrict my ability to create new work).

By sharing my work freely, people around the world are able to see it, and they willingly pay for me to come and speak to them. I do not collect speaker fees, but I do require that they pay my expenses, because otherwise I could not afford to travel to their cities. We both benefit, because I then use these trips to produce work that we share with other people around the world, and the cycle continues.

You might think, it's not a very good deal for some organization to pay several thousand dollars to fly me to their city. But consider the cost were they to buy books from me instead. They could get maybe 30 or 40 copies of an academic text for the same amount. This way, they get all my content I ever create for free, as many copies as they would ever need. It's actually an excellent deal for me.

What does my employer get? My employer is the government of Canada (it might have been some company, or a university; it just happens to be the government). They get the reputation from sponsoring my work, they get significant input into what I work on and where I work, they get me to contribute some of my work to Canadian companies (resulting in outcomes like this http://www.desire2learn.com/newsletters/Horizon/Issue17/articles/?id=1). I promote Canadian culture and values in Canada and around the world, stimulating business (and maybe even tourism) for Canada. It's a good deal for my employer.

What don't I get? Filthy rich. There's never going to be a million dollar payday in my life - no album that goes platinum, no book that hits the best-seller list. But you know what? I'm OK with that - because giving up the decent life I have for a longshot like fame and riches is a sucker's game. And for those of us who do anything outside popular culture - anything philosophical, academic, esoteric, radical or fringe - fame and fortune will never ever happen. Not only would I have to give up my nice home and salary, I would have to give up the things that really matter to me - my art, my creativity - to play this sucker's game. It`s not worth it.

So that`s how artists can be paid. We can pay them the same way we pay bricklayers, the same way we pay chefs, the same way we pay me. And what we get for that, I would wager, would be a beautiful thing.

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Re: Linking research & learning technologies through standards

denherr, April 25, 2010

Stephen,
Thanks for taking time to respond to me at length. I know this is an old discussion for folks who have been on the forefront of technology and learning and I am relatively new to pondering future visions of learning at this level. I've been enthusiastic about open education and the ideas of the PLN mavens, but at times they seem so extremely anti-establishment that I bounce back and check out what the skeptics are saying. I've been reading from You Are Not a Gadget to check my thinking. I also work for passion and offer work freely, and I prefer a daily walk in the woods to consumption, but I can only do this because I have some salary from a few standard educational institutions (and have a good husband). It will be very interesting to see the scope of change in education, economically, politically, in the next few decades.

I actually have a more immediate concern and wonder if you have any comments about it. I've been interested in the Personal Learning Network vs. Learning Management System debate as it relates to getting public schools up and running with technology in the right way – such that technology serves pedagogy, not the other way around.

I know that is also an old debate but there's something that's not old about it – there is a pedagogy crisis unfolding right now before me in Oregon where I live, and in other places where private technology companies or textbook publishers are winning the race to be the designers of online learning experiences. These private companies are offering hosted, packaged digital K-12 courses and they are marketing these services to public virtual charter schools. These courses are not designed by the teachers who teach them, who can respond flexibly to their learners, changing direction and materials and activities, structuring discussion, and using the internet dynamically. They are primarily fixed, digitized content, with facilitators who monitor individual progress, and may moderate a few "Web 2.0" activities and Skype sessions.

The students are leaving their brick and mortar local schools and enrolling in these virtual charter schools at a rate much faster than ever imagined, at least those students with the means – with one parent who can be at home to supervise and buy them computers. When they leave their local public school they bring their per pupil public education funding with them, which pays for the virtual school's hosting contract. (It is a functionally a voucher system.) If the trend continues, what they leave behind is the financially crippled public brick & mortar schools with a prevalence of low-income students and minorities and probably no technology. The virtual charter school model then becomes the adopted model of online learning -- online learning as a different way to hand over content to students.

Meanwhile, there is a small group of people who are experts in both learning pedagogy and technology, who are doing great things in a few places. They recommend that we dispense with LMS, to do away with authoritative model of learning. But I think they may be making an important mistake when we consider the whole of the challenge before us.

Though I see how personal learning networks, and open source tools are in line with deep learning in the digital era, empowering diverse learners, participation in knowledge creation, etc. I'm wondering if learning management systems may be a crucial bridge for the masses of educators who have limited technical proficiency or aptitude. I wonder if educators need user friendly tools to get started with and may be able to compensate for the limits of those tools with good pedagogy. It might help educators to win the race to design online learning experiences, rather than lose it. I, for one, know that if you give me a group of 25 clueless teachers and administrators, a learning management system, and 6 weeks, and I'll turn them into confident enthusiasts for pedagogically sound online learning. They may still have quite a way to go to develop their literacy, but they will have experienced something compelling enough to break ground.

I've been teaching teachers online for 9 years and have found this work to very effective and powerful, mostly because that is the feedback I consistently get from my students. I got into it accidentally by moving out of state after 21 years of public school teaching. I've never had more than average technical skills but I'm strong on learning pedagogy. For teaching online, the universities offered me Blackboard and later, eCollege, and I found these tools user friendly enough to jump right in. I figured out 100 different ways to power-use those early social tools 9 years ago, mostly forums, to maximize interaction and collaboration. I could make forums function as blogs before there were user-friendly blogs, and I made forums function as wikis before there were user-friendly wikis, and I had teachers presenting case studies, giving feedback to each other, sharing resources and building units of lesson plans together online, grouping themselves in different ways, and I brought in guest speakers for discussion. Teachers often told me it was one of their most useful learning experiences, and that they had not only learned about the course content (differentiation for diverse learners) but also about how to use the internet for learning.

Now I can use both, my Blackboard or eCollege site as my course portal, and I send my students out to develop their own blogs, set up their own wikis for their own school team project, have class members visit each others sites and report back for complex threaded discussion in the LMS forum. And, as long as I am required to submit grades by my employer, I love my gradebook that allows me to instantly gather each student's or team's work for grading, compute totals, add comments and submit my grades at the press of a button.

The thing is, I would never have been able to have my students set up all their own blogs back then, and set up RSS feeds to all collect each other's messages. Now, there are tools that make that more possible, but I think you still need to start where your learners are, and create a successful environment and move forward from there. The tools and skills for personal learning networking seem like very old news to some, but for the masses it looks a lot like starting math with calculus. So they throw their hands in the air and contract out learning to the programmers.

Maybe this is a moot point already – it seems like PLN and LMS have been growing towards each other. I just recently subscribed to your newsletter so I haven't been following your message for long.
Denise
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