Below are my slides and links of interest.

(from UMW Students Explain ds106)

I am overall so impressed with what DS106 has become in so little time. It’s an amazing, eclectic, informal learning space and community that never back down in front of a challenge. It’s also a virtuous circle of grassroot positive energy that keeps you going as a learner. Once you start DS106 and engage with the community, you become a part of that community. It’s what the Internet is all about.

Short URL: http://bit.ly/ds106-preso

The courses are designed as Google Doc collections for easy remixing (how-to guide available here).

The Student PIRGs, a student advocacy group, has updated their cost savings analysis to include these new courses. Copied below are the highlights, as listed on their announcement.

• Lower Prices: OCL materials cost 90% less than the materials that faculty members used prior to adopting OCL, saving students $96 per class. The average OCL material costs $12 while the average traditional textbook replaced was $135.

• Massive Savings: The Open Course Library has saved students $5.5 million in textbook costs to date, including $2.9 million during the 2012-2013 academic year alone. The vast majority, $5.1 million of these savings are within the Washington community and technical colleges.

• Return on Investment: The textbook savings have more than tripled the original investment of $1.8 million.

• Branching Out: The mathematics departments at Green River Community College and Shoreline Community College have switched to using Open Course Library’s Precalculus textbook, which was developed at Pierce College. During this academic year alone, these departments have saved students $197,395 and $162,848 respectively.

• Projected Savings: Our 2011 analysis found that savings could rise as high as $41.6 million if the materials are adopted for all 410,000 annual enrollments at Washington’s community and technical colleges. While 100% adoption is unlikely, usage at other colleges and universities across Washington and the nation will almost certainly produce even greater savings.

If you or a colleague teaches a college course, it’s well worth a look. Besides content, there are also instructional design elements included, such as activities, prompts, assignment ideas, etc.

One of the strongest strength of Twitter has always been the non-reciprocity of the platform, allowing me to follow someone else’s work without requiring a formal handshake like LinkedIn or Facebook requires. Twitter is a very strong discovery platform. But it’s not the only game in town anymore.

Archiving

A couple of years ago, every time I participated in a conference, I would create an archive on a service called TwapperKeeper. TwapperKeeper allowed to easily create a list of all the tweets following certain search criteria, such as an event hashtag. Since the service was bought by Hootsuite, it is my understanding that the archival process is now a premium service. I haven’t found a free service that could archive tweets as simply as TwapperKeeper did, but, to Twitter’s defense, their search indexing has gotten a lot better (for a while, search results would stop at around 2 weeks back, which is not the case anymore). 

Eventifier seems like a good “affordable” alternative. Storify is a free curation alternative, if you like to manage archives manually…

Following limit

This one really makes me upset. In January, as I was attending Educon, I was doing my usual following routine on Twitter. As attendees were tweeting about the event, and I found their comments useful, I started following them. But then, I got an error message, saying that I can’t follow more than 2,000 people (see explanation from Twitter).

I have built my list of followers over FIVE YEARS, this is not excessive. Basically, I need to get more followers to allow me to follow more people. Or I have to unfollow contacts to make some room for new ones. So I either have to be more picky from now on, or I have to adopt a spammy behavior to get more people to follow me, even if they are spam bots or porn stars. This works well for celebrities, not for common professionals like me.

UPDATE: Tweetdeck, the Twitter client owned by Twitter, has led me to believe I could follow people beyond the 2K limit, but FAILED SILENTLY while I was attending #digedcon. This is beyond ridiculous!

Hoarder behavior

Twitter likes for everyone to direct their information to them, but frowns upon anyone taking their feeds and displaying and storing them elsewhere. For instance, I used to be able to aggregate Twitter feeds seamlessly in Yahoo Pipes of IFTTT.com, but not anymore. Twitter is banning other services to use Twitter triggers to other services. This means you can create a recipe in IFTTT.com to send a tweet, but you can’t take a tweet and send it to your Evernote archive, of generate an RSS feed to send to your tablet’s reader. I understand this might be related to traffic and spam control, but it’s getting a little ridiculous for the average “civil” user.

Conclusion

I have started to pay less and less attention to Twitter, shifting my attention to Google+. I am not saying that I am abandoning Twitter; it will still be a must for conferences, because of the sheer volume of users using it. But you should expect less activity from me on that service.

My poster/meme is targeted at exposing the mixed bag of what people mean by the term Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. As with many trending topics, many people and institutions have jumped on the MOOC bandwagon, but have little shared understanding of what they actually are, or what they are useful for. By adding prompts around the potential meaning of each letter, I wanted to represent visually the fuzziness of the concept, and the need to develop a better taxonomy of what it means to learn online.

Although I have represented this concept visually myself, I would not have come up with the idea without attending Educon in Philadelphia in January 2013. I borrowed the tagline from Jon Becker, Assistant Professor at VCU.

I also got some feedback from Derek Bruff during the ELI Focus session on MOOCs, which lead to this version 3. (previous versions: 1, 2)

Feel free to use, reuse, comment! It’s always a work in progress!

Open Education Week – March 11-15, 2013.

UPDATE: Link to the info and materials for this presentation.

Only a few days to go before my presentation titled “The multiple facets of openness for #udsnf12″ for Open Education Week. It will basically be an extended and more complete report of the fall 2012 course I taught (EDUC439/639 Social Networking), and that I previously presented at the 2013 Winter Faculty Institute (where I only had 15 minutes to present –video of the presentation with Richard Gordon now available, and previous post here).

I am still working on my presentation, but I’d like to ask my great former students to attend, either online on Google Hangouts (please follow the Open Education Week’s G+ account to be included) or face-to-face at 201 East Hall. I’d like to draw upon your experience as students on the value of openness for teaching and learning. Please leave your responses as comments, or as links to your own longer response on your blog.

I’ll present from East Hall, room 201 (2nd floor, in the IT-ATS consulting space), starting at 10 a.m., EDT.

See you then, and stay awesome!

Reblogged from Democratizing Composition:

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In planning and facilitating the EduCon 2.5 hack jam and flying schools sessions, I got to work with amazing teachers and learners from the National Writing Project (NWP) and Mozilla networks. Science Leadership Academy (SLA) English teacher Meenoo Rami and I hosted our third NWP- and SLA-sponsored hack jam together. Then I teamed up with Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh…

Read more… 1,006 more words

During the Friday night panel, many interesting quotes drew my attention. The overall topic was “Hacking Entrepreneurship”, but the discussion covered a lot of topics related to education. Coming in from a different perspective, Captain Barrington Irving came up with a number of interesting points regarding education:

Jeff Pulver, Founder of Vonage and early-stage investor, also moved the audience more than once with his self-disclosure of how his childhood was difficult because he didn’t have many friends, and how finding his voice through ham radio was a big step for him in becoming who he is today. He also shared his story of how he lost a lot of weight, and how his life has changed since that process has started.

Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan, Director of Academic Innovation and Senior Fellow at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, reminded the audience of the need to take a hard look at the market and competitors when attempting to innovate, to see where your product or service will find a fit (the business fundamentals, really). She also emphasized the idea of having access to test beds and sandboxes to allow for innovations to benchmark themselves against the market.

Dawn Hancock, Founder and Managing Director of Firebelly Design, introduced us to her vision of what role design can play in social change and education. This Fast Company article summarizes her view on the topic, including some information on Firebelly University.

Firebelly University is a nine-month program in which individuals band together to run a business with our guidance and support. Monday through Thursday, Firebelly U fellows learn everything about running a small business that no one ever tells you and a few things that can only be learned when you’re actually doing it. Friday is reserved as an education day, filled with inspirational speakers and workshops run not only by business owners, but lawyers, accountants, and peer mentors.
At the same time, each fellow is developing and implementing his or her own business plan under the guidance of the dean and others, and at the end of the nine months, their new businesses are hatched.

I’m am not 100% sure what people have gotten out of the panel discussion, but if you have a “knowledge nugget” that stood out for you, share it as a comment!

P.S.: I’ll make an effort to continue reporting some of my #Educon25 experiences later this week, so look for part 2, 3, etc.

Chris Lehmann, Fearless Leader at the Science Leadership Academy

As this is now a yearly tradition, I’m attending #Educon in Philadelphia this weekend. This K12 un/conference has become quite an attraction over the years, something you would not expect from a quirky little school like the Science Leadership Academy.

My goals for the weekend are the following:

• Meet passionate educators from all over the place, and add them to my personal learning network (check out my about page for more info)
• Collect 21st century teaching and learning strategies.
• Get a sense of what innovate schools do to deal with enabling innovative practices while preserving the cyber-safety of their students.
• Understand a little bit more what is and will be expected of future teachers.

I’ll be carrying my camera everywhere on Saturday and Sunday, so please stop by, say hello, and tell me what’s your story! I’ll be posting those to my Youtube account (as I did last year) for all to use, and as teaching materials for my upcoming classes on digital storytelling and social networking for educators at the University of Delaware.

Slides are below.