Talk:Intro Open Ed Syllabus

Thoughts and feedback on the class...

[NewPage] MEETINGPOINT

Where is assessment in the idea of Open Education
For example Open Source Assessment Nils peterson 05:15, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Schedule, practical details
I just came across this page, because a friend told me, and I absolutely love the idea. However, although the introductory page was very informative, I miss a few details (which might have been given in other fora). First of all - what is the start date? I cannot find it anywhere, only week 1, week 2 is referred to. Checking out some blogs, I noticed some had posted the answer to week one, but others had not. Is this week one? And when is the deadline? This sunday? Also - with all this grading, will we receive a grade? In an email, or a diploma in the mail or? Also, is there a forum for students to discuss this throughout the course? Blogs are great for some things, but not for to and from discussions. Are we supposed to use this wiki for that? Thanks so much, and sorry that I ask these questions. Looking very much forward to the course.

Week 2 General Questions
1. I noticed copyright provisions on this week's reading. Seems ironic given the title and subject matter ;) I am assuming that we are unable to link to the PDF file in our blog posts as that would be a transmission without permission, correct? 2. I may have missed it, but are there specific questions the group should consider this week?

Get 2 know... ourselves
Everyone attending / following the class can explain their interests and introduce themselves here. Any info, as long as you think it will interest others, is welcome.

Emanuela Zibordi
I’m 51 years old, I teach Physical Education in a hight school, my presence in the e-learning field is quite atypical and strange :-), but I became to use it for my students to choose the university path. Then I studied it deeply and I discovered the Web 2.0 with its social networking and the perspective of web based education for the people all over the World. Now I e-teach to my colleagues how to use the web and the new technologies for a better learning. (I hope so!). I’m interested about open content because I think the Web is a great opportunity to fight against ignorance, the first couse of  war and death in the world.

Thieme Hennis
I am 25 years old, and still studying (Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis, and Management). I am currently writing my final thesis for my university (Univ. of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands) and try to develop a sustainable model for their Open Educational Resources project. In January I started off with another project, similar, but aiming for a revolutionary educational system, but without any guidance or possible application. I was too enthusiastic and overly convinced in my own capabilities, so I finally decided to apply the concept on a project which interested me a lot: the Delft OpenER project. I hope to be finished in November, but with an intensive and interesting course as Wiley's, who knows what happens..

My ideas about Open Education concern not only the resources, but the whole system... boundaries will fade between teacher and student, learning, working, and living (as Stephen Downes said some time). I am in favour of a higher intertwinement of working and learning, resulting in a Just-In-Time learning behaviour, learning exactly what you need, when you need it. Making connections (George Siemens connectivism theory) is crucial in this, more so than being able to repeat knowledge once pumped into your brain. Other interests include sports (field hockey, golf, tennis, surf), music, traveling... etc. etc.

Elisa Spadavecchia
I teach English as a foreign language to High School students aged between 14 and 19 in Italy. I think that an intelligent, critical, ethical use of modern technologies can improve learning and foster education.

I have been using the cooperative tools of the web 2.0 with my students with positive results for the last three years. At the moment, I am combining a blog plus an open source LMS for a distance make-up summer course addressed to 5 “weak” students of mine.

I am highly motivated to attend the course and know it is worth the effort, but I will have to reconcile it with my job (I am staying with my students for two weeks in UK in September and one week in Holland in October and I know that it is not possible to connect to the Internet at the school in Torquay at least). I’ll do my best to meet the deadlines of the assignments.

Andreas Formiconi
I'm 52. My original background was in physics. About 20 years of research in the field of medical imaging. Now professor of informatics in the faculty of medicine and teaching basic informatics in some 20 courses of the faculty for a total of 700 students per year. I experimented a blended learning approach and some constructivistic (perhaps) idea to "reach" the most needy students as well as the most skillful ones and, particularly, those willing to co-operate to help the rest of the class.

Fond of Seymour Papert ideas, I like very much your proposal. After having read three of the readings listed in http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus#Schedule, I decided to become a student in your course, believing to improve my background in this matters.

Karen Fasimpaur
Hello, everyone. My name is Karen. I have a keen interest in the area of open educational resources, particularly in elementary and secondary education (K-12).

I run a small educational technology company, working with schools to use new technologies to enrich learning. I have worked in education, including software and textbook publishing, for over 15 years. I have also taught overseas (in Africa). This experience coupled with the current trends of open licensing and massive collaboration has led me to become very interested in open educational resources. I think it has enormous potential to change the nature of education.

I am excited about learning more about this area and exploring the topics in this course with all of you.

Catia Harriman
Hello! I am Catia Harriman, a 2nd year PhD student at the Instructional Technology program at The University of Georgia. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication and a Masters’ degree in Education, both from the Federal University of Ceara (UFC), in Northeastern Brazil. I am also a staff member of UFC and have worked since 2001 in its distance education unit. My work there is mostly related to the development of educational materials for distance education, and I am part of the didactic transition group. At UGA, I teach the course "Introduction to Computers for Teachers", that focuses on learning to create teaching and learning environments using technology. This course is very much related to my work and research interests and I hope to have a great experience!

Jennifer Maddrell
Hello! I am a graduate student at Indiana University (IU) in the Instructional Systems Technology (IST) Masters program. I will be taking this course as an Independent Study option at IU with the sponsorship of Dr. Anne Leftwich. I am taking the IU Masters program "at a distance" from my home in Hoboken, NJ to practice what I preach. I love the online world. I maintain my blog as an exploration of online learning and technology topics and I am actively involved in a community of educators at EdTechTalk.com dedicated to facilitating learning and to making educational connections through the use of free (or freely available) technology. Please join in the conversation at EdTechTalk.com during our live interactive webcasts held several times during the week.

p.s. I look forward to meeting many of you at the 2007 Open Education Conference in September!

Antonio Fini
I am a teacher and an educational technology consultant. At present I am working at the Educational Technology Laboratory (LTE) of the University of Florence, in Italy, where I teach in post-graduate courses on e-learning and education technology. My primary interests are in Open Source, LMS/LCMS, Learning Objects, learning design. Recently I am very interested in educational implications of Web 2.0, mainly about social networking, learning networks, personal learning environments and Open Educational Resources. I hold a MSc in Education and I am currently engaged in my Ph.D. in "Telematics and Information Society". I maintain a personal blog and I am the promoter of an online community, growing around LTE, LTEver. I have great expectations from this course but... I am quite worried about the requested application...

p.s. I look forward to meeting many of you at the 2007 Open Education Conference in September!

Heather Leary
I am a PhD student in the Instructional Technology Department at Utah State University (USU). My research interests include problem-based learning, digital libraries, online educational resources, sustainability, and open education. Currently I work full time in the USU Merrill-Cazier Library in the Digital Library Program. I am excited for this class to learn the material David has to present as well as to listen and interact with everyone else. Hopefully I'll be able to meet many of you at the Open Ed Conference in September.

Rick Reo
Hi everyone! I have been working for George Mason Univ. (Northern VA 30 miles outside Wash DC)for the past 8 years as an instructional technologist/faculty support staff. I think of myself as an instructional technology generalist and do a little bit of everything. I have a MA in Cultural Anthropology and an Instructional Design M.Ed. My current interests are largely focused on social software tools and pedagogy, which has evolved in the last year to include the Open Content movement.

I also do some adjunct teaching at GMU – large lecture undergrad IT courses, and designed and teach a fully online grad course on Networked Learning Tools that emphasizes the affordances of social software tools for online or informal learning.

I don't believe I will have the support to attend the upcoming Open Ed conference this year.

A special ciao to all the Italian attendees from a 3rd generation Italian-American.

Stian Håklev
Hi! I was very excited to find this course, which will both allow me to look more profoundly into ideas and methods that I have already thought about a lot, but also to experience and use some of these very methods - learning by doing. I am a final year student at the International Development Studies co-op at University of Toronto, and just finished a year internship in Indonesia working for a big INGO. This final year I will also be the teaching assistant for a course on Global Development and International Communications. Next year I am planning to apply for an MA in international and comparative education or curriculum studies directed towards open education. I have a bunch of research interests, and always find it hard to tie them together... I am very fascinated by distance learning and online learning, both in providing access to those who wouldn't have it otherwise, and in combination with offline learning (I am thinking about getting a few people at the educational MA in Toronto to join me, and form a little offline study group). I find access to knowledge - whether courses, textbooks or online lectures as well as access to research and open forms of doing research very interesting, as well as more transformative and constructive/social ways of learning, such as wikis etc. In addition I care deeply about language policy issues, making content available both in smaller national languages and minority languages within countries - making sure content sharing flows in many directions, not just one. Recently I have thought a lot about collaboration and democracy/governance within large multilingual internet-enabled organizations, like Wikipedia, KDE and Creative Commons.

Looking forward to learning from all of you! Grazie per lasciarmi partecipare!

Jolynne Berrett
My name is Jolynne Berrett, and I am a technical writer. I am also a Master’s student in USU’s Istructional Technology department. I’m a single mom with four sons and two grandbabies, so my life is busy but happy. My undergrad degree is in piano pedagogy — writing is my second love — so INST blends my love of teaching with my job as a writer. My mother is from Mexico and came to the US to go to school, as did many of her siblings and cousins. None of them ever moved back. Because of this, I am very interested in open-source courseware. I’m delighted to be able to learn from all of you.

Eleonora Pantò
Hello everyone! I am from Italy, as many others here :-) I have to thank Antonio Fini as I get the information of this course from his blog. I want also thank prof. David Wiley, that I appreciated for his contribution in UNESCO/IIEP Open Educational Resources Community, for starting this course and for giving anyone in the world the opportunity to participate.

I work as Social Network Area coordinator in my organization CSP. Inside this area, I manage two Laboratories, started in collaboration with the University of Torino: the  - KEILAB related to knowledge communities and elearning and Smartlab related to social software. The Keilab is giving technological support the Arcipelago Project of the University of Torino - Economics Faculty, for the production of learning objects, SCORM compliant, that will be released under the CC license. I am the chairperson of the IANIS+ Elearning Working Group. I participate in some European co-funded projects, like EDOS, ESTREAM, INTEGRA. In early days (1998) I published, with Corrado Petrucco, "Internet per la didattica"

Sigurður Fjalar Jónsson
Hi everyone. I'm from Iceland and I'm a student at the Icelandic University of Education where I've done some teaching as well. I'm currently teaching at an Icelandi secondary school and working in the marketing division of one of the largest IT company in Iceland.

I'm very interested in the open source culture and everything surrounding it. I've introduced Moodle in a number of Icelandic schools and for this semester I'm trying to get my fellow teachers interested in using wikis with their students.

I look forward to this course which I will be taking as an independent study in relations to my studies at the University of teaching in Iceland.

Mario Mattioli
I am a professional musician and teacher in Italian public school, with pupils aged 11-14. In the last 10 years I worked as a teacher in many courses for my colleagues, mainly about IT in education. I hold a degree in piano performance and a Master's degree in e-Learning. My current interests are focused on music as it is (and will be) in a networked world: listening, learning, production, sharing. Now I'm the new vice-principal of my school and I'll try to introduce some strategic innovations inside the organization. This course will be a valuable source of inspiration for all my activities.

Megan Haggerty
Hi All! I'm 30, and a few weeks away from finishing my Masters (Arts) in Education - looking at how civil society networks affect education policy in Tanzania. My background is in International Development and Comparative Education, and I have had the opportunity to live in Korea, Equador, and India - giving me a wide breadth in which to compare communication technologies and trends. I'm interested in this course, a) because I'd love to have a better grasp of how to successfully teach using Open Ed, and b) because I'd like to realistically explore its potential impact on developing countries. I've already seen the importance of Open Ed (broadly defined)in capacity building of NGOs and transnational advocacy networks through my research. I'm starting a bit late, and hope that is okay. Hope to catch up this week! Glad to be here.