Badge Widget

David Wiley developed a light-weight Badge Displayer. Had to try it out of course. And it wonderfully displayes the one badge that has been awarded so far! (Expecting a few more at some point ... ;-)).

Badge(s) from #IOE12

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Intro to Openness in Education - OpenEd Overview Badge.

With my posting of a summary of my learning about the Open Policy topic, I have jumped all but one hurdle to earn the OpenEd Overview Badge in the Intro to Openness in Education 2012 course. The last hurdle is this blog in which I try to link 12 individual posts and announce my intent to have completed the badge.

Occupy Education

What resonates in my mind after looking at so many different topics around openness is the enormous struggle there appears to be between the the way we used to do things and the suggested movement towards open access to education. Cory Doctorow even calls it a war, in the Open Source section. The Open Licensing section (of the course, not necessary my summary) provided several critical insights in how big business is trying to hold on to their copyrights, by continuously changing the law to keep prolonging rights that were intended to promote creativity, not block it. And in Open Policy Dr. Cable Green gives several examples of where existing business models (read the publishing industry) are lobbying for laws that prevent individuals and institutions to develop competing open resources. Some faculty are fighting back by boycotting existing business models, in favour of Open Access.

Some weeks in the course, and inspired by the many spinoffs of Occupy Wall Street, I though of coining the phrase 'Occupy Education' to signify that we should start taking back something that was actually ours in the first place; public education! And a google search showed the term was already in use, in particular in relation to a strike by high school students in Chile for almost a year already.

Did anyone hear about this? I certainly did not. 

Now I do find sites that are more in line with my initial thought, that public education is not for sale.

Projects in Openness

Over the past ten years all kinds of small projects popped up that experimented with opening of Content, Courseware, and Educational Resources. Perhaps initiatives in these areas happened under the radar of the establishment, or were seen as funny little experiments, doomed to fail. But ten years in, the existing business models are starting to notice these annoying little bugs, and start brining out the insecticide, in particular the one they know best: lawyers. See for example David Wiley's blog about the Boundless case. 

Somehow I feel that initiatives involving Open Science and Open Data are tolerated more by the existing business models, as they accelerate opportunities to earn more money. 

I am wondering how long it takes before some BIG contributor to institutions where professors such as David Wiley practice Open Teaching methods including Open Assessment (I know, weak link, but hey I am trying to get all 12 topics in ;-)) start telling the governing bodies of such institutions to stop employing such harmful methods. 

Conclusion

Dr. Green states "cooperate and share - we all win." 

But what about existing business models? What about the poor employees of the publishing industry who will loose their jobs because of this evil movement? 

It is high time that existing business models start looking at how they can contribute to Open Business Models, or else start preparing to disappear. I have the feeling that the openness in education movement will turn into an avenge that cannot be stopped. 

By the way

And hereby I announce my intent to have completed the OpenEd Overview Badge. 

OpenEd Assessment Designer Badge - Announcement

OpenEd User Perspective 
(Apprentice level, complete for one topic to earn the badge)

The open course Introduction to Openness in Education offers a variety of badges to recognise completion of part of the course. One of those is the Assessment Designer Badge, in which the student design their own badge, and encourages peer students to complete it as well. For this purpose I suggest the OpenEd User Perspective Badge.

The course topics focus heavily on their theoretical background, discussing key figures and milestones and  theoretical frameworks. And we do see and listen to some MIT faculty at the kick off of their Open Courseware project. But what does it all mean in practice?

This badge encourages the students in the course to interact with users of the topics of the course; the researchers using open data, faculty designing open courses, developers designing open educational resources, students in open courses, etc.

- Define a research question.
- Identify a user or group of users.
- Collect qualitative and/or quantitative data from the users.
- Analyse the results and publish a blog, announcing your intent to complete this badge.

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As I would have to complete the badge myself, I have put together a little survey for students in this course.
Please take 5 minutes to fill it in! I appreciate your support!

Go to the survey.

Openness and badges

In my jobs I have been fortunate to be able, in fact encouraged, to keep up to date with the developments in my field. One of the ways I have been doing this is by attending the international convention of AECT. Here I run into my former professors and peers from Twente and Penn State, learn something new from time to time and try to report back when I managed to apply some theory in the real world.

In recent years the topic of openness has interested me; it makes so much sense to me. Even more when one is working in an organisation like Oxfam, where equal rights and equal access to resources is the central focus of all our work. I am developing some e-learning modules at the moment, and want them to be published under a Creative Commons license, and do run into problems with copyrights at the moment. So that will be one focus of my participation in this course.

At the last AECT convention (Jacksonville, FL, Nov 2011), I heard about Badges for the first time. And something immediately clicked for me again. So often I get questions about 'can we get accredited?' 'does this lead to a Masters?' 'what does this internal training actually mean?' And in my humble opinion the answers generally are no, no and whatever you take from it. And some people are very capable of expressing what they took from a training, how that changes the way they work, how it contributes to the organisations objectives and what it means for their value for the organisation. For this who are not so well able to voice this, badges can be an excellent additional tool to show what one is capable of.

I am going to try to design a system of badges for some of the trainings in my department in Oxfam. And participating in this course will help me gt a better idea on what it should include an how it works.

Looking forward to learning from/with others!

Cheers,
Jeroen