MuseScore

Several years ago I was making a simple arrangement of a song, most of which was done using copy/paste and manually drawing things onto a photocopy of an existing piece of music. I found a free, open source software package called MuseScore, which was kind of difficult to get through the learning curve but seemed like a great tool in spite of my awkwardness with it. Over the years they have come out with several new versions of the software, and I have practiced with it quite a bit to where I'm much more efficient with it.

In addition to the software for writing and transposing music, it has a community which lets people share arrangements they have created with others. As the platform and community has gotten bigger, it has started gaining the attention of the music industry, and they have had to start charging to gain access to download the arrangements other users have made in order to have money to pay licensing fees to the original artists for making arrangements of their works. Some are upset with the system changing to charge for what used to be free. But the best part about it is still free - the software itself.

I think a lot of people were just using the community to download free sheet music, but taking it to the next level, using the software to create your own arrangements is the best part, because you learn to create something for yourself. I have learned a lot about music theory and about the instruments I have been arranging for by doing it myself.

Thanks MuseScore!

Why Wikipedia is Awesome

From the Wikipedia article for the song Fishin' in the Dark by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band:

The premise of the song is a couple contemplating a late night fishing expedition. Specifically, the adventurers plan to make their way to a river and chart constellations in the full moon light. In the song, the tentative date for this excursion is set in the late spring to early summer.

This is a great example of a pseudo-scientific neutral point of view.

Meta Blogging

In September, I started a series of blog posts on college courses that I've taken. I wrote a post every day and got through about four or five semesters' worth, depending on how you count it (one year was quarters, plus some AP classes from high school). I haven't stopped but have slowed way down. Between not wanting so spam my (3) loyal readers and not having the time to keep up a post a day, I couldn't maintain that kind of production.

I don't know how the NaNoWriMo people do it. Well, I do know that of the hundreds of thousands of people who sign up, the average number of words written per person is just under 15,000. They're supposed to write 50,000. About one in five finish, which means about two in three write nothing.

I did write a post for every day that one month, which is something I wanted to try, and I have kept up my streak of at least one post a month for the past four years. Interestingly enough, I pulled in a little over 15,000 words in September, which means I beat a lot of NaNoWriMo people.

Something else I have let slip is my RSS reader. I had close to a thousand unread posts in there from all around the web. I unsubscribed from the feeds for a MOOC I stopped participating in, which dropped a few hundred unread posts off. I marked the posts from the You Are Not a Photographer blog, because everything is in there twice and they keep doing weird things with their feed that makes old stuff I've already read show up as unread again. I may end up just unsubscribing, since it looks like they stopped including the picture in their RSS feed, so you have to actually visit the site to make fun of how bad people are at photography. I've been considering unsubscribing from the Freakonomics blog for awhile now, but every once in awhile a post comes along that makes it all worth it.

I finally unsubscribed from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. I'm sorry, Larry. I tried to keep up. I really did. I subscribed when I found several interesting posts related to Bloom's Taxonomy, which I was reading about at the time. Seven posts a day is too much for me, especially if I get a couple days behind. To give you an idea of the volume here, he has well over 500 "most popular" posts. I have no idea how many unpopular posts he has. I was going to maybe suggest that he try Twitter, since his blog posts are mainly lists of interesting site related to teaching a given topic, and Twitter is great at sending out links to people. Of course, I should have known; he's got more than 30,000 tweets. That means that over 3 years on Twitter, he averages 27 tweets a day. Given an average of about 12 words per tweet, that's almost 10,000 words per month, so he's not much off the NaNoWriMo average and doing better than most would-be authors just on Twitter.

One thing I do need to do is go back and fix the pictures in my September posts. I didn't add a picture to every post, but for the ones that I did, I got lazy. I just randomly googled images and grabbed stuff wherever I found it. Normally I use photos licensed with Creative Commons on Flickr. When I use their photo, I will link back to their Flickr stream and leave a comment on the photo I used with my thanks for their sharing and a link to the post where I used it. The bus up there is just a random openly licensed photo I found that kind of popped out at me. Thanks for sharing but not sharing too much.

photo by didbygraham

Improving Teaching by Understanding How People Learn

A colleague recommended a book he's been reading, “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School” by the National Research Council.

In the introductory chapter, they give some important concepts for teaching based on an understanding of how people learn. The main points:

• student initial knowledge and conceptions provide a foundation for further learning


• frequent formative assessment encourages metacognition and leads to deeper learning


• need to teach education students to help their students recognize and replace incorrect preconceptions


• in-depth coverage of fewer topics is better than superficial coverage in many topics


• to be an effective teacher, you need to have done in-depth study yourself


• assessment must test at the level teaching occurs, that is deep testing for deep teaching (students will do poorly on superficial testing if they've been taught for deep understanding)


• metacognition needs to be planned into the curriculum

The whole book is graciously provided online for free. See the complete table of contents.

Closing courses

An email was recently sent to instructors of online courses to let us know that Summer courses would be hidden unless we specifically ask them to remain available for students to access.

Each new semester we hide the previous semester courses from students as a means of protecting copyrights on multimedia content and preserving the security of assessment materials and other content items.

Compare that to Kevin Young's Human Physiology class that wrote a textbook using technology to encourage access rather than to hide it.

For classes of mine that have used wikis or even just static webpages that only the instructor can edit, I often refer back to them later - much more often that I will rifle through old notes or a print textbook that I probably sold back to the bookstore.

Time Keeps on Slippin Slippin Slippin

As I look into the future of higher education and the impact of the OER movement, I read OpenCourseWars again, having read it a couple times recently. A problem of this particular fictitious history, which simply requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, is the short amount of time in which the story takes place. It seems unlikely that any major changes in higher education generally could occur in a 7 year span, especially given several court cases and multiple levels of appeals, which themselves probably take most of that time. Then there's the part where Google becomes evil, but I digress, as that is not really the point of the story. What's important is the discussion of the problems with the CC-NC clause, license compatibility issues between GFDL and CC, and the explosion of the sharing culture.

My first prediction is that we will have compatible versions of the GFDL and CC licenses by 2010, although concessions will have to be made on both sides, and they will not be fully compatible. There will be certain versions of both that play together. Some people will care and use the license-exchange option, and some will continue not to care and mix them anyway.

My second prediction is that as new collaboration and communication tools are created and distributed over the next 10-15 years, more virtual schools like WGU will pop up, and the jucos, tech schools, and for-profit institutions will embrace collaborative education methods. Broadband access will finally become universal and inexpensive after a narrow vote in Congress funds a major investment in infrastructure, as lobbied for by Google. The two major options will be wireless and powerline networking. With increased access a whole new market of potential nontraditional students will open up. With the lower-tier schools enabling and empowering their students, the research universities will have no choice but to adjust their practices to remain competitive. The top-tier schools will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the collaborative age and then will immediately turn around and congratulate themselves on their innovative practices (like how the cellphone companies fought against phone number portability, but now tout it as a great feature since they were forced to implement it).

My third prediction (a subset of number two) is that the textbook industry will go away as we know it. As Wikipedia and its sister projects continue to grow, the younger professors, who are adept at Web 2.0 tools and who resent their professors that forced them to spend $1,000 per semester on out of date textbooks, will stop requiring textbooks for their courses. It will be a slow process, and some form of printed textbook will always be around, but the demand will eventually diminish.

My fourth prediction (also more details on number two) is that these young professors will adopt new teaching methods that leverage student and alumni knowledge and information-gathering skills to develop their lesson plans, giving them more time to complete their research. That won't last long, though, as many faculty positions will become 12-month, rather than 9-month appointments to deal with the increasing numbers of students and their tendency to take classes year-round, since many classes can be done from any location.

My fifth prediction is that my children will not remember a time when you had to pay for long distance phone calls. Okay, so that doesn't have much to do with OER or higher education, but that will be the seamless nature of technology within a few years, and openness will be expected in all facets of life.

Copyright and the Public Domain

Copyright has obviously gotten out of hand. Even ignoring the complexities of differences among laws from various countries, which you'll have to deal with anytime you cross international lines, just within the US, copyright law has become convoluted and complex. It is no surprise that the lawyers are making a killing off helping all these authors comply with the law and protect themselves from each other, all the while increasing costs and reducing creativity.

Unfortunately, when I teach about copyright as part of a larger unit, generally the most I have time for is to briefly explain that copyright protects your creation as soon as it is put in tangible form without any additional registration or notification required and that fair use allows some exception to this rule. I guess I go slightly (but not much) deeper than that, also briefly mentioning work-made-for-hire, open source vs all rights reserved software licensing, citing your sources, plagiarism, and the DMCA. If I have time I try to at least point out Creative Commons by showing a CC search on Flickr.

Other than government-produced works, 80-plus year old works, some works where someone forgot to renew the copyright or inadvertently left off the copyright notice back when the law required either of those things, or people who specifically release their materials into the public domain, we are left with tons of material that can't be reused by anyone without a big hassle...until the GNU and CC folks came along.

Ideally, we would have much more content in the public domain, but the GNU and CC open licenses allow for more sharing of content while protecting the author's copyright claim. So would we be better off by converting these open licenses over to public domain? That is, if more works moved from all rights reserved status to the public domain, we should theoretically see an increase in creativity and a decrease in production costs, so wouldn't it follow that by changing these open licenses (which contain restrictions) to public domain (with no restrictions) we would see a similar change? I don't necessarily think we would be better off.

The open licenses provide some benefits that the public domain does not, given our current IP climate of extended-length, automatic copyright. Copyright exists, according to the Constitution, to encourage new works by granting the right to exclusive use of those new works to their creator. If the only two choices given an author were infinite full copyright or completely giving up all rights to a creation, I believe we would see less overall sharing. The reason the open licenses work is that they allow the creator to retain the rights they care about, while allowing others to use their material in certain ways. This compromise is the strength of the open licenses.

If copyright reverted to its original term of 14 years or to a model of requiring registration or notice to retain copyright, the open license issue would be moot. Many materials would quickly become public domain and we wouldn't need alternate licenses for them. I believe that many people that are willing to voluntarily apply a "some rights reserved" license would be unwilling to give up all their rights. Even the simplest case attribution-only license is important so that acknowledgement is given to the author; that is not required of public domain materials. An author is unlikely to review his or her own materials on a regular basis to decide which old materials should be released to the public domain. He or she will likely decide that when it is published. The open licenses allow the author to set it and forget it.

Should copyright law be scaled back so works enter the public domain faster? Yes. Is that going to happen? No. Would we be better off by releasing our creations into the public domain instead of using an open license? That depends. If people will actually do it, then yes. If they reserve all rights, because they don't want to cede some, then no.

OER Repositories

Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative

The Open University, being a higher education institution, provides higher ed content. This content is available in units, which are different size chunks, anywhere from a smaller amount of material that could be reviewed in just a few sessions or a workshop to what appears to be enough material for a full semester course. The materials have learning objectives and are rated from Introductory to Advanced in the level of the material they cover, but they do not provide any clear prerequisites that might be required to successfully meet those learning objectives. There are discussion forums dedicated to allowing for exchange of ideas among learners of the content.

Rice Connexions

Connexions is a repository of modules and courses (collections of modules). From what I understand about Learning Objects, these modules are basically just that. Each of these modules are quite small, and could be used alone or along with the rest of the course, or remixed in some other way.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

The OLI exists of a very small number of full courses, with all the same material as a student taking the course at CMU, but without access to the instructor or exams. By paying, the student can earn credit by working with an instructor and taking exams. Both methods allow the student to track their way through their completion of the course if desired.

UNESCO Open Training Platform

The UNESCO materials, put out by the United Nations, is not so much focused on higher ed like many of the other OER repositories reviewed here. The OER in this case look more like continuing/distance education or adult outreach education. A byline on the site says they are "Advocating open content in non formal education." I suppose that nonformal in this case probably refers somewhat to the fact that this is not formal university material. A lot of it looked like material that could be very helpful in terms of teaching something people can actually use. I was a little worried, however, by a 10-year-old document covering the basics of getting on the Internet; some of the other information may not change as much in 10 years as that particular topic, but that one was extremely out of date.

MIT OCW

This is one of the most well-known OER Repositories, but then again I am most familiar with USU OCW which is modeled after the MIT OCW. Again, we're looking at higher ed material here, and quite a comprehensive set of well over 200 courses published in the last 6 months alone and over 1700 courses altogether (compared to just under 100 or so total at USU). They look to be mostly full semester courses, including presentation of material, additional study materials, and exams. One course even had a pop quiz included. So the students reviewing the OCW content when taking the actual class at MIT might get an extra hint about when the pop quiz will come up. :) These are MIT classes, so a reasonable assumption might be that these are high quality materials.

National Repository of Online Courses

NROC OER consist of higher ed as well as high school level courses. They employ a staff of designers and evaluators to ensure the content consists of effective materials that follow accepted Learning Theories. NROC content is available for educational and nonprofit use for free, or for a price to commercial entities. Similar to the OLI described above, a small number of high quality courses are available.

Some of the differences among these repositories are terms of the licensing of content, the balance between quantity and quality of content, and tools for finding and working with the content.

One of the most useful features of any of these sites was in the Open University, where they have forums to discuss the materials with others that are there to learn the same thing. That interaction is key. Add onto that the myLearningSpace where you can track what you've studied, see what other people have been looking at the same materials as you, and be notified when new items are posted, and this one has to be tops.

If I had to kill one (or two), I'd have OLI and NROC take all their materials and post them to Connexions. I mean, I like the Open University's learning community better, but the fact that Connexions allows anyone to post their material is a bonus. Connexions has some tools for collaboration among authors, but I didn't see that on the learner side. Add the forums and myLearningSpace from the Open University to the collaborative development process of Connexions and that is the ultimate community.

The only thing that could possibly make this ultimate community better would be to take the enormous amounts of material from MIT and dump it by the truckload onto the community.

We'd have something to rival Wikipedia (or maybe we'd just be recreating their Wikiversity project).

Open Education: Past, Present, and Future

Several years ago while working on my MBA, I worked with a group of 3 or 4 other students on what turned out to be a 100 page marketing plan for Aggie Ice Cream. A friend of mine wondered how we could write 100 pages about ice cream. Those 100 pages seem to pale in comparison as I try to compile the several hundred pages that I've been reading over the last few weeks on Open Educational Resources (OER) into a blog posting.

The three reports are: Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (OECD), Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (OLCOS), and A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Hewlett).

OECD is an organization of governments focused on discussing and promoting policies to encourage democracy and economic growth around the world. They collect data and make forecasts to assist member governments in making decisions. The OECD report is fittingly a survey of OER movement, how it has developed over the past few years and some of the current challenges being faced.

According to OECD, much of the OER movement is driven by Higher Education, with some of that coming from institutional policy and some from individuals providing content on their own. Whether it is individuals or entire institutions participating in the movement, the purposes for sharing seem to be similar: reduce content development cost, promote lifelong learning and encourage more to seek a university education, return content to the taxpayers that funded it, compete for the best students, and improve content through transparency, among others. As content opens up, the traditional role of a teacher as one who simply provides content to students becomes out of date. If the content is already available, the teacher must become a facilitator and collaborator with students.

OLCOS is a project aimed at promoting the production and use of OER in Europe, targeting producers and users of such content, educational institutions that support them, and the technology developers and researchers who facilitate the sharing of OER through their innovation. The OLCOS report agrees with OECD that the shift to OER will bring along with it a decreased focus on a teacher-centered classroom, but points out that any change to the system will take time and sustained focus and effort by educational leaders.

As teachers begin taking a constructivist approach, allowing students to remix and reuse content, individual students will begin taking an active role in their own education, building on their existing knowledge and schema. There is much still lacking in terms of seamless support from technology to support collaboration; wikis do a good job in certain applications, but are not feasible in others. There are legal issues to deal with to allow a range of usage and remixing of content, as well as the unwillingness on the part of some educators to make any kind of change to how they have always taught. Creative Commons is a possible solution to the copyright issues, and a new reward structure may help with some of the traditional educators' unwillingness to integrate OER into the classroom.

The Hewlett Foundation is a grantor organization dedicated to addressing social and environmental problems and thus assist grantee organizations make positive contributions to society. The report to the Hewlett Foundation was the one that most drew me in. Although it focuses mainly on projects that have received Hewlett funding, that covers a lot of ground, since so much money has been made available to many organizations to encourage the growth of the OER movement. I liked seeing the specific projects that have been funded and the impacts they are making.

The Hewlett report provides a balanced view of the featured projects, pointing out that there are successes as well as items to keep working on. An interesting concept here is the meta-university, perhaps something along the lines of the WGU, where content may be provided from any number of sources, but then some central assessment or organizational structure exists to provide direction and verification of skills. An important consideration in providing open content is accessibility of that content through mobile devices or in remote locations.

To me, the most interesting piece of the entire OER movement has to do with an increase in direct participation in the learning process by students. Students will learn better as they take the time to invest in their own education. In addition, we should see more of the legal issues worked out as music, movie, and publishing industries fight to maintain copyright control while becoming increasingly irrelevant as the technology to share content becomes increasingly simple and available. The path ahead is long and filled with resistance, but change is already happening and will continue to happen. Hopefully the movement reaches critical mass (if it has not already) before some boneheaded senator is duped by lobbyists into passing legislation that cripples the growth that is already starting. Given the international nature of the OER movement, it seems likely to withstand the resistance that is to come.