Promised and Published

About two months ago, I posted a paper proposal that we submitted to the IEEE TLT vision issue “On the role of technical standards for Learning Technologies”.

I promised feedback on how comments compared to review feedback. The paper is now published. So, I guess that it is time I keep my promise… Basically, the formal reviewers gave some good editorial comments (conclusion was too weak, for instance) and one reviewer asked to expand the paper quite considerably. In fact, if we had done what he suggested, then I think we would have published a rather large book .

The main blog comments we received (after those on an earlier version) came from Tore Hoel. It seems like we share a lot of common ground, but that Tore wants a better theoretical foundation of standards work and believes that we should not separate specification development from standards work all that much. Interestingly, IEEE seems to think that Tore Hoel’s paper from ICALT is the most related one to our published one, so there is some consistency there

Anyway, I’m rather happy with the paper and, proud to be part of a special issue that includes some really nice papers:

• Julita Vassileva. Toward Social Learning Enviroments
• Judy Kay, Lifelong Learner Modeling for Lifelong Personalized Pervasive Learning
• Roy Pea, Robb Lindgren, Video Collaboratories for Research and Education: An Analysis of Collaboration Design Patterns
• Kristina Höök, Knowing, Communication and Experiencing through Body and Emotion

Hope you’ll like it too… Comments, of course, still welcome!

OER TLT CFP: deadline approaching

We’ve received a good dozen abstracts for the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies special issue on “Open Educational Resources: Learning Objects for all!“. Deadline for the full papers is 1 March.

Just to avoid misunderstandings:

• We will NOT reject or encourage submissions based on the abstracts. They were mainly meant to give us an indication of what we can expect in terms of full paper submissions.
• You can still submit a full paper, even if you did not submit an abstract. In that case, we would appreciate a short message to let us know that you plan to submit.

More details can be found in the call. Or ask – here or by email.

We VERY much look forward “to establish a reference publication focusing on the technical aspects underpinning the OER movement”.

(BTW, can I get some kind of recognition for using three acronyms in a post title? Any references to posts that start with more? How can you search on that criterium…?)

David Weinberger ‘gets it’ ;-)

As usual, David Weinberger get’s it:

Less-than-perfect open courseware is a zillion times better than no open courseware. And we’re just beginning this. Open courseware will change, and it will also change how courses are taught in the real world. Here comes atomization, the Long Tail, network effects, backchannels, and, OMG, spam and undoubtedly porn and …

And, evoking the theme of abundance that I often use to structure my keynotes around:

The most obvious missing piece has to do with metadata. Right now, there is a relative scarcity of open courseware, so sites like iBerry aggregate the known offerings. But, as recording and posting courses becomes the norm, we will have the problems of abundance. And then we’ll want the usual — and perhaps some unusual — ways of filtering to find exactly the courses we want to invest in. [...] We need tags, ratings, reputation systems, trust mechanisms, social networks, and ways to talk with our fellow auditors. And the sites that do this for us well will take on some of the role, value, authority, and standing of universities themselves.

As David anticipates:

(And now y’all get to tell me about all the sites I’ve missed that do exactly that already.

Indeed! We harvest metadata from networks of repositories and make them available for facetted browsing. Other folks make the same metadata available in their specific sites for schools or architecture. And we’re working on integrating social features.

Actually, you may be working on similar issues – you still have some time to prepare an article for our special issue on “Open Educational Resources: Learning Objects for all!“. Abstracts due in two weeks, full papers by March 1…

BTW, David really gets metadata too: “Everything is miscellaneous” is required reading!