In direct opposition with the model for most universities, these days. So that may be the fork in the road. But there are more than two paths.

As is well-known, there’s a direct correlation between financial incentives and the quality of one’s pedagogy…

Those two models can mix, but there’s a big tendency for the “non-profit” side to be a way to generate goodwill while forcing the startup model down people’s throats.

So it’s not inevitable now, but it should become so. Interesting part of the story. Commercial entities like Kaplan and Knewton are trying to put things in place so that this inevitability happens. Doesn’t give much agency to other players. Or address the issue that cable packages are still bundled and may even be bundling more. As sociology keeps asking: who decides, here?

Ha! Now we have it. It’s yet again about tuition increases. Very important, and spreading from the US to elsewhere. But does the same logic happen when most universities are public, as is the case here in Canada? Sure, many fees increase and it’s a big issue. But the reasons might be different.

Can we get a date for this one? Again, it sounds quite far from the original Bologna model. Maybe it came from the German model, which so influenced US universities? Can’t we think of other models?

Speaking of transparency…

Who came up with such a scheme? A mad scientist? We’re far from Bologna.

Already? But we were just getting started!

A very individualistic sense of “justice” runs through this type of model.

As what happens with some students who require so much care either because they’re so “entitled” or because they have special needs?

There might be something about the connection between learning and “health & wellness”.

The Lynda model (which now belongs to LinkedIn).

Before Common Core.

And since there’s no obfuscation in academia…

Might read the University Ventures piece but, pausing a second: a college student assessing the potential benefits of her degree has a harder time because she has to take this “Just in Case” course as well as the “Just in Time” one. Gotcha.

Currency is mightier than the pen which is mightier than the sword which is thicker than blood. Or some such.

And the shift away from “access to content” is still going on, a decade and a half after Napster. If education is a “content industry” and “content industries” are being disrupted, then education will be disrupted… by becoming even more “industrial”.

The battle is raging on, but the issue is predetermined.

Sets the tone.

One linear model, represented in something of a spiral… Agreed that the transformative experience is tough to “disrupt”, but the whole “content delivery” emphasis shows that the disruption isn’t so quick.

Oops! Started annotating the Forbes version but this one might be better (no preload). Wish I could transfer my annotations from one version to the other…

There are a few key cases, here. a) Public Education (much of the planet) b) Parent-Funded Higher Education (US-centric model) c) Corporate Training (emphasis for most learning platforms, these days) d) For-Profit Universities (Apollo Group and such) e) xMOOCs (learning as a startup idea, with freemium models) f) Ad-Supported Apps & Games (Hey! Some of them are “educational”!)

Now think of it with a learner in mind.

The idea that there’s a “Great Unbundling of (Higher) Education” needs not be restricted to the business side of things, but it’s partly driven by those who perceive education as an “industry”. Producing… graduates?

More consolidation in the LMS market?

In all the platform news, we can talk about “learning management” in view of instructional and course design. But maybe it even goes further than design into a variety of practices which aren´t through-designed.

Important claim, probably coming from the need for reports which answer the “But does it scale?” question.

Even those who adopt a taylorist model to education may understand that “it takes money to save money”.

Well… The World Wide Web Consortium is really about governing the Web, not the whole Internet. But we do tend to forget that there’s more to the Net than the Web.

Useful list, almost a roadmap or set of scenarios. The last two might be especially intriguing, in view of the Semantic Web.

Ah, yes! It may sound technical to some, but there’s something very useful about deep linking which can help fulfill Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web idea much more appropriately than what is currently available. Despite so many advances in Web publishing (and the growing interest in Linked Open Data), it’s often difficult to link directly to an online item of interest. In a way, Hypothesis almost allows readers to add anchor tags to an element so it can be used in a direct link.

Could see a lot of potential for Open Standards, including annotations. What’s not so clear is how they can manage to produce such ePub while maintaining their DRM-focused practice. Heard about LCP (Lightweight Content Protection). But have yet to get a fully-accessible ePub which is also DRMed in such a way.

Especially useful in “today’s memetic marketplace”. The “image macro” isn’t the only format for memes, but it has become enmeshed with the concept.

A very special space inasmuch as it has few offline equivalents. Sure, we might describe the class “lecture” in a similar way. But the type of collaboration involved is severely limited (and, in some cases, prohibited). This is one deep dimension of online annotation, which requires some “sink in” time. People are reading collaboratively, as a social activity, by sharing annotations asynchronously.

Providing context for the coalition (coming a bit over two weeks later).

Sounds exaggerated, and there are people who probably go through life without annotating much. But point taken, annotation is a broad concept.

Touché!

Acknowledging a related controversy to make the argument non-controversial.

Does the slow reading movement parallel the slow food one? In some ways, there might be a point against “consumption” in both cases. Or, at least, utilitarianism.

With “text”, here, in the broadest sense. Which some people outside the Humanities may not find so obvious. “A drawing is a text?” Well, yes, in this sense.

Embedded reference to Talmudic traditions?

It starts with academia and standards but it should trickle down to education and the corporate world. Gotcha.

In some ways, all “people of the Web” hold stakes in this process.

This feedback process is key. The barrier to entry can be pretty high, but the effects may be felt widely.

Laying down some of the core actions to be done with Web “content” through annotations.

In some non-trivial ways, this might be key to how people have defined “scholars”, including religious ones.

Officially, the core constituency for the coalition. And they’re probably easy to define, especially among English-speaking academics in North America or Europe. But there are important bridges to build with other spheres of agency which also contribute to the construction of knowledge. Who knows? Maybe open annotations will fill in the gaps between the Ivory Tower and the so-called “Real World”.

Leaving the door open for eBooks? IDPF is part of the coalition after all and there are important connections with work done on ePUB3.

Former Web Platform DevOps Renoir Boulanger had nice things to say about Kardell’s Chapters.io.

An important form of deep linking.

Ha! Good to know. Anchoring might be the trickiest issue with Web annotations, especially with dynamic content. There’s been a lot of work on similar things for SVG, including by Shepazu himself. So it’s useful to know there’s some way to automate anchoring. But it’s one of those problems which may still be difficult to solve if texts change in unexpected ways.

Well-structured annotations can pave the way towards Linked Open Data.

A description of both social bookmarking in particular and most social media practices generally.

Open Annotations could serve private purposes, like FoxMarks.

Bookmarking still isn’t a solved issue.

Sounds like solving the problem with comments is a priority to many, but approaches tend to diverge. Some content publishers have decided to turn off comments, because of perceived issues with the “signal-to-noise ratio”. Others adopt a community management approach, enabling people to monitor and moderate comments as a special type of a group effort. Annotation brings this approach to a new mode, though people may not comments and annotations as occupying the same sphere.

Not that decentralisation is necessarily a net good, but the risks of a centralised Web are probably clear to most people.

Funny how this layering stacks up. What’s “under” the Web is probably the backend. But there’s depth in annotation and the structure created is more complex than a simple superposition.

Dreams of federated content.

Continuity with Web 2.0, emphasis on content. Though the coalition is forward-looking, there’s something of a timestamp on this wording.

While “web curation” is well-established as a practice, there’s still a lot of work to do on what it represents, conceptually and epistemologically.

Social scientists among us may dispute this “democracy” label. The whole “one dollar, one vote” system is literally a textbook example of the Matthew Effect (through which the rich get richer).

Although Dougiamas claims Moodle already has what is needed in the form of logs and reports: no need for Caliper or xAPI.

This sounds like an unambiguous statement against accusations of Open Washing. But other pieces of the contextual puzzle make it difficult to get what’s going on. Hmm…

Oh? Might need to revisit Michael’s statements on the merger (wasn’t following e-Literate when the merger happened). Will also try to learn more from Apereo about this.

Yet again, we’re reminded of Norman’s Law.

This part makes it sound even more like Open Washing. Apereo is a legitimate foundation for Open Source development and Blackboard entities entering by a side-door would be a dubious process. But we probably should be careful as to what this means for Apereo itself.

Contrary to Free Software, Open Source has special affordances for forking, even if the forks become commercial.

Giving structure to an existing initiative.

That’s one way to put it.

There’s a clear need for collaborative work on LMS. But this approach deepens the impression that Moodle is a solution for “admins”.

During MoodleMoot, the notion that one organisation could “own” different institutional members of the Moodle Association was brushed away. But it sounds like a distinct possibility. Maybe not Blackboard but, say, a publishing house or an EdTech vendor…

Oh? They were quite present at MoodleMoot. Wonder what their ties are. Clearly, their solution isn’t free software. Nor is it pushing Open Standards for Learning Analytics.

Had not thought of that, during MoodleMoot. But, clearly, there’s a number of things at the back of Martin’s mind (or anyone else at Moodle HQ).

L’interopérabilité est essentielle à l’avènement du Web des données liées (en éducation comme ailleurs).

The reverse of the typical “goal displacement”. Instead of focusing on ensuring our continued employment as “instructors”, we want to make sure learning happens. Deep down, we know we’ll find ways to work, no matter what happens. The comparison with health can be interesting. If doctors had an incentive to keep people sick, society wouldn’t benefit much. Allegedly, Chinese healthcare provides incentives for doctors to help people stay healthy. Sounds like it’d make sense, somehow. Yet education and health are both treated like industries. We produce graduates, future employees, etc. Doctors produce people who fit a pattern of what it means to be healthy in a given social context. There’s even a factory-chain metaphor used when some people apply “lean management” to hospitals or colleges. Not that the problem is with the management philosophy itself. But focusing so much on resource allocation blinds us from a deep reality: as we are getting healthier and more “learned”, roles are shifting.

Guess ISO and the W3C have a very different view of “standards”, then.

Among the most useful summaries I have found for Linked Data, generally, and in relationship to libraries, specifically. After first reading it, got to hear of the acronym LODLAM: “Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums”. Been finding uses for this tag, in no small part because it gets people to think about the connections between diverse knowledge-focused institutions, places where knowledge is constructed. Somewhat surprised academia, universities, colleges, institutes, or educational organisations like schools aren’t explicitly tied to those others. In fact, it’s quite remarkable that education tends to drive much development in #OpenData, as opposed to municipal or federal governments, for instance. But it’s still very interesting to think about Libraries and Museums as moving from a focus on (a Web of) documents to a focus on (a Web of) data.

The “Open World Assumption” is central to this post and to the actual shift in paradigm when it comes to moving from documents to data. People/institutions have an alleged interest in protecting the way their assets are described. Even libraries. The Open World Assumption makes it sound quite chaotic, to some ears. And claims that machine learning will solve everything tend not to help the unconvinced too much. Something to note is that this ability to say something about a third party’s resource connects really well with Web annotations (which do more than “add metadata” to those resources) and with the fact that no-cost access to some item of content isn’t the end of the openness.

That’s a far-reaching claim, but ok…

Sometimes an annotation is just an annotation.

gifs are little gifts.

Let’s imagine that future. What else could [h] do, if we were to make a wishlist?

C’était long, en 2002! Où en est la BnF, aujourd’hui? D’une certaine façon, ce résumé semble prédire la venue des données, la fédération des catalogues, etc. Pourtant, il semble demeurer de nombreux obstacles, malgré tout ce temps. Et si on pouvait annoter le Web directement?

As long as we define OERs in the “publishing” model. Learners in poor institutions often produce a lot of resources. Many of them aren’t online. But they may still be open, in some kind of UNESCO-friendly definition.

Maybe too rarely. Or they’re dismissed too quickly. Or they’re too difficult to fully discuss when much of the scene is taken by modernization theory. This is where post-development’s Ivan Illich meets deschooling’s Ivan Illich.

Much learning happens in this process. Including embodied cognition, in some cases. And experiential learning. And selfdirected learning. And emancipation, empowerment, growth…

That ain’t new and we all agree. Why are we still caught up in “content”? Can we understand knowledge in new ways? Are we stuck in a “content” paradigm the same way the Web has been stuck in a document paradigm?

Same issue perceived with Genius.

Slidewiki has lofty goals as well.

Can even be perceived as a direct reaction to textbooks.

Thanks in part to David Wiley… Could be a neat thing to show off at WPcampus.

In FACET’s Quick Hits, it’s called the “Collaborative Syllabus”. Works well in some cases and can open up new possibilities.

There are initiatives to do much more than this, including using Open Data on syllabi to delve down into course content.

Access is here, for some people.

Learners already create and curate a lot of “content”. Let’s encourage them to do more with it, even if they keep it somewhat closed. Much of it doesn’t have to be so high-minded, as even forum posts can do a lot to the learning process. “Open Education” isn’t merely about content and a lot of work in the 5Rs can be done in learning communities.

Well… Credibility is a tough thing and Wikipedia’s NPOV model does offer something early critical thinkers might find more appropriate to develop their skills than a biased textbook. Those of us who have used textbooks may feel that pain.

Sounds so good! But often very dependent on context. Many learners (early dualists in Perry’s model?) have a lot of difficulty accepting the notion that there are multiple authorities. Plus, the same could be said of asking learners to come up with their own sources. A few blogposts and Wikipedia entries can accomplish much of the same thing. Or even a well-crafted coursepack, full of copyrighted material. Giving option is essential, but it requires a lot of adjustments and doesn’t always work.

Now we’re talking!

So the reusability paradox is field-specific?

Can we embrace diversity?

Big “if”. And it’s one of those cases where defining those terms (“access”, “knowledge”, “free”, “good quality”, even “learners”…) is important but risky. We don’t want sterile debates, but we need to acknowledge that we may not be talking about the same things.

Though it may be taken for granted by actors in the sphere of learning in Canada, this factoid can have a large impact in terms of “Canadian Exceptionalism”.

Via @Willis3James

No BuddyPress?

Wait… Any connection to SUNY Learning Commons?

Relegating LMS to certain functions. Weaning ourselves away from the LMS milk.

D’Arcy Norman, again.

As we get into “Big Data”, individual datapoints become less important.

Levels and types of responses. Just read such an analysis, based on Brookfield and Preskill’s “Conversational Moves”.

Or any Learning Record Store.

How long before we get such a thing?

Annotations should have “pingbacks”, too. But the most important thing is how to process those later on. We do get into the Activity Streams behind much Learning Analytics.

Post, comment, annotation… All different, but can all have the same predicate.

Chain of attribution, as @Shepazu would have it.

Wait… Michael Schrage and Eric von Hippel must know each other, right?

Which is quite different from solutionnism. Hill and Feldstein aren’t saying that we need to individualize at all costs and they’ve come out against some aspects of the great unbundling. But we can all try different things, see what sticks, what the implications are. In times of crises, we have no choice but to innovate.

Used to be the core model for Quebec’s Cegep system, a mix of high school graduates and “non-traditionals” (especially divorcées going “back to school”).

The new frontier!

In pernicious ways, the grade- and enrolment-based system makes it hard to give credit where it’s “due”.

Bear in mind that it’s not necessarily about the “learning styles” which end up being rather controversial, for some reason.

Again, the “Myth of the average student”.

Yet we don’t seem to find a way out of the crisis. Or even perceive the crisis.

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Myth-of-Average-Todd-Rose-a

Not really what we tend to mean by “open access” in academia, but closer to “open education” than one might assume. It can be less about the cost of textbooks than about inclusion. And diversity.

Education, she sure is changing.

Will our annotations issues be solved, in nine years?

Interesting that SVG guru Shepazu would talk about Hypothes.is…

Sounds pretty close to Comète.

Significant opportunities for collaboration on educational resources.

Standards matter.

Intéressant, de la part d’un des pionniers des cMOOC.

Souvent l’étape la plus difficile.

Besides the piece’s content, the interactions which happened through a layer of Diigo annotations were quite interesting.

Might want to add yet another layer to this old discussion.

The future of news is still about journalism? We can annotate any content. This piece makes it sound as though journalism should become even more controlling.

Which is where OER catalogues (tied to the Semantic Web) may shine. Sure, they can require a lot of work. But this is precisely why they matter.

Pretty much what we’re trying to enable. Culture change is organic, but there are ways to empower those actors who are pushing things in an appropriate direction, in terms of Open Education.

Either an obstacle to Open Textbook adoption or an opportunity for OER.

Wonder how Colwiz compares to Annotator.js …

One would hope that the field is wide open for experimentation. Yet such dreams of creative endeavours get crushed by business models.

Including Open Textbooks and Open Access articles.

Or about the broader context for reading. Often strikes me that we still take the “book” concept as a given. Texts come in many forms but we’re stuck with this model of packaging texts by length. Much of literary postmodernism had to do with breaking free of those boundaries on our thinking. But eBooks often reproduce the linearity and boundedness of pre-hypertext “books”. Landow’s book was first published in 1991. What happened in the last 25 years?

Shift to first person singular.

See, dear print book publishers? Nothing to fear from eBooks. They’re your friends!

With their incompatible formats and digital locks… Funny Apple’s iBookstore isn’t mentioned.

We may still be in that transition, but it sounds like it’s felt more as a set of opportunities than as a crisis. At least by some actors. Can’t help but think about digital writing, as a longterm transition. Most authors now write digitally, one might assume, but few are fully cognizant of what this shift implies.

Obligatory Mark Twain misquotation:

‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’.

In this case, some people are rather quick to point out reports which allegedly demonstrate the longterm viability of dead-tree books.

Although, Everett Rogers’s influence may encourage us to oversimplify things a bit.

Funny that privacy wasn’t expected to be a key affordance of eBooks. Sounds obvious, a posteriori. But it wasn’t on publishers’ collective radar and wasn’t discussed at big eBook conferences, it sounds like. Maybe because publishers focus on selling prepackaged experiences.

No prior art?

That’s one way to put it…

There’s a lot in STS (Science & Technology Studies) to challenge linear thinking about inexorable series of outcomes. Given a technocentric tendency to extrapolate from perceived trends, this kind of foretold consequence is at the very core of much #transhumanism.

Pithy, but potentially misleading.

Who doesn’t hate broad patents?

Cue Merlin Mann voice.

Let’s hope it does.

Getting technical (thankfully)

As long as it has some URI, it can be annotated. Any object in the world can be described through the Semantic Web. Especially with Linked Open Data.

Waiting for those to be promoted, through Hypothesis and other Open Annotations platforms.

Unlike some other approaches to development, this acknowledgment that usage can push innovation could help expand Hypothesis beyond a core base of “annotation geeks”. Document-level annotations can serve to classify or evaluate, like social bookmarking. What’s wrong with that?

aka SSO?