A completely open high school

Posted on 13 May 2008
Filed under Academia, Open education
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David Wiley announced yesterday that the Utah Board of Education approved a new charter school, the Open High School of Utah. It’ll be a publicly-funded virtual school which uses exclusively open educational resources.

There are a few reasons this is particularly exciting. This school will have a strong concentrated interest in supporting OERs — you can expect the administration to be vocal advocates for favorable policies, funding, etc. The staff will develop deep experience with OERs, which can be shared with colleagues at traditional schools — and carried with them to future jobs. The school’s existence will establish a precedent, encouraging other educators to consider how to use OERs.

In other words, this could be the acorn that starts a forest.

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Presentation on open access to Virginia legislature advisory committee

Posted on 8 October 2007
Filed under Open access, Open education, Personal
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The presentation builds on my earlier post at Terra Incognita, as well as my previous post about states as research funders.

The slides for the presentation are available here.

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Opening education

Posted on 7 September 2007
Filed under Class, Fall 2007, Open education
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I’m taking David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education class at Utah State University this semester.

“But Gavin, didn’t you graduate?” Sure I did. But you’re never too old to learn, and when it comes to open education, I’ve got of learning to do. I could probably teach a class on, say, FOSS or open access, but I’ll admit I’d never heard of open education until the iCommons Summit this year. I’d heard of OpenCourseWare, and of course I’m familiar with many of the concepts, but there’s still much more I want to know.

Open education holds tremendous promise. It speaks to much of my platform when I was a candidate for Student Senate at the University of Florida. My vision of the university is an institution dedicated to creating and sharing knowledge, with a relentless drive to best fulfill that mission. Open education is squarely in line with that vision. But it’s more than that, too. I really don’t know much about what open education will mean for middle school students or for educators. I want to know, so I can help put that knowledge into action.

I’m not taking the class for credit, but by participating, I ensure that David Wiley reads my blog once a week (heh).

I look forward to interacting with the other students in the class, and look forward to a rewarding experience.

For my classmates: You can find my posts for the class here, or get the RSS feed if you prefer. (You are also more than welcome to visit the rest of my site, as well.)

P.S. I’m a week late joining the class, but I’ll start with this week’s assignment to be on schedule, and backtrack to Week 1 when I have time.

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Open access, open education, and FOSS

Posted on 4 September 2007
Filed under FOSS, Open access, Open education
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Update: Here’s a link to the post.

On Wednesday, I’ll be guest-blogging at Terra Incognita, the blog for Penn State’s World Campus, as part of its series on FOSS and OERs. The series concept is: a different guest blogger posts every other week – just one post – with discussion in the comments. You can read more about the series at its page on WikiEducator. The series initially ran from March through July, and I’m kicking things off for the series to run through the end of the year.

My post is titled “Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource”. Be sure to stop by and join the discussion!

Thanks to Steve Foerster for the introduction, and to Ken Udas for the opportunity to participate.

I had some thoughts on linkages and similarities between FOSS, OERs, and OA, but I decided to trim them from the Terra Incognita post. They’re after the jump for anyone interested.

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