The preview Cape Town Open Education Declaration is live. The document is the result of a 2 day workshop in Cape Town that 27 people spent brainstorming, strategising, discussing, agreeing and disagreeing - and then many more weeks of the same by email. It was drafted by members of the community, for the community - [...]
The open access movement has had tremendous success increasing the amount of self-archived journal articles. Self-archiving means that authors can negotiate with publishers the right to keep a copy of their peer-reviewed article on a personal (or institutional) web-site for public download. Self-archived journal articles are usually covered by copyright, but users are allowed to [...]
The Commonwealth of Learning has published a chapter on open licenses (part of an upcoming book on the use of copyright for authors, educators and librarians). I believe such a book could be a great resource, and given the CoL’s mission of supporting education I was quite excited to have a look and share it [...]
Fantastic Disney mesh-up to explain the concept of copyright and fair use (which is referred to as fair dealing in South Africa). It’s a tricky beast and, as the film points out “not a right!” and there is much uncertainty how much of a work can be reproduced for teaching and learning in higher education [...]
I found a mention of the active learning triangle (in this slideshare presentation on education in Web 2.0, which references “Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching” by Holt Rinhart and Winston). It posits that the more we engage / internalise / transform what we learn (or act on what we learn) the more of it we remember [...]
We are in the process of reading and summarising papers that will help us inform our thinking on rip-mix-learn practices in higher education. We are keeping them on an internal wiki, which has a few public pages. I am working on a way to making it easier to navigate only the pages that are accessible. [...]
Reading an article about “Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis”, a book by two Canadian academics, I came across this fascinating story. It does not directly have anything to do with our research on rip-mix-learn practices at UWC, but maybe we need to start asking ourselves, if (how) new ways of teaching and [...]
My article on open educational resources was published by the Global University Network on Innovation (GUNI), a think tank on higher education based in Barcelona. It’s a fairly broad introduction to open educational resources, and I raise a few key issues that are likely to keep this movement busy over the next years: a new [...]
I am representing the University of the Western Cape at the open education meeting organised joinly by The Shuttleworth Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Hewlett Foundation. We are roughly 30 people from around the world working on various aspects of open education. We started the day off by listing the many different projects and [...]
David Wiley spoke of content as infrastructure at the recent UNU/UNESCO conference on higher education, “Pathways towards a shared future”. The idea resonates with my own thoughts on how we can engage with content, and what tools might support this engagement. In traditional education was characterised by a process of combining and pulling together; content, [...]
