New Models for a New Year
Paul Stacey, Musings on the ed tech frontier, December 30, 2013

"Most people struggle to understand what open is and its implications," writes Paul Stacey. Understanding comes only in stages - he describes seven, ranging from awareness to trying it out to adopting it as a cornerstone of practice. He then moves through a discussion of these stages, including an interesting contrast between closed and open models of public financing for research papers. For example, work at Creative Commons in the Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP). He also looks at the private sector, for example, the Noun Project, "a platform empowering the community to build a global visual language of icons and symbols that everyone can understand." The private sector model is in general (he lists ten or so examples) the provision of a platform for the hosting and distribution of open content. Good article, longish, with lost of examples. Don't miss it.

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Unravelling -> a model for an open course?
Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, December 30, 2013

I like that Dave Cormier is trying an open course using a slightly different model. He's basing it on the P2PU platform, including the unhangout platform for live sessions. The course, he writes, "#rhizo14, will inevitably be an exploration of the possibilities of open learning as well as a space for considering rhizomatic learning."

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Bootstrapping A New Landing Site
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, December 28, 2013

Web redesign is in the wind again and the snappy new WordPress templates of the 2000s will look as dated as old Geocities sites after the transition to the dynamic Javascript and CSS enabled sites of the 2010s powered by applications such as JQuery and Bootstrap. Alan Levine introduces us to his sharpo new landing site, created with the aid of prebuilt Bootstrap templates and website building apps such as CodeKit, which compiles site designs written in Less. If all of this sounds like gibberish, take the time to read Levine's article and bring yourself up to speed on modern web design. And yeah, I can't be that far away from rebuilding downes.ca along similar lines (I've already used Bootstrap to build monctonfreepress.ca and really like the way it adapts to mobile devices).

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What’s Our Vision for the Future of Learning?
David Price, MindShift, December 28, 2013

The premise is this: "Once the possibility exists for students to study informally, at online (and offline) schools, compiling their own learning playlist, putting together units of study that appeal to their passions, the one-size-fits-all model of high school will appear alarmingly anachronistic." Hard to argue. And this raises questions about the role of the education system as a whole (not just public education). "Indeed, the gaping hole in the middle of the public debate on schooling is that we can’t even agree on what schools are actually for. Do they provide a set of skilled employees for the labor market? Or are they about developing the ‘whole’ child – emotionally, intellectually, creatively? Do they serve to ensure national economic competitiveness? Or are they about civic cohesion through cultural education?" And this, in turn, "has fatally held back progress in understanding how we learn best." It's the sort of thing that calls into question things like Tony Bates's arguments on 'educational productivity'.

And then there's this, from Heng Swee Keat, Singapore’s Minister for Education, arguing for a radical shift in policy: "The educational paradigm of our parents’ generation, which emphasized the transmission of knowledge, is quickly being overtaken by a very different paradigm. This new concept of educational success focuses on the nurturing of key skills and competencies such as the ability to seek, to curate and to synthesize information; to create and innovate; to work in diverse cross-cultural teams; as well as to appreciate global issues within the local context.'" Here is Keat affirming and describing student-centred values-driven education. Read both speeches.

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How to Escape the Community-College Trap
Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic, December 28, 2013

One of the key lessons I learned teaching in northern Alberta was the role community support plays helping students overcome family and financial hurdles during their education. Life in the small towns and First Nations communities could be rough; I remember women showing up to class with black eyes. It was the outreach of programs like the Sunrise Project in Slave Lake that kept them coming back to class, and led them to future success. At Blue Quills, in St. Paul, without this support, almost none of the students succeeded. You don't forget lessons like that.

So this article resonates with me. It begins with the story of a student succeeding in college through the assistance of Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) in New York. It's an unusual accomplishment; more than half of community-college students in the system never earn a degree, and those that do take a long time. Those most in need of community support get the least, while students an institutions like Harvard are surrounded with support. "A surer formula for widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots—at least while still paying lip service to ideals like opportunity and meritocracy—would seem difficult to devise."

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