Sosiaalinen media pakottaa muuttumaan

Kyse ei ole verkossa olevista palveluista, kuten Facebookista, vaan toimintakulttuurin muutoksesta. Verkkoteknologian mahdollistama ihmisten välinen julkinen keskustelu, jakaminen ja tiedonrakentelu – eli sosiaalinen media – tuo yliopisto-opetukseenkin omat haasteensa. Omassa työssäni Aalto-yliopiston Medialaboratorion tutkijana yhteisöllisen oppimisen parissa olen jo vuosien ajan ollut tekemisissä sosiaalisen median kanssa, sillä se vaikuttaa oppimisympäristöihin paitsi teknologian, myös kulttuurin ja pedagogian osalta.

Sosiaalinen media on jo nyt muuttanut yhteiskuntaa. Kuluttaja ei enää ole yksin, vaan voi jakaa kokemuksensa tuotteesta tai palvelusta ystävilleen ja koko maailmalle. Yrityksen ja kuluttajan suhde on muuttumassa julkiseksi dialogiksi. Markkinointi, myynti, brändinhallinta, strategia, sisäinen ja ulkoinen yritysviestintä, tuotekehitys, julkishallinto ja oikeastaan kaikki muuttuu tämän seurauksena. Jos yliopisto-opetuksen kohteena on jokin näistä teemoista, on sen uudistuttava nopeasti. Read the rest of this entry »

Open educational content – possible future prediction by David Wiley

David has published an intriguing draft of a possible book chapter, written in the form of a historical review at a future date, looking at the 2005 – 2010 OpenCourseWars. As one commenter already pointed out, this form of fictive, entertaining writing probably helps to communicate the difficult issues of the Creative Commons NC (Non-Commercial) clause better than any number of scientific publications. The main message (which I agree with fully) is that NC is bad – it does not work, it is ambiguous, and problematic. For educational content, the SA (Share-Alike) clause provides enough protection to content authors.

This is the stance that our research group has taken when we’ve designed and developed the LeMill system for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. We use CC BY-SA exclusively, and as part of the EU-wide consortium involved in the CALIBRATE project are giving our best effort to helping both teachers and educational policy makers in the EU understand this issue. And we’re having some success, I’d say. At least the consortium is still allowing us to proceed with the development of our fully free and open collaborative authoring system with the CC BY-SA license enforced, and we’re actually getting excellent reviews from both official and unofficial sources. (Hmm, now I’m thinking I should have posted this in our group’s blog, since I got so involved with our work. Oh well…)

I have just one question to David: I find it odd that I cannot see any license information on your blog or in your writings section, considering the huge contributions you’ve made in the field of open licenses. I’d like to paste your chapter draft into LeMill, and possibly translate it to Finnish. But can I do that? I see no license information, so I assume you’re using POC (plain-old-copyright), and therefore my possibilities for using this excellent article to educate others on the threat of NC are quite limited. If I’m wrong, please let me know.

Update: Well, David replied quite quickly (kudos to David’s ability to follow the blogosphere) and his Creative Commons plugin had just been broken with the WordPress upgrade, but was quickly restored. And of course the article as well as other David’s writing are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

List of interesting blogs on learning

Couldn’t get any sleep tonight (yet), so I decided to go through a bunch of learning and teaching related blogs and pick up any that interest me. Mainly I used the controversial top 100 educational blogs list and the Edublog 2006 awards basically opening all (well, at the time of this post, not all of them yet) of the blogs up, and reading through what they have on their front page. If they got my interest, I subscribed them to my blogroll in Bloglines (I use a web service for my blogroll since I use several computers and it’s a headache trying to sync Firefox livebookmarks on several instances).

Here’s a javascript thingie that lists the current contents of my Learning folder in my blogroll. But first the disclaimer: these aren’t necessarily the best blogs in the world. But they’re the ones that I’ve found most interesting to me. But I’m a techie as well as a psychologist, so my tastes may be a bit different from yours.

And since this is a javascript thingie, it’s unbloglike in the sense that it will change according to what I have in my Learning folder in Bloglines, and not stay what it was when I posted this note.

Blackboard's eLearning patent is going to be reviewed

Flosse Posse commented in August on the absurdity of Blackboard’s eLearning patent claim. Now action is being taken, as the Software Freedom Law Center is demanding that the patent be reviewed and revoked if necessary.

The power of the networked community of people can be seen in the huge article on Wikipedia on the History of virtual learning environments which goes back to 1728. This massive collection of references was one reason that the SFLC decided to go ahead with this action. Well done, everyone!

And why is it that Microsoft seems to be involved in all of these sleezy patent claims, like the SCO vs. IBM (or the Linux community), which was resolved yesterday and SCO lost royally.