OpenEd+2007+Trip+Report

Hi all, I was extremely fortunate to spend most of last week in Logan, Utah at the 4th Open Education conference, hosted by David Wiley and his COSL group at Utah State.

I just wanted to share my notes and links to the conference sessions in case this was of interest.

All the presentations and session recordings are available at the site set up for the conference http://www.51weeks.com/events/3/. ...

All of my notes are also available at http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/Open+Education+2007

I would highlight the following sessions as having been particularly beneficial:

__**Wednesday 11am - OpenCourseWare in Motion- Pedro Pernias**__ Demonstrated some new code that converts any OCW course into a Wiki-based course with RSS functionality, some custom wiki-widgets for user interaction they've developed. Next step - convert IMS Content Packages to wiki-based courses. This could be very helpful.

__**Wednesday 2pm - Open Content in Education: The Instructor Benefits of OpenCourseWare - Preston Parker**__ Very useful study done with Utah State faculty who participated in the OCW project to discover what the benefits they derived from open publishing. While OCW has a different publishing paradigm than SOL*R, there are still a number of good arguments to be gleaned from this for openness in general.

Survey of an ongoing discussion series that has been hosted by Penn State. Good for picking out themes that ran across all 'open' (both 'content' and 'source') projects
 * __Thursday 10am - International Perspectives on the Impact of Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software on Education. Ken Udas__**

__**Thursday 11am - Out of Print: Building a Digital Environment for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship. D’Arcy Norman, Jim Groom**__ Demo'd how instructors can build open courses using freely hosted Wordpress software, and how students can also have their 'own' spaces in a similar way. Good demonstration of instructor best practice with non-monolithic tools.

Study by some Carleton grad students which used 'Motivation/Ability' tech innovation framework to examine which orgs involved with OER are mostly likely to innovate, which are not, and what the gaps are that can easily be filled to increase innovation. Good but solely focused on tech innovation, not social innovation.
 * __Thursday 2pm - Open Educational Resources in Developing Countries: Assessing the Motivation and Ability for Innovation. Kamal Hassin__**

Great session coming out of Merlot (and other) projects. First actual empirical study on how instructors find and use online resources. Quite depressing for repository projects in general but finally we have some empirical data to base all the assertions on. Interesting point: no significant differences in how faculty search for or find materials based on discipline, demographic (age) or tenure status (adjunct versus associate etc).
 * __Friday 1pm - Open Educational Resources: How are Faculty Using Them?. - Flora McMartin, Alan Wolf__**

Hope there is something of interest here. Let me know if I can provide any more details. Cheers, Scott