Denver — Clay Shirky is one of the country’s most prominent Internet thinkers—“a spiritual guide to the wired set,” as The Chronicle Review put it in a 2010 profile of him. In his latest book, Cognitive Surplus,the New York University professor argues that a flowering of creative production will arise as the Internet turns people “from consumers to collaborators.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Shirky took that message to a group of higher-education-technology leaders who have been buffeted by a rapidly evolving ed-tech landscape. Mr. Shirky, in a keynote speech kicking off this year’s Educause conference, explored how technology was changing everything, from research to publishing to studying. (The talk starts about 20 minutes into this link.)
Open education has at least three components: free access to learning resources; digital access to formerly analog learning resoources (e.g. instructors in classrooms); and learning accomplishment validation (becoming common) or credentialing (rare at this time). More broadly defined, open education is “root” for any society desiring to be both democratic and prosperous. Open education has not made the transition to Open Source Everything, but needs to do so — open education along with open books (businesses with public charters), open data, open government, open repositories and open science, all need the other opens in order to be agile, inter-operable, and scalable in an affordable and sustainable manner. The stakeholders within the legacy education domain are largely afraid, ignorant, and in opposition to change. They must be embraced, informed, and led. “Open” is a meme, a mind-set, and a method. It is a seed crystal for a local to global holistic approach to education, intelligence, and research — three domains that must be integrated — and the foundation for open civil society, open commerce, open government, open law enforcement, open media, open military, and open non-government/non-profit.
NOTE: This search response does not include Open Access, Open Knowledge and all the other opens that enable and are themselves empowered by Open Education.
Welcome to site for Virginia’s inaugural Open and Digital Learning Resources Conferencethat will be held on March 7th, 2013 at the University of Mary Washington. The broad theme for this year’s conference is OpenVA, and encourages all state institutions of higher ed in Virginia to confront the possibilities and challenges of open education experiences and resources.
The Open and Digital Learning Resources Conference is an initiative of the Office of Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the Virginia Community College System, and a list of partner institutions you can find here.
This space will be updated regularly with conference news. In the short term,registration and online submission of proposals is now available on this site.
