17.1 Content is infrastructure  (Page 4/10)

Without going into too much detail - I think that there are things we can do to think differently about resourcing content in education. For example, the most significant cost driver in developing high quality asynchronous learning materials is the academic authoring time. By sharing development cost over many institutions, the development of free content (public good resources) can lower the current costs of production for individual institutions. Savings in cost of production is a mechanism to resource more free content development.

4. redsevenone - october 4th, 2007 at 8:15 pm

David – Seems to be a regular occurrence here at Camp One these days,

One – News comes in, get put on the Big Board

Two – ‘Work’ Stops, Discussion starts and begins to heat the floor up

Three – The Sound Pressure meter goes off, the alarm sounds and everyone disengages and goes to the Basket Ball court.

I first came in contact with Terra Incognita after Gavin Baker’s ‘Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource’ post . and first introduced Camp One with this response posting as well making on to the much coveted, even by those who don’t know it exists yet, 10/10++ rating on the Camp One Way Cool Scale (comment 3).

134 Words in and finally I will get to the point. There are constant discussion by people who are wondering why Camp One is so successful. The answer to this is a simple one and speaks to the ethos of this post. There is no program per say, no dictated vision, just a set of ground rule and an infrastructure built to support those rules. Simply put, the camp is the program, from which has grown the community of learners. It is the content of what goes on here which takes precedence over the infrastructure. To be sure, we have a crack team of Techno Humans, most of them ‘Recovering’ Hackers who have seen a beneficial use for their creativity. But we are a community first and foremost and while there are a few walking through the door, who don’t grasp the concept, the building sways them fairly quickly.

Accepting responsibility for a bit of ‘All about us’

Regards Martin

5. colecamplese - october 6th, 2007 at 6:52 am

David– Great post and a very important topic here on our campus. There are lots of smart people doing great things with platforms all over the University — finding new ways to engage students with blogs, social networks, and all sorts of other great tools. What I see lacking is the innovative use of these tools as instructional design and delivery tools. Faculty who routinely use these environments use them in an activity form — not as the vehicle for delivering course content. They use them to engage students in and out of the classroom, but not to design and deliver courses … perhaps when they start to understand more fully how the environments work we’ll see a new breed of content exposed via the social web.

What frustrates me is the notion that our own eLearning spaces are both closed and built on old infrastructure. I have many conversations all over our University with people who say open is good, but when push comes to shove, they ask us to keep it closed. A perfect example is our use of iTunes U. This is an environment that begs to be open so anyone can come in and subscribe to a course podcast and learn. Our faculty produced over 2300 course podcasts last Spring, but there are exactly 12 of them that are open to people outside of a given class. That is no different than our LMS universe.