Have been asked repeatedly for either same budgets or very similar budgets, with detailed justification that is tied to foundational principles for every single thing, right down to basic necessities like worn out desktops. We all know these justifications will likely not be read; in fact, our requests will in many cases likely not be even considered. Meantime, we are urged to go all-out on planning for certain campus changes that we are simultaneously being told we can’t fund. All this disfunction is sapping my energy and distracting us from doing important things we can more reasonably accomplish. So, I am beginning to find myself reacting from a place of burnout. Good thing I have a chunk of time off coming to me soon.

Here’s a quote from someone who’s contact info I can’t find. Anyway, it’s free citation software.

Zotero is an excellent tool for managing data for bibliographies, footnotes, and reference lists.  It is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that allows users to either type in author,  title,  and other publication data manually or enter it automatically from library catalogs.

To install it, simply select “add-ons” from the Firefox tool menu.  Click on “Get Add-ons” and type “Zotero” in the search box. When Zotero appears, click the “Add to Firefox” button. After restarting firefox “Zotero” will appear in the lower right of the browser window.  Clicking on “Zotero” here will open the database for editing.

My college uses WorldCat to search library catalogs worldwide.  Here is what I do to automatically enter information from WorldCat to Zotero:

Use WorldCat as usual to find a book or other media you would like to save in Zotero.

From the library catalog record window, click “Cite/Export.”  Then choose “Export to Endnote” in the resulting pop-up window.  That’s all it takes to automatically enter all the publication data into Zotero.

When it is time to enter the information into a paper, Zotero lets you choose from several different citation styles and paste formatted entries right into your bibliography.

Please visit www.zotero.org for complete instructions.

Several people sent me this. I couldn’t agree more with it.
——————

Forty internationally known leaders in open education and technology met in Barcelona on October 19-20, 2009, at the NMC’s first official European event, the Open EdTech Summit, cosponsored by the Open University of Catalunya (UOC) and the New Media Consortium (NMC). Together, this extraordinary group considered the question of how to design educational institutions that fully embrace open education as means of being truly responsive to the needs of contemporary society and of today’s students.

Summit attendees generated fifty action items necessary to realize the goal of creating an institution truly responsive to the needs of students today and into the foreseeable future, and then ranked them. Those which ranked highest are captured here, and framed as a Call to Action – five major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving open education:

1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media. In order to achieve this, it must be easier to find, use, and cite pieces of media, especially for educational purposes. Contextual tools that perform these tasks, co-developed by students as the end-users, must be created and made available to all. We must also develop ways to translate rich media, not only between languages, but also between modalities, such that content produced in a certain geographical area and medium may be accessed and reused in other places and in other forms. Portability of rich media is key; content must not be tied to a certain platform for delivery, nor to a specific medium or environment.
2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms. Mobiles – not simply phones, but all kinds of handheld and portable devices – are a powerful tool for learning because they are controlled by the holder. With mobile devices, users can direct their own learning experiences, accessing information where and when they need it. It is critical that we effect a paradigm shift toward recognizing mobiles as a primary platform for delivery of educational content – not content that is translated for use on mobiles, but content that is designed for such use from the outset. We must actively encourage development practices that remove platform dependence. Likewise, we must advocate for a global mobile network that is as easy to use, as inexpensive, and even more ubiquitous than the web.
3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes. It is time to recognize the learning that occurs outside of courses and beyond classroom walls. The model of awarding credentials solely on the basis of participation in established programs must give way to a more flexible design that separates credentials from coursework and recognizes mastery regardless of where or how it is attained. As more learners choose alternate means of education, including non-university programs, mentoring, apprenticeship, and other informal or innovative options, we must accept and recognize their achievements as equivalent to those gained in more traditional ways.
4. We must enable a culture of sharing. Recognizing that the sharing and reuse of scholarly work is a key component of the university of the future, we advocate building a culture of sharing in which concerns about intellectual property, copyright, and student-to-student collaboration are alleviated and the model of proprietary work dissolves in favor of a more open one. To this end, we must establish reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and scholarly publications of all kinds, including reputation systems, peer review processes, and new models for citation of such content. We must empower students to share knowledge with one another in ways that are viewed as collaboration rather than cheating. Assessment models must change to support these practices. Ultimately, we see a culture of sharing as a crucial piece of the infrastructure of a scalable educational system that can support the millions of learners who will participate in it.
5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable its use and understanding. Content out of context is at best easy to misconstrue, and at worst, too difficult to use. Content producers and users alike must embrace strategies (reflective blogging, metadata, documentation of process, visualization of learning, etc.) for linking content generation to “pedagogical wraparounds” that embed content within effective learning practices. Such strategies would ensure that the focus remains on learning objectives and process, rather than on the technology used to deliver the learning materials.

The attendees noted that the task of reinventing higher education is complex, and the road to change long. Institutions change by degree, and the group underscored that it must become part of our culture to embrace our collective knowledge and wisdom when it comes to designing learning experiences. Higher education must begin to recognize the utility and value of informal avenues of learning, self-directed learning, and the new forms of mentorship made possible via the network and social media. Thoughtful experimentation must be encouraged at all levels, including the formation of whole new forms of institutions.

The work of the attendees was captured in real time in the summit wiki. For more, please read the full Communiqué.

Larry Johnson
Chief Executive Officer

Have sufficiently caught up enough to blog about Educause finally, though I still feel a bit overwhelmed. Here are some of the highlights:

Lessig’s brilliant as usual talk on taking a stand for our intellectual property rights

Jim Collin’s pithy quotables on going from good to great

Google’s booth – 42 free wave accounts and invitations, lots of NITLE wave activity, lots of new info and ideas about how waves might transform collaboration

Hardware free personal response systems, oh joy! How we hate having to support clickers as they exist now. We simply must demo one of these in our sandbox classroom.

Free Tegrity classroom so I can fully explore lecture capture possibilities. This is something we could really use if faculty just understood it.

Updated thoughts on mobile communications – computers are out, iPod touches (not iPhones) are the next thing.

The now thing is netbooks tho – saw a ton of them. I just used my Pre to Tweet the whole conference, and so did loads of others – see it all at #educause09

BB is partnering with Google to create seamless links and includes for BB v. 9.1, which I believe we are going to next year. Tres exciting! But when I asked why Google doesn’t just come up with its own LMS, they hinted they might be buying BB. Hmmmm!

Camtasia has really improved it’s studio system, and Jing now captures up to 5 minutes, for both free and pro. It’s spendy though!

Won a cool little eco phone from the Sprint booth! Gave it to my partner to replace her very basic clamshell antique so she can GPS, Google Maps, navigation, Internet, and even TV now. But the one guy at the booth I talked to didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in ed tech possibilities. Why would Sprint send a flunkie to a higher ed tech conference to represent their product? Jeez….love the phone, though.

Learned about something called Voicethread – must explore further

Learned about Maharra for open source eportfolios – must explore further

Learned about 3rd party gatekeeper ePortfolio model – must pass the gatekeeper at regular intervals before can progress, based on achieved competencies reflected via folio. Neat idea

Leadership in hi ed very difficult, thanks to faculty, who = 1000 points of NO (Jim Collins)

Microsoft Live folks seemed a bit desperate

The BB booth never seemed crowded

Apple didn’t even bother to show up, prolly cause they don’t have anything really innovative to showcase this year (I truly think they are vastly overrated). Who the hell cares about Snow Leopard? Plus, the iPhone has been done and done and done.

Talked to the furniture reps, will receive updated catalogs soon, but didn’t really see much new there

Lots on cloud computing – but I zeroed in on Wave since we can afford that

Bottom line: Hell of a lot of good stuff coming about now!

Here’s what Stephen Downes says about this: “MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) has for some reason set up a Second Life site. It looks like stacks of books. All I’m going to do is pass this information on to you ans wash my hand of it.”

Have purchased one Flip Ultra and one Sony Webbie camera for the FDL. So far, I’d say the Flip is far more intuitive to use, but the Sony seems to take better quality videos.

Love that Skype screen view. So far, seems to work pretty good on both my HP Touchscreen Windows Vista and MacBook Pro – Leopard boxes.

This fall, I finally upgraded my three 3-yr-old iMacs to Leopard from Tiger. Aside from the weird way Apple went with wild cats as names and choose to go up quickly to the undisputed top cat in the food chain and then digressed to a lesser cat, the leopard, I have this to say: It was hardly worth the bother. Tiger worked fine up until I found a program that required Leopard. Now Snow Leopard, maybe never Snow Leopard, but Leopard. Does it run any better? Not on those boxes. Maybe on my brand new iMac, with its 64 bit capabilities – but so far, all this upgrading has been kind of a waste of money and feels a bit like Apple extortion. I say once you buy a computer, the operating system upgrades ought to be free forever after, especially if those upgrades get us any security upgrades.

Lots of folks are taking up with Skype these days, which makes this interview on CNN via Skype all the more interesting to me. Big media is using it to interview big culture (WIRED), about a man who tries to disappear from the grid. So much to discuss in this story!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/01/dcl.off.the.grid.intv.cnn

In other Skype news, eBay is selling (did you know eBay owned Skype?). eBay somehow thought people would want to sell and buy using Skype, forgetting that auctions are still a bit unnatural for we Americans. We are a bit embarrassed to barter FTF, and besides, Skype doesn’t let us impulse buy. It forces us to slow down and consider what we’re doing.

Looks like we won’t be upgrading from BlackBoard 8 to BlackBoard 9 yet. We don’t have the budget. Drat.