by George Lorenzo, editor and publisher

Like many of you working in the field of distance education, I have had the pleasure of attending some live presentations recently, most notably the Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT) held on May 30 through June 2 at the State University of New York (SUNY) Fredonia campus (a convenient, and affordable, 1-hour drive from where I live).
 
CIT was established in 1992 by the SUNY Faculty Access to Computing Technology (FACT) Advisory Committee, which includes representatives from SUNY system campuses who meet regularly to focus on ways to support the education technology needs of faculty.

SUNY has 64 campuses that currently serve more than 414,000 students. More than 373,000 SUNY students are currently pursuing bachelor’s or associate degrees, and 40,000 are working toward advanced degrees within the 6,688 courses of study SUNY offers.

CIT Fredonia 2006, which was the 15th annual conference (titled “Envisioning Tomorrow’s Classroom: Learning Without Limits) brought together about 500 faculty and instructional support professionals from 56 SUNY campuses.

Curtis Bonk, professor of Instructional Systems Technology and adjunct in the School of Informatics at Indiana University (and a member of the Educational Pathways advisory board) was the CIT Fredonia 2006 keynote speaker. His opening presentation was titled “Oops, Did You Mean to Share That? Open Source, Open CourseWare, and the Learning Objects of Tomorrow.” If any of you have seen Bonk, who travels the globe giving presentations to educators, you know that he comes with a large footlocker of props, including a number of costumes and hats, a couple of rubber chickens that he throws out to his audience, a bunch of CDs that he tosses around like Frisbees, and other various sundries. In short, in addition to being very informative, Bonk is very entertaining.

Flattening the Learning World

Bonk’s keynote combined his views on education-, information-, and communication-oriented sharing with a theme from the popular Thomas Friedman book “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century.” In that spirit, Bonk coined “The Ten Forces that Flattened the Learning World.”

1. Tools for Searching and Finding Information

Bonk called this the biggest flattener, because it is, perhaps, the one we recognize the most, primarily in search engines. Google, for instance, is continuing to build interesting tools that many educators and students utilize in their classes and research. In addition to the typical web-searching tools, there’s Google Scholar, for searching scholarly literature; Google Groups, for creating announcement lists, mailing lists, and online public discussions; Google Book Search, for showing information and sample page views of books; Google Images; Google Maps; and a variety of other tools that are either currently available, in beta, or on the drawing boards of Google Inc. Bonk said that it’s important for educators today to teach students critical thinking, evaluation, and analysis skills - what many in academia refer to as information literacy or information fluency skills - as Google and other information portals continue to grow in popularity.

2. The Rise and Demand for Online Learning

Bonk provided numerous examples worldwide of how online learning has grown at a phenomenal rate. He mentioned 1999 as the year when the adoption of online learning at colleges and universities jump started, and he also referred to the growth occurring at the high school level. For example, Florida Virtual High School grew from 77 students when it launched in 1997 to more than 31,000 students in 65,000 half-credit courses during the 2005-06 school year. In the state of Michigan, high school students must now successfully complete an online course or learning experience as part of their graduation requirements.

In higher education, Bonk pointed to examples of online learning program growth, such as:

• The University of Illinois at Springfield grew from 400 online learning course enrollments in Fall 1999 to about 2,800 enrollments in Fall 2005.
• The SUNY Learning Network has grown to more than 100,000 SUNY system-wide annual online learning course enrollments since launching in 1995.
• Bellevue University grew from 3,948 online learning course enrollments in 1997-98 to 8,169 enrollments in 2004-05.
• On the international online learning scene, Bonk mentioned that the Open University of Malaysia’s programs, which are typically comprised of blended courses, grew from 800 students in August 2001 to approximately 33,000 students in 2005.

3. Open Source Learning

In addition to talking about SAKAI and Moodle, Bonk referred to the “Godfather of Open Source,” Steven Weber, professor of political science and author of “The Success of Open Source” (Harvard University press). Bonk took an excerpt from Weber’s book in which Weber explains that open source projects need to “find a way to create a reverse flow such that if I donate something that other people are going to use and modify, I want to somehow benefit from what they’re learning - that is the key exchange. The trick, and what people are experimenting with, are different ways to structure that exchange so it works.” Bonk offered a differing point of view that expanded on the sharing motif of his keynote. “I think there are people out there who give just for the sake of giving and want to see their work used,” said Bonk. “That is the exchange or payoff for many of us. Some people have lots of ideas, and they just want to see them being used. They have built something and want to take it beyond their classroom. They want to help people.”

4. Collaboration

Today, there are many tools available that enable faculty to facilitate online collaboration via instant messaging, VOIP (voice over internet protocol), and/or text-based group messaging through e-mail or the web. Some of these tools are free, such as Google Talk, Google Groups, Skype, Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups, and SmartGroups. Other software products for facilitating online collaborations that have more sophisticated audio, video and web-conferencing capabilities, and are not free, include Breeze, Elluminate, Interwise and Sharepoint. Groove is another collaboration tool that Bonk talked about, saying that, in particular, he liked its brainstorming-oriented software features. Groove was acquired by Microsoft in April 2005 and was founded by Ray Ozzie, who created IBM’s Lotus Notes software.

5. Learning Portability

Podcasting and other mobile technologies were covered in this flattener of the learning world. To show how much things have changed so quickly, there is an Intel survey of the top 50 college and university campuses in the United States for wireless Internet accessibility. In 2005, the survey revealed that about 74 percent of the top 50 had 100 percent wireless network coverage on campus, up from just 14 percent in 2004. Bonk mentioned that during a recent trip to the UK he saw people accessing the Internet on their laptops while riding on a train. In short, this kind of technology is enabling faculty and students to take their learning on the road or under a tree on campus. Educational podcasting is growing quickly. Stanford, for instance, now hosts “Stanford on iTunes U,” featuring web access to a wide range of Stanford-related digital audio content via the Apple iTunes Music Store. The project includes a public site, targeted primarily at alumni, which includes Stanford faculty lectures, learning materials, music, and sports. In addition, there’s an access-restricted site for the Stanford community only, delivering course-based materials and advising content.

6. Learner Empowerment and Individualization of Learning

Blogs, or weblogs, are the big thing in this flattener. Blogs are pretty much everywhere. Incidentally there’s some great information about blogs in “Blogging 101” by Chris Yeo at a website called Squidoo (more on Squidoo in flattener #7). Also at the Squidoo website, see Rajesh Setty’s “Blogging Starting Checklist." In a Chronicle of Higher Education article on June 6, 2003, titled “Scholars Who Blog,” David Glenn wrote that “blogging offers speed, the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe, and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those available to people with Ph.D.’s. No wonder then, that scholarly blogs are sprouting like mushrooms.” Today, there are tens of millions of blogs. Technorati.com is the authority on what’s going on in the “blogosphere.” As of June 14, 2006, Technorati was tracking 44.4 million sites and 2.5 billion links. As noted on the Technorati.com website, “with an increasing number of people reading, writing, and commenting on blogs, the way we use the web is shifting in a fundamental way. Instead of being passive consumers of information, more and more Internet users are becoming active participants. Weblogs let everyone have a voice.” Blogs are part of another learner empowerment trend called “social computing,” or “social networking” which, in the Internet world, is the practice of using a wide variety of electronic tools for interacting, communicating, and “sharing” with others virtually. MySpace, for instance, has become a very popular social networking website used primarily by tens of millions of young teenagers for creating blogs, sharing user profiles and photos, communicating inside special groups, and more. Other popular websites that fall into this category include Friendster, MyYearbook, ClassMates, DiaryLand, and LiveJournal. The interesting thing about blogs and social computing is that they allow for people to connect more easily than ever before. A February 2006 Forrester research report titled “Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It,” by Chris Charron, Jeap Favier, and Charlene Li, makes the claim that such “shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies.”

7. Online Portals of Information

The aforementioned Squidoo.com occupies an interesting corner of the world of online portals of information. As noted on its website, Squidoo is an online platform and community that gives anyone free access to build an online “lens” to a “topic, idea, product or cause he is passionate about. These lenses in turn help finders get unique, human perspectives instead of computer-selected and often irrelevant search results.” Bonk noted that Squidoo could possibly be a good online venue for marketing yourself. Bonk also remarked about a number of other interesting online portals of information, including:

• The Public Library of Science is a “nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.”
• The Museum of Online Museums contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an online presence, links to exhibits related to design and advertising, and links to collections and galleries that are primarily hosted on personal web pages. It is published “as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce” by Chicago-based Coudal Patners, a design, advertising and interactive studio.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is “a comprehensive online philosophy reference work that is authoritative, peer-reviewed, and continually updated.” More than 1,000 professional philosophers donate their time and labor to collaboratively write, referee, and maintain this website.
• Library Share is one of Bonk’s eight “share” websites that he and his staff created. “Here you can browse through the libraries of North America. You will find a multitude of library-related resources, including online documents, books, journals, electronic books, and online retrieval tools.”

8. Online Learning Object Repositories

Bonk referred to this as the “tinkertoy effect,” whereby instructional technologists and faculty link things together through their access to pieces of courses that are interoperable and reusable. Merlot.org, for instance, is well known in this field. Bonk said that Merlot membership has increased by 8,000 people over the last six months alone, totaling 34,000 members to date. He also suggested that all educators attend the upcoming MERLOT International Conference to be held on August 8-11 in Ottawa, Canada. For more information about the conference, see http://conference.merlot.org. Bonk also provided information about the Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO), which is “a searchable, Web-based collection of multidisciplinary teaching materials for educators.” CAREO is a collaboration between the Universities of Alberta, Calgary and Athabasca University in cooperation with BELLE (Broadband Enabled Lifelong Learning Environment) and CANARIE (Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research in Industry and Education). Connexions, out of Rice Unviersity, was also mentioned. Connexions is a “growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help authors publish and collaborate; instructors rapidly build and share custom courses; and learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. Connexions features “knowledge chunks” that can be connected into courses. Bonk said that the Connexions service is growing very fast, currently getting about 14 million page hits per month on its website, and growing at about 1 million hits per month.

9. Open CourseWare

Bonk explained how this field is no longer dominated by MIT, as many more Open CourseWare (OCW) initiatives are gaining ground across the higher education landscape. Utah State University’s eduCommons, for instance, is a very interesting management system that drives USU’s OCW initiative. eduCommons is part of USU’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, which is part of the Department of Instructional Technology. One of the goals of USU OCW is to “provide free, searchable, access to USU’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.” Another one of its primary goals is to “extend the reach and impact of the Open CourseWare” concept.” MIT’s OCW and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have contributed significantly to the success of the USU OCW. A number of times Bonk referred to the work of David Wiley, an assistant professor of instructional technology at USU. As noted at the USU website, Wiley’s “work in reusable educational materials, social support for learning, and open access policies have won him numerous awards and recognition. This work and his passion for increasing access to educational opportunity have resulted in formal partnerships with several groundbreaking projects, including MIT’s OCW Initiative, the joint MIT/Microsoft iCampus project, and Rice University’s Connexions project, for which Wiley’s team provides social software enabling distributed, informal learning support.” Bonk quoted Wiley as saying, in October 2005, that not only is the OCW movement “worldwide and gaining momentum every day, it is also becoming a key part of international strategy to achieve equitable access to education for people everywhere.” Perhaps the most pervasive example of this can be found at the Open Course, Open CourseWare Prototype System (OOPs) out of Taiwan, where volunteers are being solicited to help transcribe MIT’s OCW, and OCW from other institutions, into both traditional and simplified Chinese. At press time, more than 400 courses were listed at OOPs for translating, with 89 completed. Other projects worth noting can be found at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OCW, Tufts University’s OCW, the Japan OCW Alliance, the Vietnam Fulbright Economics OCW, the Rai Foundation Colleges OCW project in India, JORUM in the UK, and the China Open Resources for Education project. “If there is one thing that you can walk away with from this conference,” said Bonk, “it is the fact that your course information can be accessed by anybody around the world and potentially translated into their language. This is powerful.”

10. Knowledge Brokers

Think Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works. A great example of how well Creative Commons can work comes from Athabasca University Professors Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi whose Creative Commons-licensed book, “Theory and Practice of Online Learning,”  was downloaded in its entirety more than 55,000 times, and more by individual chapters, over the course of about one year. SHERPA  out of the UK is another knowledge broker that is “investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.” Visitors to the SHERPA website can “find information, advice and materials relating to building and using repositories.”

In Conclusion

Bonk noted that technology in education has moved from technology enhancing, extending, and transforming education to technology sharing. “This is the decade of sharing,” he proclaimed. “Today the atmosphere and the attitudes are different, and people are starting to share.” He concluded his presentation by asking “how will we move forward in this age of sharing? Will all of us become knowledge sharers? How can each of us contribute to the knowledge of the world?”