Another few sites added to the Utah Alliance

So, the Utah OCW Alliance is slowly growing. For those keeping track at home, USU, Weber State, and UVSC all have OCW sites up and running. WGU has also put some things online. We hope to have some Applied Technology courses up, as well as courses from the U. And by the end of the year, maybe all Utah universities and colleges will have some material up. A citizen of the state and in fact, any person with internet access, will eventually have access to hundreds of college courses.

I'll keep you posted.

I'm a celebrity, at least on a certain block...

About three weeks ago I spent two full days at an elementary school. I went to every class (except the kindergarten) and talked about my book. 40 minutes in each class. I told them how I wrote the book, how I got it published, I read to them from it, and then taught them a quick lesson on writing.

It was a lot of work, and I had the time of my life.

Usually I REALLY don't like dealing with my book. When I do a book signing I feel like an animal at the zoo, except for at the zoo, the people at least make eye contact with, and talk to, the animals. "Hello little monkey!" Nobody says "hello little author!" they simply walk around the author while looking the other way.

And when I talk about my book with people, I feel like an Amway salesman (not that there is anything wrong with that (ok, there is something wrong with that)). I find myself constantly telling people, "yeah, if you want to read the book, which you may not, and please don't feel obligated, because I won't feel bad if you don't, then go to your local library and check it out for free, or read the first chapter online and see if it's something you think you might like, which you may not, but I won't feel bad if you don't, because some people just don't like some kinds of books." Yes, I talk in run on sentences, and I use that many commas when I talk. You can see why I don't like talking about my book.

But, there was something about talking to the kids that made it a blast. It was out of control fun. The kids kept wanting to get out of control, and the teachers were trying to reign them in. And of course, I'm asking them questions, and giving them activities that will lead to more out of control activity. But the funny thing is that now I'm almost a celebrity at the school. I work about 60 feet from the elementary school in the education building on USU's campus. So when I walk to my car, I hear things like, "Hey! It's Mathew!", or "There's the author!"

5 minutes ago I was walking toward my building and a small boy was looking up at me with wonderment in his eye. He was walking with a lady who appeared to be his mom, and at the risk of looking like a child predator I said to the boy, "Hey there! How is it going?" He just grinned as he walked past, and then I heard his mom ask who that was. "That's Matthew Buckley!" He said it as if that was all the information she needed. "Oh, of course, that's Matthew Buckley."

So, I'm never going to reach celebrity status, nor do I want to, but I've got a taste of it here at Edith Bowen, and it's a little fun.

It's Arrived!

Discovered that my book has hit the shelves, at least the shelves at Seagull Book and Tape. Deseret Book didn't have it, but will probably have it soon.

The whole event actually turned out to be a bit of a let down. I was initially excited when I saw it sitting there on the shelf next to Chickens. But then I realized, "I already know how it ends." I couldn't take it home and read it. I mean I could but... I've already read it about 15 times now.

But still, fun times.

Web 2.0

Very interesting article over at Publishing 2.0 in regards to a New York Times article about a study carried out by Science Magazine. Ok, I promise, no more links.

The gist of the article is that Scott Karp says Web 2.0 does nothing more than allow us to find random junk quicker.

"All of a sudden it’s crystal clear what Web 2.0 really is — the greatest platform ever for harnessing randomly imitative social behavior. Before Web 2.0, achieving utterly arbitrary results took time and effort. Now, with platforms like Digg, we can get nowhere in a fraction of the time it used to take.

"Web 2.0 glorifies the “social,” but in an open system, social behavior becomes “monkey see, monkey do.”"

All three are very interesting reads, and touch upon some of the things I brought up in my post (ok, I lied about the 'no more links' bit) about groupthink and digg. If you remember, the post made it to the front page, and was immediately buried.

Anyway, all three articles bring up some good points, and could make for an interesting conversation around the water cooler.

Three weeks and counting...

Three weeks until my book comes out. I haven't got any book signings set up yet, but part of that is because I will be in Spain when my book is released. I'll be attending the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference, and it should be a lot of fun...

When I have signing dates, I'll post them here.

Readability of Wikipedia

I wrote this little piece for another blog I write for, and thought I'd post it here as well...

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I've long been tickled pink by the success of Wikipedia. A group of amateurs gathering together to craft articles that rival the articles found in Encyclopedia Britannica? How sweet is that!

But the issue of quality always rears its ugly head. Is the quality of a Wikipedia article going to be as high as the quality of an Encyclopedia Britannica article?

Measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles is a complex matter, mainly because quality is subjective. Is quality depth or breadth? Succinct or in depth? More information or less? Quality can't truly be measured because it means different things to different people.

One aspect of quality is the readability of an article. If you want to teach important concepts about the American Civil War to 4^th graders, you're going to prepare a text differently than if you were teaching those same concepts to a group of American History post-graduate students. The 4^th grade version would not be very long and would intentionally leave information out. The post-graduate level text would be much more detailed, and focus on much more information. All relevant information would be included, no matter how complex.

Several scales have been developed that measure the readability of a text. The output lets you know at what level your text can be understood. A quick and dirty test of five of the 'featured articles' in Wikipedia show that on a readability scale, they come out very high. In other words, these aren't just simple articles that could be written by any High School student; they are complex, in-depth, and informative.

Some might argue they are too complex. In a world where USA Today reads at a 10th grade level, could Wikipedia articles be more 'useful' if they were more readable?

The introduction to the Wikipedia article on President George Washington rates a 23 on the Gunning-Fog index – which puts the text on a post-graduate level. Although you could argue that the quality of the article is high, it is not useful for 4^th graders.

What to do? Should we dumb down Wikipedia because the content is complex? Not at all. What I would like to see is the ability to take the text, make a copy, and make that version of the article more readable. By bringing down the readability level you are making the article accessible to a wider range of individuals. Content that was of use to one segment of the population now becomes useful for even more people, thus raising the quality of the article.

Visitors to Wikipedia could go to an article, and based on who the content is intended for, click on the more readable version. There are a number of volunteers working on Wikipedia, and now with more than 1.5 million articles, maybe it's time to look back at the 'finished' articles and see where improvements could be made.

Know a little about reuse?

Call for Papers

Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University
Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007

Submission deadline is May 18, 2007


Conference Themes
For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn't finished; we're simply nearing a checkpoint.

If our open education efforts aren't supporting learning, we're failing as a field. Period. And as we are beginning to understand how to produce and license content, we have to turn some of our attention to how this content is used by learners and teachers. How do they change, adapt, and localize it for their specific needs or the needs of their specific students? Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?

OpenEd 2007 will focus on:
* Localizing open educational resources
* Learning from open educational resources

Acceptance announcements will be made by July 31, 2007. If your session was accepted for presentation, we strongly encourage you to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Accepted full papers (5-10 pages) are due no later than August 17, 2007.
All submissions (short description, abstract and full papers) and presentations must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).


For more info please see the conference website http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/ or
email conference at cosl dot usu dot edu.