FLOSS In School - Open Source Software in the Education System

The U.S. Justice Department has sued Maricopa County Community College District, charging it with illegal discrimination by requiring non-citizens to produce more work authorization documents than are required, the Associated Press reported. U.S. citizens have not faced the additional requirements. A district spokesman declined to comment on the suit.

Judge blocks attempt by state attorney general to get records on a scientist's work at U. of Virginia; further court battles are likely.

New Jersey's low-income students will see their state grants for higher education cut by 8 percent this year, even as they face higher tuition rates, The Star-Ledger reported. The state increased funding for the grants program by 18 percent, but the number of eligible students surged, so the additional funds were not enough to keep the grant size even with last year's level.

Editor of new book discusses how a group of leading economists dissects the international higher ed universe and the U.S. place in it.

A judge in British Columbia has lifted an injunction that blocked the University of Victoria from moving ahead with its rabbit control plan, but the rabbits may be safe from being killed, The Globe and Mail reported. The judge ruled that the animal rights activists who won the injunction earlier, lacked standing to sue the university over its plan to deal with some 2,000 wild rabbits on the campus by trapping and relocating some of them, killing some of them, and sterilizing others. The controversy has prompted so many offers to take some of the rabbits, university officials said, that if everyone who has offered to do so follows through, no bunnies will be killed.

• Jonathan Dela Cruz, account executive at Access Group, Inc., has been appointed regional director for the North Central United States at the National Student Clearinghouse, in Virginia.
• Teri Duda, senior vice president at external affairs at Berkeley College, in New York, has been named senior vice president for government affairs there.
• Scheherazade Forman, coordinator of articulation and transfer at Baltimore City Community College, in Maryland, has been appointed as dean of student development services at Prince George's Community College, also in Maryland.
• Richard Glejzer, professor and chair of English at North Central College, in Illinois, has been chosen as dean of faculty and graduate education at Marlboro College, in Vermont.
• Nan Yancey, director of the graduate nursing program at Lewis University, in Illinois, has been promoted to dean of the office of graduate studies there.
• Joselyn Zivin, senior vice president and group director of brand strategy and planning at Lipman Hearne, has been named vice president of marketing and communications at National-Louis University, in Illinois.

The appointments above are drawn from The Lists on Inside Higher Ed, which also includes a comprehensive catalog of upcoming events in higher education. To submit job changes or calendar items, please click here.

Dave Cormier has a new post on possible use cases for open courses. From the post:

I think there’s a middle ground somewhere where we can bring in people who aren’t exactly ‘opposed’ to the idea of openness to understanding the power of supporting networks and network creation.

Link and commentary by Stephen Downes. Gabi Witthaus expands on Cormier’s thoughts.

Mike Linksvayer has posted an interview with author Lewis Hyde, who has written a new book Common as Air. From the interview:

I am obviously someone who cares about gift-exchange and sharing in the creation of knowledge and culture but I am also a bit of a contrarian and thus find that sometimes I want to underline the complications that necessarily arise around gift-exchange in our current situation.

Robert Darnton at the New York Times reviews the book.

George Siemens reacts to an article on open courses that was placed behind a pay wall on The Chronicle of Higher Education website. From the post:

I haven’t read the article. I’m sure it’s good. But it’s against the grain of what I wanted to communicate about openness.

D’Arcy Norman posts similar thoughts.

Victor Yu has posted an interview with Richard Baranuik, founder of Connexions. From the interview:

In 1999, frustrated by the fact that there was no appropriate textbook for my class, I considered writing my own. But on careful reflection, i realized that
the educational publishing system was broken and that writing a new book and publishing it through this system would not make a meaningful impact.

Thanks to Daniel Williamson for the link.

I just finished co-authoring of an article for a book that will be published by (and for) the Parliament of Finland. The title of the article is “Open learning – the end of teaching?”. In it we try to explain what open education and personal learning are and what kind of scenarios there are related to the theme. We present three scenarios:

1. Society of independent learning communities
2. Academic capitalism
3. Small entrepreneurs of open education

We do not value the scenarios anyhow. We aim to leave that for the reader.

We do, however, claim that a society of independent learning communities is a risk. With it we may loose the society wide cohesion and responsibility. In this case there would be some great communities but also some extremely nonconstructive one.

We also show how academic capitalism valuing highly knowledge with high exchange value (patents and immaterial right) is partly dominating, but also partly withdrawing trend. Open Access, open scientific data, free culture, Wikipedia/Wikimedia and open courseware movements are examples of the change. The knowledge with high use value (not necessary exchange value) has shown to be providing, in a long run, more value for the mankind at large.

With the small entrepreneurs scenario we build on the Ivan Illich’s deschooling idea. According to Illich:

“A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”

Some kind of “deschooling” would naturally require network of entrepreneurs interested in to operate in the area. If doing it with public funds it would make sense that all online activities are open and transparent for all.

We see that most likely in the future we will se features of all three scenarios. How national policy could then respond to the challenge? We propose five action points:

• We should invest to all citizens — including adults — ability to build good national online culture that will provide bases for the constructive open education online.
• We should expand the concept of “liberal education” / “free adult education” in the legislation so that public funding could be allocated also for individual citizens, organizations and businesses and not only for the established institutions.
• The public funding should operate so that it would allow direct support for individual open online courses.
• We should more widely recognize — also outside the “liberal education / “free adult education” — that studying and learning is not only a matter of reaching economical goals but as a such increases people’s happiness and wellbeing.
• Government should provide the most critical social media services for learning and research purposes.

With these action we have a chance to maintain the happy family we have been for a long time. Righ now it looks that we may loose it.

“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. ” – Leo Tolstoy

I was last weekend in Copenhagen. I learned a lot about many things. I have been many times in Copenhagen but only now realized that it is a happy family.

With the Tolstoy’s thought in mind I am now really interested in to study “happy families”. Whatever you consider your “family” to be a modern nuclear family, commune, neighborhood, language or racial group or an online community they resemble one another. They are mutually supportive and empathic.

Fearing inflation and U.S. debt, University of Texas investment arm adds gold to portfolio – and its officials suggest others have privately done the same.

Faculty members should think about how they can support and guide, not just critique, those taking on new administrative roles this semester, writes Daniel L. Kain.