Startl has announced a $25,000 competition, soliciting business plans for best uses of Open Educational Resources. The prize is modest, but this could turn into a generator of alternative ideas for education. From their blog:

In partnership with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania, Startl will announce the winner this spring during the Milken PennGSE Education Business Plan Competition. The Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources awards the best business plan that leverages openly licensed content to change the paradigm around the production, delivery, sharing, and experience of learning. The intention is to catalyze models that increase access to and dramatically lower the cost of learning. Startl is seeking to inspire entrepreneurs to think creatively about how to incorporate open principles into their core business strategy.

I like conceptual maps –tools for illustrating the relationships among ideas– and, Tero Heiskanen created an interesting one. It’s huge. Without any further commentary:

Settlers of the shift is an open map of experts, organizations and ideas that are scattered around the globe. It’s for people whose work is shifting us towards a better tomorrow – a New World Order 2.0. This map aims to encourage people to connect across sectors and enable you to tie partnerships with like-minded individuals.

And:

Six values are suggested as a common backbone for the partnerships:

• Justice: fair and honest treatment of everyone involved
• Co-creation: synergistic dialogue and collaboration
• Meaningfulness: solutions to problems worth solving
• Generosity: giving time and resources for the sake of giving
• Dignity: acting in a respectful and ethical manner
• Abundance: denying artificial scarcity and limitations

(Thanks to Pekka Ihanainen for sharing this find!)

[Photo by darkmatter]

At the beginning of this year, I released five predictions for global education in 2008. How did I do?

It’s a mixed bag, ranging from being completely off to spot on… with some surprises, too!

Prediction #1:

Largely driven by the moderate success of OLPC, Linux will emerge as the platform of choice for K-12 technology leaders. The OLPC will demonstrate that not only is Linux different, but it can also be used to do new and different things. Instead of using new technologies to teach the same old curricula, new technologies will be used to teach new things.

What really happened: Linux didn’t take off, but the OLPC spurned an entire ecosystem of cheap, portable computing. We’ve seen this in the form of exploding sales netbooks by Acer, Asus and other small-form, low-powered, low-cost producers –as well as products intended to compete with OLPC, including a $98 laptop from China.

Prediction #2:

Web 2.0 will continue to democratize the globalization of higher education as more students and professors embrace open communications platforms. This means university administrations will have a harder time “owning” their global agendas.

What really happened: Web 2.0 technologies are continuing to democratize the globalization of higher education; but there’s little evidence to suggest that administrators are making the most of what is happening, let alone the question of “ownership.” Of course, there’s also the problem that nobody really knows what “Web 2.0″ really is, except as “a piece of jargon.” Some schools, however, have began to experiment with integrating their services with YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc., providing some hope that they will be able to leverage the power of Web communities.

Prediction #3:

Because of the influences of #1 and #2, education-oriented open source development will boom.

What really happened: The open source development boom hasn’t happened, but it also does not seem to be lessening. Moodle continues to develop as a popular course instruction platform, and other institutions have copied MIT’s OpenCourseWare program –but, these innovations all predate 2008. With a few exceptions (like OLPC), the open source/open access movement has made little new headway in 2008. Software in higher education, however, remains largely centered on proprietary formats.

Prediction #4:

Chinese orientations toward the rest of the planet will change during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The Chinese widely view that the award to host the Olympics is a sign that their country is progressing positively –and of international acceptance. During the Olympics, however, much of the international attention will focus on revisiting the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the government’s treatment of political prisoners, the annexation of Tibet, the mainland’s relations with Taiwan, catastrophic ecological destruction throughout China, and many more sensitive topics. Unless if the Chinese can distract the world with Olympian splendor, they will have to endure international condemnation. What will this do to the millions of Chinese school kids who were drafted into generating national spirit under the false assumption that the world thinks China is doing a great job? Will China reorient its education system away from the West?

What really happened: As expected, China had a hard time navigating the additional attention of human rights and ecological issues. What was not expected, however, is that China would muscle such a huge effort to manage its public relations image. This was most evident in the spectacle of the opening ceremonies, but also with the scandals that plagued the government and Olympic organizers as they tried to manage China’s image.

What does this mean for Chinese education? The Chinese government managed media relations well; and, as students at Anqing Teachers College told me in October, “the successful implementation of the Beijing games is evidence that China is prepared to lead the world.” China is not reorienting its education system away from the West. Rather, it intends to reorient the West toward China!

Prediction #5:

India’s the place to be. As more U.S. companies quietly continue to offshore their creative work to India, India’s knowledge economy will boom. The world will take notice of this in 2008.

What really happened: The jury’s still out. We’ll have to wait and see. In a 2005 report, the World Bank noted that India is in the bottom third of the global knowledge economy, and hasn’t improved much in the previous ten years. Has it changed? We’ll watch this one closely in 2009!

Stay tuned for five new predictions for 2009!

Graeme Thickins reminds us that the Minnebar barcamp is coming up on Saturday, May 10! As noted a couple months ago, barcamps are open access, user-generated conferences. Aside from all the great discussion and networking to be had, MinneBar includes free breakfast, lunch, afternoon appetizers, evening drinks, and a commemorative t-shirt.

The list of sessions is available here.

Passport of skills for a knowledge worker:

1. Not restricted to a specific age.
2. Highly engaged, creative, innovative, collaborative and motivated.
3. Uses information and develops knowledge in changing workplaces (not tied to an office).
4. Inventive, intuitive, and able to know things and produce ideas.
5. Capable of creating socially constructed meaning and contextually reinvent meanings.
6. Rejects the role of being an information custodian and associated rigid ways of organizing information.
7. Network maker, always connecting people, ideas, organizations, etc.
8. Possesses an ability to use many tools to solve many different problems.
9. High digital literacy.
10. Competence to solve unknown problems in different contexts.
11. Learning by sharing, without geographical limitation.
12. Highly adaptable to different contexts/environments.
13. Aware of the importance to provide open access to information.
14. Interest in context and the adaptability of information to new situations.
15. Capable of unlearning quickly, and always bringing in new ideas.
16. Competence to create open and flat knowledge networks.
17. Learns continuously (formally and informally) and updates knowledge.
18. Constantly experiments new technologies (especially the collaborative ones).
19. Not afraid of failure.

Sources:

Cristóbal Cobo. [http://www.slideshare.net/cristobalcobo]
Stephen Collins. [http://www.slideshare.net/trib]
John Moravec. [http://www.slideshare.net/moravec]

The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students’ theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university’s prestigious graduate program in writing…

More at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2152n.htm?utm_source=aw&utm_medium=en (registration/sacrifice of first born child required)