Opening Nouns & Verbs

Nate Angell on 24 Jan 2019

Wooden doors ajar in a stone garden wall.
Arbour Hill Gardens by William Murphey licensed CC BY-SA.

The open education community I run with is filled with the kind of people who think words really matter. For a while now we’ve been debating what to call the things we care about and do: open practices, open resources, open pedagogy, open licensing, open this, open that. Our debate is hot enough to make some people turn away and others dig in. But when words matter this much it signals real tensions in beliefs, priorities, territories and relationships.

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Mothering Digital

Nate Angell on 9 Dec 2018

A black and white screengrab from the recording of Douglas Engelbart giving the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968.
Screengrab of Douglas Engelbart from the recording of the 1968 “MOAD”.

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”), a notorious event held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, where SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated computer systems they were developing and which many folks point to as one of the most important events to presage and shape our digital technology environment today.

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Education for the Public Good

Nate Angell on 10 Nov 2018

Lighthouse over the sea, in the public domain from http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2016/02/legacy-of-light-worlds-largest-lens-shines-aloha-light/.

A chance encounter led me to want to post about my evolving views on education as essential public infrastructure. Thanks to a tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, I was led to an article by someone I’d never read, Corey DeAngelis, Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute: “Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities”. If I were not already thinking about education as public infrastructure, I probably would have walked away from this article given all its issues (which I’ll end up addressing, like it or not) and the futility of engaging such polemical works. Yet so much sprang out of my reading of DeAngelis and the other works it led me to that I feel compelled to write, if only to set out some thinking on education as public infrastructure to build on later.

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Caring for OER

Nate Angell on 19 Mar 2018

Painting showing a shepherd running away from his flock while a wolf kills sheep.
“The Bad Shepherd” by Jan Brueghel the Younger in the public domain.

This is the beginning of a post I’m researching on the CARE Framework using a workflow that includes Zotero to record and display reference information and Hypothesis to record and display notes.

As I haven’t drafted any content yet, so far this post just displays the references and notes I’ve already collected.

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Random Encounters: Thinking Beyond the Totality

Nate Angell on 12 Feb 2018

Image of a solar eclipse during totality.
“Totality” by Geoff Livingston licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This post involves a bit of Frankenstein thinking, because two — seemingly unrelated — posts I came across recently made connections for me. Let’s see if I can explain why I think they’re connected. TL;DR: While I have gigantic respect for both authors of these posts, I think both ask us to view things too generally, without paying attention to details that matter.

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