Education for the Public Good

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

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

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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Open Licensing Over TV Dinners and Smoothies

Image of a TV dinner in a foil tray with different Creative Commons licenses badges on the different food items. This work, CC TV Dinner by Nate Angell is licensed under CC BY, and is a derivative of tv dinner 1 by adrigu (https://flic.kr/p/6AMLDF) used under CC BY, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

An offhand, only half-serious comment I made in the Creative Commons open education slack channel in response to a very worthy question from BCCampus’ Amanda Coolidge led to a new (?) metaphor to help explain the different open-licensing implications between collecting and redistributing a group of works with different open licenses versus actually remixing several works to form a new, derivative work: hereafter known as the TV dinner vs the smoothie.

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7 Ways To Do Holiday Marketing Right: 2017 Edition

1: Don’t do it

Not everyone celebrates your holidays. Statistics show that the majority of people on the planet live in other countries that don’t necessarily celebrate the same holidays you do. Even your close neighbors may view your hallowed tradition as the commemoration of when your people showed up to make everything worse.

Columbus lands in the "new world".
Landing of Columbus, used entirely without permission in keeping with the spirit of this post.

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