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.
Education
RSVP: IndieWeb Summit 2018
Nate Angell will attend IndieWeb Summit 2018
Caring for OER
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.
Random Encounters: Thinking Beyond the Totality
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.
Open Licensing Over TV Dinners and Smoothies
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.
From 5R Permissions to 5R Practices
I’ve been working with open resources for some time and have recently wanted to make a profound shift in the way I think about open permissions, or “the 5Rs” (Retain, Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute) as they are known. TL;DR: Let’s move away from thinking of the 5Rs as qualities of artifacts and instead think of them as tools we use in the activities of opening knowledge practices.