Comments on EDUCAUSE Should Model Open Learning

• Follow up on earlier post
• Posted by Dick Leurig , Dir Future Technology at Montgomery College on November 11, 2009 at 8:15am EST

• As one of the founders of CAUSE when at the University of New Mexico, a past president years ago, and 37 straight meetings, I find your postings informative and thoughtful. Agree with the openess of the meetings although I do not use some of the new social networking. In the last 16 years as CIO at Montgomery College the sessions and vendors have provided new ideas and the opportunity to exchange thoughts with others. Am curious as to your conclusions after the meeting regarding the themes to watch;

• Worth Getting Worked Up About?
• Posted by stevenb on November 11, 2009 at 9:00am EST

• While I generally agree with your point about the importance of making speaker's presentations publicly available - and we certainly have an abundance to choose from these days - I don't think you can expect that every speaker will agree to make their presentation public and I think we have to respect that. First, let me say that as an EDUCAUSE attendee you were darn lucky to have the opportunity to hear Collins present. He is a pricey speaker and I am pretty sure that without sponsors like Blackboard, Microsoft and Oracle, such costly speakers would not be possible. At the major library conferences I attend we rarely have such speakers (which is why we end up with politicians). One must also consider that Collins is a consultant and businessman. He makes a living off his books and talks. If he agrees to have the talks go public, then he perhaps devalues his product. Why should we have Jim Collins talk at our conference another group might ask. Everybody can just go to the web and watch what he did at EDUCAUSE. Or maybe his message becomes so public that no one needs to invite him to speak - until his next book comes out and he has a new message to share. You can find video of Collins on the web (for example, his interview with BusinessWeek), so it's not like he is totally opposed to public access to his talks - though I'll admit what he does allow is probably designed to sell his books. You can go ahead and make public recordings a requirement for speakers, but I suspect you'll have some of the best ones turn EDUCAUSE down. They'll just go elsewhere. So maybe it's better to have the speaker add to the value of the conference than not. A compromise? Perhaps speakers like Collins would be more agreeable to allowing a montage of segments of their talks - but not the whole thing.

• responding to Dick and Steven
• Posted by Joshua Kim on November 11, 2009 at 5:30pm EST

• Dick...thanks so much for the comment and the thoughts. After looking up your bio now I'm the one that is curious about what you think are the themes to watch......Hope we can find a way to have a dialogue.

  Hi Steven....appreciate your measured comments and realist thinking - compromise is always good. Yeah...I definitely get worked up about all this. Have been very influenced by Lessig and Anderson's book Free - but I do think if it works for http://www.ted.com/ and works for talks at Google http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks that EDUCAUSE could find a way to both make it work (attract great speakers) and set an example for openness and sharing. My way of thinking is we would get more as a community then what we gave up - and doing this would really force us to think about how the "at conference" experience can be maximized.

  I wonder if this will be debated?

  Thanks again for the comments....Josh

• Educase
• Posted by kesia CANNING , Miss at STC on November 11, 2009 at 6:00pm EST

• I think that it was a wise and safe decisions to make.