I am giving a presentation today at Open Education 2011 (the conference has been fabulous so far!) based on this article. Here are the slides:

Update October 2011: Preliminary efficacy results are now available!

I’ve been involved in an exciting research program where we are collaborating with middle and high school teachers to determine the cost effectiveness and educational effectiveness of a set of open textbooks in middle and high school classrooms. David Wiley initiated the project, and it’s been underway for a little over a year. The short version of the study is that teachers have modified CK-12 textbooks and a hard copy was printed for each student. Part of the the thought process was that by going with an OER textbook, it might be cheaper to print a book that students could keep rather than use a proprietary text that would have to be reused for seven years to recoup its costs. Some literature demonstrates that when students have their own text to mark and annotate that they learn more effectively. If both of the foregoing statements are correct, by using an OER textbook, students could learn more while districts save money on textbooks.

The below graphic illustrates the five possible outcomes of our study.

Stay tuned as the study unfolds!

I received an email pointing me to this website where “Captain Vancouver” is collecting images of people who participated in the Vancouver riots. His purpose is to punish people’s inappropriate actions by publicizing them. His idea is that while the court system may or may not deliver justice to these people, quick justice can be achieved by posting these actions and identifying the people behind them.

In one post he writes to a person who may (or may not have) flipped over police cars: “I sentence you to public shaming so that whenever “Jonathan Mason” is ever typed into google, your name will be forever associated with the Vancouver riots.  I will leave it up to your future employer to ask you during your interview whether you were really there or not.  Take your chance with that.  You’ve been served by Captain Vancouver punk!”

Some are concerned that these kinds of sites violate privacy and could be a slippery slope to places we don’t want to be. Earlier I shared some of my feelings on this while blogging about a similar issue. My main concern with public shaming sites like this one is what happens when they are used to bully others who are acting in accordance with the law? For example, if there is an unpopular political issue that a person privately supports, should I be able to publicly point out that person as one who supports it?

Again, I refer to things which are legal, but unpopular, as opposed to the things which are illegal (whether or not they are popular). Captain Vancouver strongly defends the appropriateness of his particular public shaming site in this post. This is no doubt an issue that will become increasingly important.

The National Academies Press recently announced that it was making over 4,000 PDF versions of its books available for free download. This is a very interesting development, especially considering that they previously were allowing much of this content to be accessed on a page-by-page basis on their website.

I checked it out this morning and downloaded The Teacher Development Continuum in the United States and China:Summary of a Workshop.

So far, I’ve really enjoyed it. Go check out the free books!

One of the key tenets of using social media in marketing is to not just speak to your customers, but to listen to them. I had a recent experience that taught me the power of using Facebook to learn from others.

My wife and I have written a book for teenagers called “What guys need to know about girls” and then (when you flip the book over) “What girls need to know about guys.” So 2 books in one, and two front covers. It’s a fun idea and I think the book will be valuable.

But since people judge a book by its cover, getting the cover right is huge. How can we be sure if we’ve got the right cover? I believe one of the best ways is to tap “The Wisdom of Crowds.”

We decided to use Facebook to tap into this wisdom. Using the publisher’s Facebook page, as well as another fan page, we posted the cover and asked, “Help us judge a book by its cover. Do you think the cover for this book would appeal to teens? What age group does this art evoke?”

We didn’t tell them (so as not to bias) that the book was really designed for junior high and high school students.

Here’s the initial cover. For the record, I liked it and some friends (in their 20s and 30s) that I showed it to liked it as well. I was ready to say, “Let’s have this be the cover.”

The response on Facebook was quick and decisive. One woman wrote that it was for, “‎6th graders at best – cartoon robot on the cover, seriously? My kids are 16, 12 and 7 and I guarantee they would only catch the eye of the 7 yr old!” (You can see all feedback  here.)

I was really surprised at the almost unanimity in saying that the cover looked like it was for tweens. The feedback was VERY helpful!  So the publisher came up with another cover design:

This cover got a lot more positive feedback than the first cover did. (You can see it all here.). There were a few suggestions about the clothes that the people wore, and so one final cover was produced:

Here’s the point I’d like to make with this post. Asking for feedback from the people you are trying to serve is a vital step in any industry. Facebook and other social media make it so much easier to solicit this kind of feedback. And people are often very willing to offer it.

My experience with this cover design has taught me that using Facebook to get feedback can be very, very helpful!

Lots has been written about Apps versus the Internet. Today I heard Ben Galbraith speak on this topic and he said something like this (quoting from his blog):

“What a fascinating time of change for our industry! The Web has been challenged as the dominant platform for mainstream consumer software experiences–though the contest with apps is far from over. The predicted mobile convergence (with the desktop) is happening now. Independent software developers are now re-empowered to earn a living at their craft in a new and interesting way–they join musicians, directors, writers, and other artists whose products command the attention of large swaths of the general public. The opportunity has always been there, but now the complexity of so much infrastructure required to distribute those experiences has been swept away…”

He went on to say that basically, apps are content. Meaning (in part) that it’s a new sphere to distribute content. For authors, I think this is a really interesting concept. There is a lot of information that is available online for free, that people are paying money for in apps (for example – Chuck Norris jokes).

A few years ago, when I was working on my dissertation, free e-books seemed to increase the print book sales. But what about free apps to point people to a paid book? And could taking the basic ideas behind a book and releasing it as an app instead of a book actually make more money for an author than a book would? And for those authors who really want people to read their work, would a book be more likely to be read than an app?

I don’t have many answers, but these are questions I’m thinking about. My initial thought is that if you have a piece of content (a book for example) the more formats and places can make it available the better. To make it free or to charge? That depends on how much you value exposure versus profit, and of course what kind of sales you could command.

I was really interested in Salman Kahn’s recent TED talk (video embedded at the end of this post).

There is much to love, and I’m going to try out some of his simpler videos on my 1st, 2nd, and 4th grade children.

I was particularly interested in the concept of “flipping class.” Typically in class, the teacher lectures and then the students do homework at home. Kahn proposes that the “lecture” be viewed by students at home, and then they do their homework in class, where the teacher (and students who understand the material better) can help those who need assistance.

It seems to me that most of the real learning takes place when the students are actually grappling with problems and actively participating.

Would a high school student really go home and watch 2 hours of video lectures before class the next day? I don’t know … but the idea of “flipping class” is definitely worth thinking about.

I just finished the book Social Media 101, by Chris Brogan. I’ve heard some criticism of the book — that it reads like a blog and doesn’t have a strong, consistent narrative. There is some truth to that; however, I still got some good insights from the book. Here are the top 2:

1. Use Feedburner. Chris suggests hat “no built-in RSS feed provides as many features and enhancements as FeedBurner. Bring your existing blog feed to Feedburner, make a new feed there, do all the little tweaks and add-ons suggested, and then promote that feed” (62). This simple plug-in made it easy to do, and you probably didn’t even notice the switch! But I’ve been able to see some interesting analytics that I couldn’t before.

2. Ask questions. On one of the Facebook pages I work with I started asking questions instead of just posting content. Shouldn’t be a surprise, but I found that my engagement rates skyrocketed. The simpler the question, the more responses.

One topic that has interested me for a long time is the possibility of college professors recording and podcasting their classes so that others could more freely listen to the class.

It seems to me that while the audience for a lot of these classes would be small, extra exposure to good classes would be a great thing. And there are quite a few people actually doing it (among other places at iTunes U).  But what does it cost (in terms of time and money) to broadcast one’s class to the world?

That is part of the subject of a paper I published a year ago with some of my colleagues at BYU. The short version is that using WordPress (course website), a wiki (course participation), student blogs (posting homework assignments and discussion) and Profcast, blip.tv, and iTunes (lecture material) a course we studied was relatively easily assembled and distributed.

In this case we weren’t just talking about podcasts, but also setting up ways for students to interact with learners at a distance.

It took David Wiley (a techno-wizard) practically no time to set it all up. My rough guess is it would take 10-20 hours for a semi-technically competent person to get all these things set up. But a TA could help!

It’s amazing to me that ten years ago it would have been both financially and technically prohibitive to create a course that could be shared with learners at a distance. However, the use of a few free or inexpensive tools can now create the spaces necessary to extend one’s classroom to participants around the world.

We also explored how learners at a distance utilized these resources. But I think those details are for another post…

An open version of the article is available.

Thanks to Distance Education for allowing an open version. The citation is:  J. Hilton, C. R. Graham, P. Rich, D. Wiley, (2010). Using Online Technologies to Extend a Classroom to Learners at a Distance. Distance Education, 31(1), p. 77-92.

Recently, I’ve been in situations where I’ve been asked, “What do you think about this?” The “this” in the sentence is usually a product or service that is designed for a teenager or young adult (I frequently work with college and high school students). Although I would like to think that I have a pulse on what teens will think about “this,” it turns out I don’t always have it.

Here’s a recent example.

I was helping develop a website designed for teenager. We had three main ideas for a “tagline” that would be prominently featured on the site. To keep things anonymous, we’ll call them

“Tagline A”

“Tagline B”

“Tagline C”

There were three people (all adults) on the design team … each had a different idea. I didn’t know which was best, only that “Tagline C” wasn’t it. I had the idea to put the three taglines on our Facebook page (most of the fans of the page are teenagers.)

The feedback came in fast and clear. Everybody loved “Tagline C.”

Lessons learned

1. I’m not always as in touch as I think I am.

2. Use social media not just to broadcast out what you think, but to carefully listen to what others think.