I have never been better at accountability than when I was working three jobs and a volunteer gig seven days a week and taking two online college classes, all while trying to maintain something close to normal relationships with other human beings. (As Lucille Ball has said, “The more things you do, the more you can do.”)
Although I have effectively no desire to return to that particular state any time soon, some accountability would nevertheless be welcome in furthering my self-education goals.
To that end, I present version 0.1 of my personal learning plan, articulated for my own benefit and articulated publicly for my further benefit. The plan wants tinkering toward version 1.0, but anyhow is better said than sat on:
After yesterday’s post highlighting Jörg Lohrer’s riff on an old anti-copyright infringement slogan, I was inspired to make my own version of the ‘X is killing Y and it’s illegal’ thing. The original is here. Lohrer’s and mine are below.
Naturally, I was curious. The Flickr page offers little to go on at first blush. Is this just for some light trolling? What sort of reaction is it meant to provoke, and from whom?
To satisfy my curiosity, I dug a bit deeper, and to pay it forward (or spoil the surpise, depending on how you look at it), I share below the fruits of my research.
So…parody…which, of course, is clear from the picture to begin with. Threats to OER tend to be a bit more subtle.
What follows is a lot of clicking and reading, which y’all are welcome to do. Google reverse image search was largely useless, but a search for [“OER is killing education”] is fruitful. This shows up on the Web only on 15 January 2013 on both Flickr and Twitter; here’s the tweet that starts it all:
Overall, I expect this image is intended to critique (often hollow) arguments against the Open movement, both from (some) individual producers jealous of their IP rights and from (some) publishers who view themselves as necessarily the best arbiters of quality.
Anyway, that’s enough digital ink spilled over a fairly obvious and fairly obscure picture. It sure is a fun one, though, so I wanted to surface it. I will leave off with a few proposals for further iterations:
Fair Use Is Killing Copyright…And It’s Illegal!
Open Access Is Killing Publishing…And It’s Illegal!
Limited Copyright Is Killing Innovation…And It’s Illegal!
Here is an image of the old version of the site, cobbled together with loving care from a basic template. This shiny new WordPress version will usher in a whole new era of experimentation, probably-maybe. It is what will happen around this site that I am most excited about, of course: computers, learning, the Web, and digital culture. Would that the digital Humanities had come into vogue in time for undergrad! Here we are, though, and there is yet time enough.
Today, at long last, I have completed Saylor Academy’s PRDV251: HTML and CSS for Beginners course (CC BY 3.0 wrapper, comprising both open and closed resources).
Whew!
The course requires some light hacking; in particular, figuring out how to use a text editor and browser to create a cohesive website from local files is largely up to the student, but there is no shortage of help available from the Web. In any case, I regard this friction as a good thing, driving learning and retention.
Rather than take notes in an outline format for this course, which is my wont, I decided to create a website that would serve as both sandbox and documentation for what I learned. The result, written in a series of lightweight text editors and published via Google Drive is this:
Overall, the course is very good and recommended not least for its introduction of other useful resources. Finally, a confession: the code is messy and not really all good HTML5; one develops best practices along the way and earlier work is inferior to the later stuff. So it goes. Some things got fixed, some things got commented out, and some things are there to stay as a permanent reminder of what not to do in the future.
