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Global Learn from AACE, E-Learning Asia, and Open Ed for Community Colleges |
| Tuesday, July 28, 2009 |
It continues to be interesting and hectic. Today, Tom Reynolds, Mimi Lee, Gary Marks, and I were creating themes and topics for the first ever Global Learn: Global Conference on Learning on Technology. Global Learn will be held in either KL or Penang, Malaysia, next May 17-20, 2010 or so I think. Site selection and announcement coming soon. This conference will be a spin-off of AACE conferences such as SITE, Ed Media, and E-Learn. However, this one will be held in Asia and the Pacific Rim area each year; at least for now.
Global Learn (GL) will be a wonderful experience when it happens. We have a wonderful executive advisory board with members from dozens of countries in Asia and the Pacific Rim. The topics will cover both learning as well as technology ones. The current list we drafted is quite extensive. I hope to have much more to post on GL in the near future. And I hope some of you can attend next year in Malaysia! If not, perhaps you can attend virtually. Again, more to come soon on this.
In addition to our GL discussions, we also spent part of the morning selecting a book cover for the upcoming book Tom, Mimi, and I will have with AACE. We are the editors. Chapters come from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and Turkey. The book is called “A Special Passage Through Asia E-Learning.” It will be a special issue of the International Journal on E-Learning and a print-on-demand book as well as an e-book from AACE. Here is the upcoming reference for the book and the journal:
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning. Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. (see http://www.editlib.org/ebooks/ and http://aace.org)
Bonk, C. J., Lee, M. M., & Reynolds, T. H. (Eds.) (2009). International Journal on E-Learning. 8(4). Special issue: A Special Passage through Asia E-Learning.
Every day is packed this week. Tomorrow I will appear on the radio program, “Something You Should Know.” It will be taped, not live. Thursday I will do a Webinar for Ednak which is an online network for “thoughtful” online educators. And Friday at 11 am I will be on the USA Radio Network (1,300 stations) which includes the Armed Forces Network. Once again, this will be taped not live.
Finally, I appreciate people who have blogged on my World is Open book the past few days. Thanks to Stylianos Mystakidis from Greece, Sheri Steinke from Hennepin Community College, James Moore, DePaul University, Tim Holt and his Intended Consequences blog and podcast program from El Paso, and Ray Schroeder, Professor Emeritus & Director OTEL (Office of Technology and Enhanced Learning) at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Thanks for your kindness everyone.
So much is happening. Today, someone from the Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me with questions about Obama's new plan to fund open education courses at the community college level (as well as high school). Just as I was writing about the open educational resource movement at Foothill-De Anza Community College District and all that they have done, I get an email from Judy Baker who is Dean of Foothill Global Access, Distance and Mediated Learning, and
Administrative Supervisor on an upcoming 2-year grant project: Community College Open Textbook Collaborative. She had some Web links that I might include in my World Is Open Website. She gave me many resources including the Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets (SOPHIA) project which has designed 8 open access online courses for community colleges.
I told her that it was ironic that we met online at the exact moment of need. I suggested that perhaps something spiritual in nature was happening or it was a kind of karmatic experience. I mean, how often does the one person who can help you out of 6.7 billion people just materialize just when you need his or her help? Well, she replied (and she said I could quote her on this), "The open learning community is actually much smaller than we'd like to think. Obama's attention to the issue has created a perfect storm along with existing open learning initiatives where all of us are getting blown together. Now it's a matter of rowing together or sinking separately." Thanks Judy. In a way, I hope she is right--that more money and attention will happen in open education during the reign of Obama. I also hope she is wrong--I hope it is not a small movement, but, instead, one that will grow across the planet. |
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