 Okay, time to fire up. A little more about myself. I've studied here in Utah, finished my PhD at Utah State, and a good job at the University of Wisconsin where I'm now. But I'm going to start just writing to it because I'd like us to connect with your own experiences and so forth at the end and have enough time because I find most people run up right to the end and hopefully have none of the same thing that we can connect a little more because I feel there's real need for connecting. And sometimes at the conference, you get to hear a lot but you lack the opportunity to really have a meaningful discussion. So let me job really good. I'm looking at obviously what we all understand is that they're in a situation that you deal with in open education and that them being the well-funded for-profit enterprises who buy up content, hire the experts and dominate the market with copyright that never expires. So that's kind of a straightforward quick jump on who they are. So then you'd say, okay, who are the us? The us are the former, them's former customers. Now, obviously we educate instructional developers, subject matter experts and the likes. Now I want to dig right into the battle. Who is going to win here and how is it possible for us to win? Now obviously if I had to play devil's advocate and say, okay, if I were to consult with them and say, you know, how can you keep the us dead and out and eliminated, that's a very important question that we have to answer. And I'm going to look at these principles of being unified, visionary, focused, sustainable and so forth and go through them and then I'll look at the we principles and look at what saves us in that case. So as we look at these principles I'm going to touch on each one of them briefly. Obviously unified. The concept of unified, you're all familiar with the cathedral and the bazaar and the analogy of not Google it, but that whole thing of they've got a very orderly planned environment so they can plan a great strategy, they've got the funding, they've got the subject matter experts, they've got what it takes to beat the market and they do it. Very effective at that. So that's in their favor, they unified. The second thing is they're visionary. They know what's coming at it down the pipe and obviously within their own realms you've got those who fall out and the ones that come in as all the ones dominate with a specific environment but don't see the future and so forth but you can definitely say they have vision in where they go with it. They take their products to new platforms, they localize it to languages all over the world, they dominate in impressive ways. So immediately as you look at these you say well how about us? How do we deal with these same things? Obviously they focus on money specifically. I worked in the corporate world and I understand that environment now being in the educational environment I'm often frustrated with the lack of experience and understanding of what money does and how to play that game. That is not something that goes away. We have to deal with it too obviously in different ways. So they have a short term and a long term vision, their focus is there. And then we've dealt a lot with the concept of sustainability. Now they've got the upper hand for sure because they've got an economic model that maintains that's one very key portion of keeping them ball rolling. And then the other thing is mind share. That's a fight, a big fight is mind share. And we've seen the whole infrastructure giving them the mind share basically. We've got request for proposals that hands into them on a plate if you go that way. That's old school thinking. So that concept of mind share of how we can sway mind share and we can't do it by trying to compete on a request for proposal. We have to capture mind share in another way that people say I don't think an RFP is the way to go today and come up with new ways of evaluating and being inclusive of the environment that we offer. So obviously they're cutting edge. And we often envy what they deliver and produce. So now let's look at the other side. What is the our strengths that we can book on? Not that we have to ignore their strengths, we have to counter it effectively, of course. So, number one is a very important one. We've got strength in numbers. We've seen this proven with software development. As the open source stuff took off and freeware and crowd sourcing and so forth started to happen. Of course there was a lot of skepticism about it but it's proven its value. Not every model works and there's a high percentage of failures but there are some phenomenal successes as well and that's obviously the environment to pull from is how can we harness the strength of our numbers. Something that goes very well with strength in numbers is we have the expertise. Not them. They come and steal from us and they, you know lure us away with the money, money come come come come come There's the money. And we go. If you need the money you go. One thing that I see that counters us with the expertise where we can stand is that we have people that really believe in the cause and if you have a job already although not well funded but you have money coming in and you can put bread on the table often that higher cause that unites us is something that strength and I'll touch on that in a second. So the world is connected today that serves them too but it serves us really well. We've just had some great examples in the plenary of the connectedness of all of the world people contributing and so forth how can we exploit that connectedness to make this really happen and then the openness obviously in finding this stuff is great. I'm not going to touch much on that. That's been touched on a lot but I want to touch on the concept of weakness I call it weakness and what I mean by that is there is a ethic there is a similar sharing that we have in this room that binds us, that's why we're here and that is that common good that wanting to share that whole thing of why we share and it's deeper than financial things and it's stronger than financial things for most it's that weakness that I think can take us the long way but if that weakness is strong then we'll have the staying power to take us right to the successful end. But it leaves us with many complexities as we look at the stress that the other side have of having the money pulling together the forces knowing their market, delivering what's needed and we seem to be disjointed often. We are scattered all over bringing unity is the main thing that you need that divine and rule principle is absolutely decimating our efforts they are able to keep us divided not necessarily by sowing discontent amongst us but by creating a unified vision of where it is and when you look at open stuff it seems so amateurish, so scattered so yeah not now. In fact maybe that's true, maybe we are there we are scattered, we are weak and we still have to look at the future of where we're going with this that's what keeps us back right now. But the one thing I always stress when we talk about this when I tell people about adopting software, you know you've got one mindset of you know a Chevy Nova you know it's a crappy little car it's never going to be a smart, great vehicle that you would totally recommend it it's meant to be a little cheapy let's say something like a Mercedes Benz and BMW and likewise then you'll have a much higher standard those standards are maintained through the decades it doesn't come up now whereas say when we deal with software environment it's up and down all the time and so sometimes you find something that's insipid today, give it a year and you'll be totally surprised how it can be overall and renewed and revitalized I saw that with Linux. When Linux started out it was saying, I'm not ready for showtime promising, not ready for showtime look at it today, it's a totally different story so in our environment we have to keep the hope with that that yes, we divide it right now there's lots that we need to do we will get there and it's this persistence that we need to sustain power to get us there so a few caveats do consider as well one thing that's very important and now we deal with those who are beholden to them mostly and that is the the first one I want to talk about that I always ask people is what's your exit strategy in other words if you buy and do anything one of the first questions asked is if I were to approach the vendor I would say, okay tell me my exit strategy that you have provided for me in other words I'm now going to enter your realm if I ever want to exit, how will it happen and if they ever come oh I don't know why you would want to do that this conversation's over if they say it's completely easy we follow up with standards, this is how you do it you can come and go as you please and really make it easy and fully support my exit from them I'm interested in going to step two so an exit strategy is very important you cannot get people away from them if they have bought into an environment that there's no exit strategy to it's like oh I can't even imagine us leaving or pulling out of this so much we are so embedded in this environment no way the second thing is proprietaryness I work for WordPerfect here in the valley in the good old days the European Union obviously used WordPerfect as the default product they came to WordPerfect and said would you mind opening your file format as an open standard because we've got so many documents in your file format we really need that we were perfect to nope they died and one decision killed them they had said sure very different story today killed them and so watch out for proprietaryness when people come and lock you into a file format that they hold that's theirs and it's not open and it's not a standard it is an absolute poison to your future if you go there rather hold your horses and do something less shiny you've arrived the other one is what I call the flesh pots of Egypt and that I remember my mom telling me the story of the Israelites leaving and heading for the Red Sea and so forth and the murmuring this is really tough and it was so good back there when we at least had meat to eat now we're just starving in the desert this is how we are on a journey and we are heading through the Sinai Desert right now and all our friends yearn for the flesh pots of Egypt and that is the when they, when the them comes and say oh just a one button solution everything is real, we've told them and it's true they really have good stuff and you're like we gotta go back to the flesh pots of Egypt and so that is a big one and obviously the thing of perceived value is a real clincher and a very important thing to understand these economic principles are very important I'll give you a perceived value one if there are any Microsoft people here sink down please hi, because this one is going to hit Microsoft a bit in Wisconsin we localize all our products to Microsoft stuff just, you know, just if it's Microsoft sure we want it because everything is so nice and integrated and weren't so well at it that logic and we thought just wise, you know you can't go wrong with Microsoft and the licensing negotiation came around and the Microsoft guy said yeah we're going to significantly up your license what do you mean, the fees? sure this is nuts I mean this is unfair and the people got real around that but we localized everything we've got to your products I mean we give you more and more business you should now lower our prices instead and the guy said the perceived value of our products has been increasing significantly and because of the perceived value of our products we are increasing our products what was he saying you were so stupid to localize our products now you are in our back pocket it's going to cost you so much to leave us and we do that you're going to have to pay more because we can't charge you more because you are now stuck and that's really what the reality was and they had to pay more because leaving would be more costly and so they dug a hole for themselves out of ignorance so those are some of the big ones so now I want to touch a little bit on some of the development of that the first principle that I want to stress is what I call zoom level awareness if I were to show you a graph and you see it dip and then shoot up would you be impressed it takes dip and then shoots out very nicely at a 45 or higher it'd be very impressed but what if I zoom out and you see this little thingy is a little blip in a solid path down you're still impressed oh I didn't know that was the bigger picture so with the graph environment you can clearly see sometimes you might quickly fix on just one little day of trading and it looks all the things are going up but when you look at 90 days you're still on the floor now that principle is very important as we deal with our stuff unfortunately a criticism to our field at large is we're myopic in our development we focus on me and my course and what I need and our standards and just my little world that's all I care about so I develop for my world so when you zoom back where you go with all of these little granules that are so developed and so forth and you realize so much replication is happening in this process and so that's a real problem the zoom level is very important to keep in mind now I'm going to go with another thing to address this I call it the menu versus the pantry approach think food sit down in the restaurant here's your menu here you go this is what you eat let's change the game we've got a pantry a pantry can serve all come the chefs all come to the same man cook up their food and the menu goes out and so forth I want to encourage you to consider the pantry approach in other words when I say menu approach I often think we myopic we think of the course that we're teaching the specific standards we have to meet that's our menu that's what we have to deal with when you think of the pantry approach you think of the discipline when you think of math areas and how it can be addressed and so you think of that and now so that's the bigger layer and then you can bring your menu and pull from the pantry of what you need so keep that concept in mind that helps you a bit with the zoom level mindset of how we design and how we plan that we not myopicly stuck just with our standards but think the content for the larger course and sometimes across several for example I do language teaching and I'll show you at the end my language site it covers four semesters it covers all beginner and intermediate level foreign language learning what I do and they're all accommodated in the same environment instead of we've got to do the 101 and then create a whole new course for the 102 that mindset is vital and so a quick little vision for less commonly taught languages that's what the LCTL dictals as they call them too less commonly taught languages some of the less commonly taught languages you have a few students here, no teacher a teacher there, no students it's wonderful to bring it to the web in short what I'm trying to establish with openlanguages.net is that you've got one mega site that serves internationally anybody in the world with that site so go really global it is from English the language that I'm doing right now I'm doing Korean and Afrikaans it's obviously from English to Afrikaans but the environment's already plumbed that we're doing it from German to Afrikaans, from Italian to Afrikaans and wherever the media is so it's got that global perspective in mind so that you can offer Afrikaans let me take Afrikaans as an example I'm at the University of Wisconsin we have a system of 13 campuses that the course can be offered at any of those campuses that all join the same group and we might have 30-40 students but that's plenty and then you can go beyond that and then bring on cohort teachers kind of like you have firemen in waiting if the fire is bigger they call a few more have that kind of a facilitation the site can serve and it's open you can participate in the course outside of a university environment it's totally an open resource and learning environment so here are some of the big pictures suggestions that I've got with media that is one is granular developments need to merge with the same granules elsewhere I've actually asked a few people there already as I hear here in Utah we're developing this course and in Arizona we're developing the same course but why don't we have one course where we get these people to talk together and go for the content and instead of just myopically focusing on our standards and our specifically what we want but go for a bigger picture then you develop a table of contents that pulls from that hyperlinking makes it really easy you don't have to just add just your stuff you can have a table of contents that pulls what you need and the rest could be of interest to them but not necessity so that's the example they were which I gave you in the second grade class that collaboration can happen widely that pulling more people and building critical maps where something becomes really good that others would want to join it if it happened I really emphasized a modular mindset modular mindset is where you understand which layers to separate from others because sometimes if you mush it too much it really serves just one need but if you can separate for example think of YouTube, it's a great modular thing it pulls all the videos into one repository although the videos still serve you perfectly of course it does you can pop a YouTube video anywhere you want in your site but it comes from the module that mindset I think is very important because it makes things very flexible and reusable so if you just push it all together just in your own what I call a zoom level problem you've got to zoom back and see how these things need to come together at one point and not immediately throw everything together I want to not much has been said about this but I strongly encourage you not to ignore accessibility get some blind students, blind people on board let them test your site, give you feedback but don't ignore that it will come back to all of you because of federal regulations and hopefully eventually they're going to come down and if you built this whole building and suddenly realize we didn't do any plumbing, dang it's not fun to go and figure out how to get your toilets in this building and plumb it if you didn't plan for it it's the same kind of problem not to be ignored and then one totally odd suggestion that I've had for years that I just want to drop as a totally separate little thing I've always dreamt of a public domain taxonomic driven image repository and this is how I would view it it's like Flickr but it's like a tree structure like we saw in Yahoo this morning so you go okay I want to learn about plants actually trees is what I mean to you the city is trees da da da da da da and you can see images of every the city's tree that there is and all those images are contributed totally in the public domain no copyright whatsoever no strings, zero zero zero strings but while you've got to read the copyright none of that nonsense, get that talk out of there submit it, totally open you can make money with it you can mess with it as much as you want it's free and for everybody to use and with that I've got also the about.com so for example if I'm a botanist by trade and I've got lots of images of specific things I take over a turf of this environment where then I collect and solicit images to build the thing I go nuts to make sure I fill my area and there's a machinist that's really into locomotives that collects images of locomotives and so you build a massive image repository I think something like that would be massive bonus globally of course but it has to be totally free and open no strings and all of all the pins none of those are pins, it's just totally totally open and then lastly I want to touch just give my details and now quickly show you my site as you notice with this I've used the same template for many languages with lots of tools that's been developed I've got a nice cozy relationship with the university in Austria they develop nice tools for me and flash tools often and so forth and blesses any language if I get a small language out of a obscure part of Asia or Africa joining it's available to them so it's just wonderful to step into an environment that's really ready to go. What you will notice here that I want to show you is the modularity of it so with pronunciation I've got a specific focus and every language has a difference of the vowels, the consonants and whatever else they've got and they know holistic focus where you've got songs and poetry and stuff that you can see the text and hear it and learn to pronounce by interacting with holistic stuff I've got lots of stuff for vocabulary and cool tools and so forth with carousels that you can go through with flashcards and learn with rich media and so forth so all kinds of cool ways to learn it and a whole topic-centric way to do the vocabulary and so forth. Grammar will be different for every language. This one is very particular to Afrikaans how this is developed then all culture environment with all kinds of culture stuff that can always go on and it's very exciting to do that and a very important one communication one. I've got beginner topics kind of based on the Actful's OPI thing of the type of topics that you do with the beginner level and the intermediate level and so forth ties it very nicely with the vocabulary and so forth with samples of people speaking and saying the stuff and so forth and go on and on. Now the important thing, this is to me the cherry on the cake and what I'm going to show you here is this the curriculum I've got a curriculum here for Afrikaans 101 sorry so I'm going to go here to the curriculum and show you this thing the curriculum for Afrikaans 101 here it's there's week one for pronunciation vocabulary communication and grammar all of it pulled from the thing. Let's say four of you also teach Afrikaans and you're somewhere else in the States all you do is this page for yourself you look it up into the site or wherever you please and you've got your own situation so you don't have to buy in to what this offers because this is a pantry and you can make additions to this and expand the pantry because on some things it's like building a city it's just very vast so you can never eat everything so I find this is one interesting solution when I started this development as I said I was here in Utah teaching Afrikaans I moved to Wisconsin I moved out of the language teaching thing and I decided I was very into the open languages thing and I thought I'm going to do something different here what I'm going to do is not develop a course for my class and open a window on the side and say everybody can come in and watch what we're doing forget the class I'm developing it open to the world but now that's why we're modular if you know the language already you can go wherever you want to in the thing it's not like a chronology or linear process like a table of contents of a book that you really should follow this logic you build that on top of it zoom focus you've got all the pieces there you can now build your layer on top of that and I find this has really changed in the game in allowing many more people to use the same resources because if you go with the old traditional logic of just doing it for myself well what would I want to do then I would want to pull some of your pieces and go put it in my bucket because we do the same thing but I do it this way you do it that way but if you zoom out and I just do the focus on the subject matter and I myself had to build my table of contents so do you but we focus on the same resource it makes it way more accessible and reusable within the same contents thank you let's open for questions please I just have not given that thought to deal with that and do it a good observation I'll have to obviously you know eventually pop that on but I've been so inundated with everything else that I just haven't sat out so I can now I'm going to put that I've had that question fairly recently too and I'm thinking I better get to that but we'll get to that how are the weeks listed right so is there a way to do it as a self-paced model or you just have to avoid looking at things this page can be redesigned if you've got an independent study I'll show you one thing for example when it comes to culture culture is not on this list when I come to week 8 scroll down fast here in week 8 I just say you've got weeks 1 through 4 you've got to know this stuff so you can shape it you can say within the first 6 months you need to cover these things you figure out how you want to order them and progress through them so you've got total flexibility in how you order things still the infrastructure is not lock-stepped that you make assumptions of how people think and so forth and then when you build this on top of something else that has already got an imposition on it then it's not so well suited and then you would want to pull that stuff out to do the thing properly and that solves that problem having a modular approach that you can build your table of contents based on your needs and it's really the design of it is free and then also at the beginning there it said something about credit units because I'm at a university so this is built specifically for that based on my specific needs and so whatever your situation is I can also build one just for people in general and also once you want to learn the language I could make recommendations on how to proceed if you can spend half an hour a day this is some progress that I could suggest and if you can spend less or more you can have different paths so it's very flexible in addressing different audiences final question yes I've seen any difference in the student achievement levels in terms of moving into this environment you are very engaged in the material right now a very important question, our time's up so I'll be very quick on this doing foreign language online is a tough job and initially we had a class with about a week into it I realized a big mistake and I added a synchronous component online of course that's a very important thing what I'm working on right now is just about perfected just weeks away from having it unfortunately I don't have it here guess what I found is to me a bigger problem than how rich the content is in our teachers is the student managing all the pieces that they have to address and master so I've developed a very interesting graph with all the assignments on it and the assignments move down to the deadline as the time moves on and you want to arrest that assignment before it hits the deadline so you click on it, you go to the thing, you do it and you check that you've done it and then arrest it right there so you've got this one visual graph that shows you everything you need to do and you go and just do it and stop it before it hits the deadline and you know the electric wire and you get it and now I have to test it but I'm very excited about that because I think just plain student managing the process is the bigger problem you can have the coolest stuff they still stuck with that problem so I've moved into that with Hagen-Berkin that looks very promising so if anyone you visit with me afterwards I'd love to show you more stuff and visit with you on any of these issues time's up, thank you very much