 My check, my check, we are the 29% We are the 29% We are the 29% Good. Okay, do you think we need a human mic? Okay, do you think we need a human mic? Do you think so? Do you think so? Okay, let's take a vote on this. Okay, let's take a vote on this. But everything needs to be consensus. Everything needs to be consensus. All right. All right. All right. If you agree. If you agree. Do that. Do that. Do you have a problem? So can we get rid of the human mic? Do we get rid of the human mic? Okay, I guess that's it. So, we're here today to occupy OpenEd. What does that mean? Well, I'm not exactly sure. But I have a couple ideas that we can actually elaborate on. Now, I just want to make sure I have audio and that this is going to detect and then I'm on my way. Fortunately, I can't find my mouse. Or just give me one second. You're right. We are just a bunch of unorganized hippies. But that's how we roll. I might need, okay, good. Is anyone able to help me get this up? What? Exactly. All right. I can do this without slides. I've done it before. All right. I want to talk particularly or specifically. Does it look like it's crashed? Your mouse has disappeared. Do you recommend a microphone? Can and did. Okay, let me restart. Yeah, do that. And I'll get this working while you talk. All right. Well, today I'm going to talk about one of the questions that I think is looming over OpenEd and is looming over educational resources in general. And it's the idea of are we talking about open educational resources as a store, as open resources as something we build up? I think as Josh said well that aren't using. Are we talking about this question of open education as an ongoing experience? I don't know how many of you were at OpenEd in 2009. In 2009, OpenEd was a really interesting experience in that we had a bunch of great speakers and not all talked so specifically about what an open educational resource is, what OpenCourseWare is, right? There was more a notion of a community. A notion of a group of people who were thinking about what open education is outside of some sustainability notion of scale. Some deadline about how are we going to get funding this idea that's funding our work, right? It was a notion of how is the work we're doing informing our goal that we set out. Which was basically to open resources for the world. To make education happen online seamlessly. And not in a repository, right? Not in some space that you have to sign up to get access to, but on the web. And why aren't we building these spaces on the web? Why aren't they open and accessible? Well, this is kind of the question. And one of the presentations that really brought this to light for me was Gardner Campbell's. What is called no more digital faceless. I don't know if you've seen it, but if I get my slides up, I have a couple of good images from it. But one of the things he talked about that fascinated me, and it was this great raw presentation. He was kind of on edge. He was kind of like, Don, I don't know what had happened, whether he got a bad flight, he had lost his luggage. I'm not sure. But he was kind of raw. And what he was talking about was this notion of open resources. Of open education as a kind of bag of gold. Right? And I want to hold that because I have a couple of, thank you, David. I have a couple of pretty good examples from that talk that will take us to it. Now, here's some audio from that talk. I just want to play it real quickly, hopefully. This is actually audio of the bags of gold talk on top of NASA's If I Ruled the World. I don't know if you know NASA's The Rapper. But this was done by none other than Tom Woodward. So let's listen to this. And this is actually excerpts from Gardner's talk. Mixed up. There we go. This is always the great deadly zone of biochemistry, the neurons. We live in an age of marvels, making a substantial difference. What a waste. Why is this not happening? We've had the internet. We've had computers. We've had possibilities. Is this making a difference? When's the tide turn? When do we actually get to the place where we can say, yeah, we're on the upswing? I'm going to force through this. We're really going to make it. I'm going to get a good feeling about this. That that is true. It makes me do what I do. I say, well, I have a bag of gold. Would you like a bag of gold? And people say, where do you find time for bags of gold? Is that sustainable? Sustainable? Sustainable? No, you spend it. What would you spend it on? What would you like to spend it on? I don't have time for your philosophical questions and ancestors. Gold? Is that sustainable? Sustainable? Sustainable? No, you spend it. Well, what would you spend it on? What would you like to spend it on? I don't have time for your philosophical questions, Gardner. Air Education is a place where we train people to be able to take advantage of this to the fullest and surprise us with the things we haven't discovered about what this can mean. But whatever it means, and we may disagree about what it means, look at that. It's a bag of gold. What part of that do you not understand? I'm not saying that this is going to be easy or that it's not going to have problems or be fraught or spawn a whole new wave of Miller cyber computing crime. And there are great possibilities there. Why does that not make a difference? Why hasn't that made people stop and say, oh, I guess I could recapture a sense of wonder under these circumstances? It's a bag of gold. What part of that do you not understand? I don't understand. It's interesting because Gardner Campbell's notion of this, and there's an Occupy We Are The 29%, that visual right here was made while I was in the tent by Michael Branson Smith. So they were starting to do the Twitter We Are The 29% and Occupy Open Ed, and he actually created that creative on the fly, shared it through Twitter, and immediately I had it. What's interesting is these assignments that you see, this is Michael Branson Smith, and I'll talk more about him at the end of this presentation. He made, he was down at Occupy Wall Street, and he was actually broadcasting through this thing called DS106 Radio that I'll talk about soon, but Fat Chance, banks take a responsibility. He did all these monopoly cards, and he shared them. And this was part of an assignment that he created for his students using this course DS106, and that's my favorite one, Fat Chance Public Education Funding Sees a Renaissance. I think we all can relate to that. That's why we have the Gates Foundation here telling us we need to find money, because it's not coming from the states. It's not coming from the federal government, and that's a travesty, right? We need to live with that. Now, Occupy Open Ed is the hippie I blame for this presentation right now. This is Gardner Campbell. This is the man behind the bags of gold talk, right? He, you might know him for his famous book, Love Analytics. So, unlike the analytics you're talking about, Josh, this is the analytics that open education should be about. An analytics of love, an analytics of community, an analytics of connection, an analytics where people come together to think about ideas and share those ideas. This is not what happens when we turn resources into objects that are commodified by companies. That disaggregates the whole community. That kills us dead in our tracks. And that's a real danger. I don't think corporations are bad necessarily. I just feel better when they're not around. Now, this is actually the very specific essay, personal cyber infrastructure that Gardner Campbell wrote that got me excited. And that last image I have to give a shout out to Noise Professors Act Owl who created that on the fly while we were at ELI in 2010, or 2011 actually this year. Personal Cyber Infrastructure. This was an essay written by Gardner Campbell for EDUCAUSE. And what this essay very simply says is, students need to take control of their own learning. They need to have a space online that is not necessarily an intermediary of the institution. Set up their own web host and then become sysadmins of their own education. They control it. They manage it and they master it. And it's this idea that out of that talk, no more digital facelifts. And this is an animated gif, which I'll talk about more, by Julia Forsythe. And this was the name, it's a very hard one to look at, isn't it? And this is actually the name of his talk, no more digital facelifts. But we came to know it as the bags of gold talk. And this talk for me was inspirational. This talk for me and the anger in Gardner's voice and the disappointment with the whole movement really crystallized for me. It's like, I don't care about what institutions are doing. And I don't care about the funding and the grants because I'm not going to fit into that form. But we can still do something. And we can do something on a grassroots movement that will change the way we think about education, institutions, and higher ed. And so what happened is this. Digital storytelling is a class that started at University of Mary Washington. And thanks for the shout out, Josh. It's awesome. We're a small school, so no one knows us. So when someone does recognize us, I get a little tingle. So I was tingling in the tent. You can quote me on that, tingling in the tent. DS106 is actually an experiment. It's a class I've taught for four semesters. And the first two semesters, I just basically, you know, had this class was thinking about a new way of having students get their own domain, their own web hosting, and they managed their own website. And from those blogs, we aggregated to one main mother blog. And all the work that's happening, we follow and we comment, and it's a community of creation. We do design assignments. We do visual assignments, mashups, videos, et cetera. It's a fun class. Well, Donna, who's here, hello Donna. She actually said to me, you know, I really like what you're teaching your students and I really want to learn this whole web hosting stuff. Is there any way you could do this thing online? You can open it up. And I was like, well, I guess, but I don't want to throw the party that no one comes to. You know what I mean? Like you don't want to be that guy. Like here, my class is open. And then like you hear the crickets or the cicadas in Australia, and like no one's coming. So regardless of that, I failed before. I'm not, you know, people either love me or hate me, I understand that. So I just threw it out. I just kind of changed my whole life view of what open means in terms of engagement, in terms of experience, and in terms of coming together around ideas and sharing. And I think we're not just talking about sharing. DS106 is an example of living it. That's the full life. This is an experience of being not an open educational resource, but an open educational experience to quote Gardner Campbell who said this last night. So DS106 is a course and you can kind of see how it works. You have the blog posts aggregating into one WordPress blog and when you open it up, it's an interesting thing. We had 75 students taking it at the University of Mary Washington. Three sections, 25 in each section. Then we had another 400 students sign up online. Anyone could take it. It was completely open. Almost 400, I think maybe about 100 or 150 did assignments and a core of like 50 or 60 stayed through to the end, which I think is amazing. But the question that's bagged, and I'm going to give a lot of credit to Chris Lott for opening up this, the question that's bagged is what is a MOOC? Well, a MOOC, has anyone ever heard of a MOOC? Okay, a few of you, right? Not to be confused with MOOCA, which is cow and Italian. Or not to be confused with MOOCY, who's the star of Do the Right Thing, right? So we're doing some disaggregation here. A MOOC is a massive open online course. And this was started, the concept was started by George Siemens and Stephen Downs, as well as Dave Cormier, and actually David Wiley did the first kind of MOOC. But what was interesting about David Wiley's course is it wasn't massive. It was just an open online course. And I think the massive here can sometimes confuse, right? We have the change MOOC going on right now, and we have a really massive course at Stanford, right? Have you guys heard of this? This is insane. When I took the screenshot, there were 95,000 people signed up. I think they ended at about 200,000 before they closed registration. I guess they ran out of seats, okay? That's a joke. Okay, so the point being here is these MOOCs have kind of taken off. But one of the things that I think MOOCs have forgotten, and this is part of that massive, is when you call it massive, it kind of, your responsibility to the course and to the students disappears. Well, it's massive. You're on your own. DS106 is simply an open online course. It's a course that anyone could take, and in fact, it's the experience of taking the course and the community around it that matters. The resources are just fun. The resources are just what you do to connect. The objects bring together the people, and it's that bringing together of the people within the course that matters. So I don't think DS106 is a MOOC. I think much in the spirit of David's early open online course, it's simply an open online course that anyone can take. The difference is invitation. And I owe an Al Levine credit for this. We did a lot of effort. We made a lot of effort to go out and get people to take the course. Come take it. Have fun. We tried to build a community around the course. We tried to make the course exciting, fun, and a way for us to build these networks. So DS106 is not an open educational resource. It doesn't fit into that model. It's not something you could package up and put in OCW, right? It's not something that would live in a repository. It would make no sense. What it is is an open educational experience. And we need more of them. Because in all this talk, I never hear about what is the relationship between people and network that builds. How do students connect with one another? How does that experience we hear about them again and again as these abject people who can't do this? No, they're alive. They're active. They're creating. And we need to foster that. We don't need to create an objectification of that outside of the actual practice of teaching and learning. So, one of the cool things about DS106, and this blew my mind, and Martha Berthes and Tom Woodward deserve full credit for this, is we allowed students to submit assignments. We used a simple Google form. They submitted an assignment, and we have now a repository, oh my God, I said the word, of 200 assignments that anyone could do. And these are submitted by students. I used to teach this class eight big assignments, and they were all mine. And I was so proud of them. But Tom Woodward said, you know, your assignments kind of suck. And I was like, upset, of course, and you know, you have the ego and all that. But I was like, you're right. And he's like, what you should do is let students decide what they want to do. And give a form for them to do it. And when we did that, we got this. All sorts of really amazing assignments. Some, which I didn't like at all. Some which I loved. I don't know if you can see this, but this is a full icon visual. A rug, a toe, and a bowling ball. Anyone know what movie that is? Little Bowsky. Isn't that awesome? So that's assignment that was submitted by someone in this class. I love this one. It's called the four icon challenge. This is 1984, which Gardner had referred to recently with Blackboard. I love that. Because they're like, Blackboard's now open. When did that happen? It's not Rip Van Winkle. It's like, hey, we're open. What? We're weird. And then they're like, hey, how can you not believe we're open? I don't know, because I've been in ed tech for the last 10 years. 1984, look at this. This is an assignment submitted by someone who never signed up for the class, never did anything. It's what I call a drive-by assignment. And I love the idea that someone took the time to do a drive-by assignment and then they got out. How many students in your classes do drive-by assignments? Hey, I'm just going to stop by and do that really fun polynomial and get out of here. The other thing about this class is when I opened it up in December 10, 2010. I was in Italy and I was kind of writing up the thing, and Tom Woodward put in this assignment called the Animated Gift. And from December 10 to January 10 when the class started 200 people had done an Animated Gift. The class hadn't started yet. It was a month to the class started and 200 people did an Animated Gift. Why? Because they wanted to. Because it was fun. Because they connected around it. Because that sense of community and experience and sharing and writing up tutorials and thinking about the work we do is just as valuable as any open educational resource that we've ever created. And that's something you can't battle in the same way as we're trying to hear. It's a different relationship and we need to think about network learning in different ways. You're right, Josh, 10 years on. We haven't done things differently. But what we haven't done differently is we haven't brought the people into the relationship and understand that content is one small part of the educational experience. One small part. When I was a child of the 70s and 80s like me, you remember these DC comics? I used to give these out in sixth grade to the girls I liked. Like, here's this. What happens? This reemerges in DS106 as an assignment. We have... We are a team. You're nice. And this was Tim Owens's kind of homage to DS106. Tim Owens is a very interesting story. He was fixing laptops at Longwood University in Virginia. He got on to DS106 thanks to Tom Woodward, and he started rocking it. He was doing assignments like you'd never believe. I was like, who is this guy? He's like, well, you know, I fix laptops, but I really want to do instructional technology, but I don't have a master's. And we had a position open up at Mary Washington at DTLT, which is the single greatest instructional technology group in the world. And we had this position open up and I said, Tim, come work with us. He's like, I can't. I don't have a master's. I said, apply. Tim Owens is now, because of DS106, an instructional technologist with us. And he's blowing minds with video stuff he's doing, open video. And I'll talk about that in a second, but it's just amazing to me. DS106 was great for actually recruiting people. That's a difference. Recruiting people. What happened is when Tim did that, we had students who loved it. So you have Superman, or I don't know who's saying you looked hotter online. Depending if you're a man, it's Superman. If you're a woman, it's probably like Wonder Woman. Like, really? But anyway, it's fascinating. She did these great Sarah Coons. She was an amazing force of nature of Mary Washington. She did these amazing kind of mashup articles. And when people would share assignments, other people would take that assignment and mash it up. And so the actual assignments became this communal sharing and communal relationship. And what was interesting is how many of you have tried blogging in your classes? Or tried blogging? A few of you, right? The hardest thing about it is to get people to comment. When you would put a post out for DS106, within 10 or 15 minutes, you'd have, like, 10 comments. And students would, like, break down. They were like, who's stalking me on this site? Like, I'm not used to getting comments on my blogs. But we had this community built in where people were locked in. And that feedback loop didn't depend on me. So how can you teach a class to over 150 people? Well, you don't. And you don't try to. You distribute it around a community and you share that. And that changes the whole notion of power. Of our ideas of expertise. Of our notions of professionalism. When you put students in a position of power, they run with it. And here's a perfect example. A student did this assignment called The Poetry Playlist. Her name is Colleen. She did this assignment and I kind of thought it was stupid. This happens to me all the time. I see these assignments, I'm like, really? That's your assignment? But she submitted it and it's free. You can do it. And then it was called The Poetry Playlist. You'd find your iTunes or your Windows Media Library or whatever. And you'd find titles for songs. And you'd remaster them into a poem or a short story. She did it. She had fun with it. About 50 people from all over the world did that assignment. From Portugal, from Australia, from Japan, from South America. And she was like, what the hell is going on? And people were like, Colleen's great assignment. And they had no connection with UMW. And here is actually how the assignment repository works. You have the assignment and everybody who blonde it and tagged it properly, all those assignments show up under it. One of the things that 106 has done over time is kind of a residual effect is it's actually left a whole series of not only cool assignments but great tutorials and great examples. And that's a community you can immediately tap into. That's a new kind of thinking about engineering a course that puts people at the center. You can also find people in Australia who mode DS106 into their lawn. This is not unheard of. In fact, I have a picture of it. Isn't that insane? Peter Ron Roan-Peter actually did this. He's in Melbourne and it was actually summer while it was winter for us in Virginia which is always trippy. And on DS106 radio he'd go out in his backyard with his mobile device of choice and he'd record the cicadas. And we would hear them and I'll show you how in a second. So this is yet another assignment. I still haven't done this one but this summer I promise I will. One of the problems out of this is DS106 radio. I'm not going to talk too much about it because there was a presentation about it yesterday. And thank you all for coming and for your positive feedback. We do think this is important and it has a lot of power at educational institutions. DS106 radio is the brainchild of Grant Potter. Hopefully this shows up. Let me just go here. Actually, let me start. Grant Potter would show up. Grant Parson's shirt. Playing guitar. There it is. Grant Potter actually put this together. Technically, he was up in the University of Northern British Columbia. It was dark as it gets there. Chris Lotton and Grant could attest to that. They live up in Alaska, Northern British Columbia. But he said, you know what? Me and Brian were talking about, we don't want to use Illuminate. We don't want to use Adobe Connect. We want to use something different. And we're like, what about a radio station? Because Brian and I had been talking about this radio station and Grant was like, yep, I can build it. And a week later he did. And the class was never the same after that. And there were some really powerful implications of what happened. Right? We had people like Mikhail Gershovich who's here today sharing his story, talk about sharing stories, sharing his story of growing up in Riga and coming to the U.S. when he was eight and what him and his parents, it was him and his parents over Vaka getting bombed talking about their experience. And it was amazing to me because it captured a notion of communist Russia during the 70s that I as a kid from Long Island only had the other view of. Only had the view of kill a commie from Mommy. Right? And a big nice tattoo. And here I have, Mikhail sharing me a completely different view of that. We had, in terms of using it to connect, we had Brian Lamb who comes up with his mash-up talk which was for the DS106 class and he'd gone out and interviewed the mash-up artist Vicky Bennett also known as people like us. And this was amazing because it was a completely auditory experience that not only the 75 people at Mary Washington could listen to, but whoever around the world could tap into thanks to the radio. And those radio waves were just coming out there. And what we were teaching was as easy to access is tuning into a radio station. That's important. That's open education. That's easy and there's no one who's on the outside of it. And you can share great stuff in audio. Sometimes we spend, and I quote in credit, sometimes we spend too much time trying to focus on the video or the visuals. Audio is enough often. We're just talking. I can't undervalue Twitter in this whole experience. Twitter was amazing. It was amazing for following all the work students did in the class, but also remaining following all the stuff that happened on DS106 radio. Twitter became a place for us to connect. Students would hashtag all their work immediately from their blog, using Twitter tools or something like that and immediately I'd be able to follow on Twitter what they're doing. And then also go to their blogs and comment. Twitter became a spine and a backbone to the communication not only for the class, but also for DS106 radio and still is to this day. If you hashtag anything DS106 radio, Dr. Garcia will invite you in. She's amazing. And I think we have a community here that transcends anyone technology. What's the coolest about me, about this for me as a teacher is that this Twitter bot DS106 radio that anyone could follow was developed week three of the class by Aaron Clemer who's a student at Mary Washington. He's like, you know what? I see what you guys are doing with DS106 radio. I can develop technically a bot that will record will grab all the information from the server and put it out there so anyone could see what's happening at any time. And this was an amazing technology developed by a student on the fly at Mary Washington that brought the community together. You could see when people went live. You could see what song was playing. You could get a sense of what was happening within that community. It was amazing and a student did it and no one told them to do it. It wasn't an assignment. It was a communal act that pushed the experiment forward. He also created a game with a class called the Beneath and it was based on Gardner Campbell's Talking Bags of Gold. So there were a bunch of bags of gold that you had to get but you were locked in blackboard. So you were trying to get out of blackboard and get the bags of gold. So it was this amazing kind of tech game. In this rudimentary, he was learning as he went. He actually narrated the whole thing. But this is a student who's involved. That is not a resource. That's a student and his name is Aaron Clemmer and he's doing awesome stuff. I love that guy. DS106 TV, right? This is another thing that came out like the radio. Timmy Boy, who I hired on, came up with this. And this, for us, has become something that we did the entire summer class on, but Todd Conaway had the first broadcast on DS106 TV from the Grand Canyon. The vertical and the horizontal. We got the radio and we got the video. We have the means for production. They're in our hands and they're cheap. We don't need book companies to create our books. We don't need Gates Foundation to fund all our work. We are doing it! People are already doing it. Why do we have to go through the mediation of all these other people? We at DS106 have done it and only good people came together around it. Timmy Boy, he created DTLT today which is an amazing TV station, no commercials, no ads. We're running it on our own media server and we're running it on an iPhone and videotape you guys right now. It's amazing. He's coming up with this stuff and this guy's been fixing laptops before DS106. Minecraft. That's noise professor up there. We had this Minecraft server that Zach Davis set up for us because he said, you know what? If you do cool things, then we need it. And students went in there, I never really went in there and they built stuff and then and then and then the summer of oblivion which for me is my high point in my hope career ever. This is what I call a pedagogy of uncertainty. What I did one morning and I had this idea based on the great Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg who's a hero for me Cronenberg was actually a student of Marshall McLuhan's. He was really into that. Well there was a character in video called Dr. Oblivion and Dr. Oblivion was trippy because for 27 years, he had never dealt with anyone face to face. It was always through the medium of the screen. That's always how we dealt with people and I was thinking like this is my first fully online course. What if I treat it like a character and I teach it as if I'm Dr. Oblivion I've never dealt with someone for 27 years and I'm teaching the class as if I'd never met a person for the last 27 years. So I became a character teaching this class as a student and that's me. Isn't that trippy? I woke up one morning, I shaved my head I had a thing and my wife I came down and my wife and kids were like what the hell's going on as a character and the students were like you know I said I'm Dr. Oblivion you will introduce me to my TA Jim Groom and then they were like wait I thought Jim Groom was teaching the class nope I'm teaching the class so students didn't know what was going on because I look so different but what happened is I started to freak out I started to have real identity issues come day three and I was like I don't know who I am anymore and my wife was like look you know you're on the other down to the couch you know I can't sleep with Dr. Oblivion I could sleep with you so I was freaking out so me and DTLT Martha Birdis and Lee Alice who's a student came up with an idea Dr. Oblivion goes missing and then Jim Groom takes over and puts the cat in the sunglasses and so then the actual thing the class was trying to teach digital storytelling it became true the class had become a story and it got crazy we had students Alan Liddell who the class got so crazy that students started to do a news on the march and they started to actually document all the nuttiness that went on so here's a good example get ready for this genius no one told him to do this he just came up with the idea let's hope it loads because it's fun on the march sectionalism rocks the Oblivion I'd camp as D.A. Jim Groom goes mad with power and banishes DS106ers on mass defund the Oblivion pickers while DS106 burns and so clearly new leadership is needed the first martyr to the cause after the Oblivion is a robber who was banished from DS106 after questioning Groom's seemingly absolute authority so let it be noted in the annals of history that DS106 is hereby dissolved its power over our minds illusory and its message of total student domination illegitimate from the ashes of DS106 arises a new order DS107 led by none controlled by none for the benefit of all those secretly from the oppression of the T.A. we are the true heirs of the legacy of Dr. Oblivion and we declare before the world that our purpose is to depose the monster all to see with that in mind to carry on the legacy of Dr. Oblivion with your radio and me what happened was I as the T.A. started to banish students who questioned my authority I'm like you're banished and the students didn't know what to do I was really playing this so they were like screw that we're going to start another class DS107 and that's going to be the real class and how many of you if you teach classes if your student starts a kind of radical sect you know that you've achieved every goal you've ever wanted to do and they were out there they would do an art DS107 became this thing and we're stand by you Dr. Oblivion Jim Groom he's a tyrant it was awesome so we had Michael Branson Smith who used a tool called Storify to document the whole thing and it's brilliant and there's a resource this will be online if you want to see all this stuff I may not have time to go through it but then other people became Dr. Oblivion giving a presentation for the class via video and then slowly as you had cuts he had a mustache and then he had this on and then he wore the Dr. Oblivion jacket and you see what it became it became a storytelling trope that the class had fun with and we reimagined what it meant to teach a class online why would we do a lecture when we have this medium that we've just begun to explore why would we waste our time this medium demands new methods it demands new senses of community it demands new notions of experimentation I think we're way too proud of what we've accomplished and the thing is just starting to open up we can't rest on our laurels now Martha Burtis she was really the one behind the killing at Camp Oblivion because all the students were ultimately killed it was a tragedy I know but they were killed and Martha Burtis was mad because she wasn't selected as the TA for DS 106 I was so she went crazy there she is it was a great jacket now what we have at the end is Jim Groom and Dr. Oblivion having a face-to-face heart-to-heart let's listen to this you can actually hear Dr. Oblivion and this is trippy because I don't really make the distinction I think Dr. Oblivion is a real person so you might want to I might want to go to a hospital soon or something so here it comes ready go ready go Jim Groom what happened why did you banish the people from DS 106 what's great about Dr. Oblivion is he drones on he's the most boring professor he has nothing to say but he's kind of fun and the students learn to love him well DS 106 doesn't end there there's a second wave happening and I got a lot of criticism DS 106 is all about you it's all about your personality who could do DS 106 if they're not Jim Groom I was always like really whatever actually that actually criticism is proving false because I don't know if you've heard of looking for Whitman it's a project that was funded by the NEH back in 2009 Matt Gold was behind it, it was a brilliant project the idea is that five different schools sharing a basic idea around Whitman and a basic syllabus so they do different parts of Whitman's life it was this idea through online and through blogs we could actually communicate with one another well this happened again in 2006 thanks to Michael Branson Smith who's rocking out here in New York City and Michael Branson Smith actually has a class at CUNY's York College and his 80 students are taking DS 106 right now they just signed up on the site and the work they're doing is feeding right into that community but it doesn't end there we have another class taught by the great Scott Lowe can I just say for a second how cool this dude looks to me I wish I looked as cool as that he's got hair back like he's totally out of the 50s and a few days on DS 106 radio well he brought his class that he's teaching in Japan on so we have I think it's 40 or 80 students from Japan taking this class and Scott and Michael are teaching those classes we almost had a third class Cheryl Cullen from Scottsdale but well fortunately she got a full time job because she was an adjunct so she couldn't do it but for me the point is this I am interested in open education I am dedicated to the idea of open education I am not dedicated to the idea of distilling that into the notion of a resource rather I am dedicated to the idea of building an experience a happening around that process and allowing us all to engage in what we're doing in education in the first place it's a communal act it's not just about picking up a lecture when you can between long drives it's about really connecting whether online or in person with other people and if we forget about that I think we forget that we're not computers Sebastian we're physical so I'm going to end with a little song for all of you