[best] Open is the new black...

Oops, I forgot to post my monthly 'best' pick. Every month, I share what I found the most interesting or inspiring article in the blogosphere. It is not too late: the title above is a quote taken from Michael Feldstein's e-Literate's blog post "Perhaps open is a flag of my disposition". Why do we see so much 'openwashing' going on?

The article deals with two very different kind of 'open' and 'free' announcements in October: Pearson announced a free, open, cloud-based LMS OpenClass, available within the Google Apps for Education platform. The other one is Blackboard's announcement on CourseSites. Both are interesting movements in the educational space, coming from a publishing power house and the number one educational LMS vendor respectively. I'll leave it to you to dig into the specifics of the announcements, and make up your mind. I'll just make a point to consider moving to cloud based platforms.

• Cloud: Schools (and most organisations for that matter) should not have to worry or reserve budgets to maintain server parks with LMS and other systems if they are available in the cloud as well. BUT, only if they can trust the cloud system to be good enough (speed, security), if they can trust it will exist next year and the provider won't change the rules along the way. 
• Platform: with platform I mean an extendable system, like Facebook or Amazon are. An application hosted in the cloud is not good enough. You need to be able to build upon it and leverage what others have build upon it. It is one you can integrate into your own applications via APIs, where others can add their own applications to.

For both announcements, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but I'm curious to see what happens. I'm sure I'll have lots more insights into Pearson's OpenClass next week, as they are one of the main sponsors of Online Educa Berlin. I don't know what their key note topic is about, but it is going to be this platform is my guess ;-)

Open and open and open is three... There is a lot of 'open' going on in the land of learning, even before it became 'the new black'.

• There is of course open source. Moodle is the most popular open source LMS for example, although I also like ILIAS, Sakai and Dokeos. 
• There is open content, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare or Khan Academy or anything licensed under Creative Commons.
• There are open standards, such as SCORM, AICC, Common Cartridge. Speaking of open standards, and relating to a previous 'best' on a simple future for SCORM and LMS: the tin can project has an update: there is an API spec out, and samples and a sandbox site for you to test out. (If you do, let me know, I'm a bit time constrained these days....)
• Last month also had a special week, the open access week. From their site: "Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fifth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Also an interesting read from the past month: Hans de Zwart's warning that technology is not neutral in this open world...

Digital Civil Rights (Bits of Freedom)

View more presentations from Hans de Zwart

What I also liked this month that was in the running for 'best':

• 147 super-entities dominate the networked corporate world : networks have a natural tendency to create super nodes
• Mindomo now has a presentation mode, like a 'prezi light' interface. Nice way to passively move through mindmaps.
• Techsmith launched a coaching app "coacheye" for iPhone. While this is intended for sports use, this is a very interesting development from one of the established players in the learning technology market...