Earlier today I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with David Wiley and Todd Manwaring as part of their EdStartUp 101 course. We talked for an hour in a Google Hangout broadcast live to YouTube about a wide range of things from the culture of innovation at the University of Mary Washington (at which point I recommended Andy Rush’s awesome video) to the ridiculous push by certain state education systems’ to outsource their expertise (at which point I invoked this article about CSU) to ds106 to the ds106 Kickstarter (at which point I read this quote from Faulkner) to UMW’s latest pilot A Domain of One’s Own (at which point David Wiley got me very excited about the idea again).
It was a far-ranging, but inspiring, conversation. David Wiley is a pro, pure and simple. He makes you feel comfortable, he listens, and he gets you excited about your own ideas. I’ve been feeling ambivalent about a number of things lately, not least of which the push to scale A Domain of One’s Own for the entire entering Freshman class in 2013. Not afraid to challenge my wavering, David got me as excited about the idea as I’ve been all year—in fact I think I needed to hear him talk about it to help me make some sense of it. If nothing else, this was an excellent presentation for me: conversational, free-ranging, and the right inspiration at the right time. It takes off at about minute 20, and the first 4 and half minutes are throw away so skip right to 4:30 for the intro, or just go right to minute 20 or 21 minutes in where the conversation starts to find its groove.
Thanks David and Todd, I really appreciate your giving me the time and space in your class to work through a wide range of ideas, issues, and concerns.
“To get into a community takes time and its painful and you have to deal with people yelling with you on twitter and its not clean and people won’t always say what you want to hear…. it [ds106] doesn’t want to clean itself up like a good ole fashioned MOOC so that it can appeal to the elite universities so that everybody around the world will want to take it…”
Amen.
Has there been any discussion of working with the Office of Career Services to develop DoOO programming that’s open to all students, but that is geared towards juniors and seniors who are applying to internships, jobs, or grad school? That might be one way to integrate DoOO into the student experience in a very practical way. It’s a rough job market, and knowing how to present and promote oneself is a really high-value skill to have. It might also help distribute the institutional knowledge about DoOO so that the initiative is more scalable as it moves down the road.