I was disappointed to have to miss out on much of my chance to participate in class this week due to some personal issues. I still managed to get through the reading and do a little discussion in the forums.

This week we’re talking about Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open CourseWare (OCW). What does that mean, exactly? Open Educational Resources are freely available resources for educators. Open CourseWare is entire classes available online at places like MIT OpenCourseWare and University of Reddit.

The idea of freely available, customized learning resources is one that I find incredibly exciting. As schools move toward increasingly digital curricula, the idea that courses can be tailored to individual students is, I think, going to grow in prominence. This is incredibly exciting for me. As a student with above-average intelligence, I often found myself bored and un-challenged in classes. In the first grade, my teacher once made me sit in the hallway for reading faster than the other students. I would often ignore math lectures in favor of surreptitiously reading a book once I grasped the concepts. Then, when my teacher would spot me not paying attention and ask me a question in order to call me out on my lack of attention, I would simply repeat the question I was asked to buy enough time to answer it correctly.

Classroom-based learning slowed me down, and because I was in a tiny school district (my graduating class was 36 people), there weren’t many options for me. Oh, to have been able to move at my own pace without disrupting my classmates!

Another reason I like the idea of freely available course content is – education in this country is expensive, and that’s a factor that reinforces the gaps between the upper, middle, and lower classes. I have had countless opportunities available to me because I happened to be smart and hardworking enough to afford to pay for what scholarships didn’t cover, and I have had an excellent education. But I have been incredibly lucky, and many people coming from a similar background don’t ever get the chances I’ve had for one reason or another. These people who don’t have the funding for a traditional college education can still learn a great deal about a great deal without giving up much more than time (though the relative expense and lack of availability of high speed internet and computing equipment remains a barrier to entry for those who could perhaps benefit most from this content). Education needs to be much more egalitarian: a right, rather than a privilege.

This week has been a blast in class! Talking about Open Source Software was already exciting enough, and then! Dr. Bonk assigned us each a prominent figure in the open source movement to role play as, and as anything must when including Richard Stallman, open source software using the GNU license, or not using the GNU license, and other people, it quickly devolved into a lot of terribly fun and surprisingly in-character sniping. I broke character exactly once, to post a link to this xkcd strip, which is a favorite of mine, and inspired this incredible photo of Stallman. So it was that this week I got to combine one of my passions – the open source movement – with one of my favorite hobbies – role playing.

Perhaps my favorite “player character” was Laurie, who was assigned the role of Stallman for the week. I was impressed early on by her quick perception of exactly how Stallman communicates in text, but she continued to be a great source of amusement as she teased discussion out of the other folks. If she had half as much fun writing those posts as I’ve had reading them, she’s had a pretty good week. I also rather enjoyed Dr. Bonk stepping in as the “non-player character” who knows everyone (this is a role playing trope. I played THAT VERY CHARACTER last weekend, except instead of being a mild-mannered academic with a legendary collection of awesome hats, she was a Russian assassin. What a varied and interesting life I get to live!)

Connexions. It doesn’t even look like a word anymore. Then again, neither does Sakai. GNU never did to me.

On a slightly off-topic but related note, I was conspicuously absent from the forums for about two days – Saturday and Sunday – which I spent in Indianapolis, dressed up like an elf, hiking across the snow (literally! About two-thirds of my steps I didn’t sink in AT ALL), and hitting people with a foam sword. Oh, and great role playing, too, though our characters are a bit less tech-savvy. Thanks to my armor, I haven’t slouched in two days. I played hard all weekend, and it was one heck of a fun time, but now I’m exhausted. I hope my responses to people’s posts tomorrow won’t be too late for the fun to continue.

As you might be able to tell, role playing is one of my favorite hobbies. I have Live Action Role Play (LARP) games scheduled… well, to be honest, most weekends of the month. I get the chance to play a lot of cool games based on the White Wolf system (Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) here in Bloomington, and then I am lucky to have a large group of friends to game with in Indy, where we play a sword-and-sorcery boffer LARP called Trials of Terra Nova. There’s a game we go to in Michigan that’s also a fantasy setting, but as Michigan is cold, that won’t be happening until May. So, good choice, Dr. Bonk.

As a side note: I’ve got to say, having a blog relating to class is really useful to me because it means I can get off on these only tangentially-connected side stories, of which I have a million. Perhaps I should blog about my other classes as well! Though I don’t think many professors would take kindly to me furiously typing a blog post with a tangent instead of paying attention to the lecture. The game I played this weekend actually is quite notable for its extensive use of various emerging technologies for logistics and communications – in addition to a central repository of files (managed by Google docs, unfortunately, not GitHub), there is a forum and a mailing list, which we can use to discuss things and keep in touch – and in touch with our characters – in between games, which happen once a month.