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Today I want to take you through a bit of a historical journey. We're going to talk about the factors that led to the development of the Massive Open Online Course and Connectivism and the new phenomena in learning today. But, a few preliminaries before I start the talk, because it's all about open education. :)
This presentation is available now at that website. The slides are already posted on the website so you can download them at any time. They're pretty close to what I have here. I was making some last minute changes during the introductions.
There will be audio recording as well on this site. And I know that they are recording video back there but I always like to do things myself as well. So I'm recording video off of my own computer and I'm just using Google Hangout so it's free.
And because I can, I'm broadcasting this talk, using a YouTube live video stream, to people around the world. I have no idea how many people are watching this, probably not that many, maybe none. But the idea is that it's possible.
Online learning begins in the 1980s, it begins in the 1990s and it's born out of two major things. And like the strands of DNA we will see these things repeated through the history of online learning. The first basis is in distance learning. Distance learning is the idea of learning that takes place outside the classroom at any time, at any place. Distance learning therefore required the creation and distribution of learning content, of course packages that would support independent study.
The other basis for online learning is the traditional classroom, learning that we all grew up with, where there is a class, a cohort of students, who go through a body of content or a curriculum, who interact with each other when they conduct activities and conduct projects.
We see the two major sides here. We see the content side, and we see the interactivity side. And there are two major pedagogies of online learning when they're born out of these two bases.
There is a transmission model of learning that is born in more transactional distance learning, distance education. It has its origins in communications theory, and it's about the integrity of the message being sent from the professor to the learner and being able to be sure that what was received by the learner was the same message that was sent by the professor.
We also have a more recent theory, constructivism, which has so many varieties I cannot count and won't try, but it's based essentially on the idea of social interaction, negotiation of meeting, finding a common ground, and a model of learning where learners construct their own model. So the content models of distance education with the course packages and the content would follow the transmission models, and the class-based interactive models, which follow the constructivist model.
In the mid-1990s, people began to develop learning management systems. I'm sure you're all familiar with learning management systems.
It's a basis in technology that we all understand and we're all more or less comfortable with. Companies like Blackboard and WebCT and Desire2Learn started companies, commercial enterprises, based on the idea of managing online learning.
They had these two different models. They had the model of the course packages, and they had the model of the classes. WebCT in English stands for "Web Course Tools." It was intended to be a set of tools that a classroom instructor would use, but it was adapted to distance learning.
In addition to this commercial stream, we had the open-source stream and, most especially, learning management systems called Moodle, which I'm sure you may be familiar with, and Sakai, which is less common, but was created by a consortium of American universities.
So we had two models for learning management systems. One model where the company, and Blackboard began this way, would post all of the technology on their site, and you would buy the service from them.
Or the other model, where you would obtain the software and install it and complete the work yourself and host it on your own website. You see what's happening here, underlining these already, we're beginning to get the basic building blocks of technology and pedagogy in models of online learning.
For the rest of this stuff, you'll see more and more of these building blocks being added and interconnected. As my wife likes to say, "It's all a great tapestry."
Early online learning featured conferencing and this, of course, would be the interactivity type of online learning. I remember in the 1990s taking a massive Internet course "Welcome to the Internet" and it was delivered by email. I would sign up for it. It was based on a mailing list. Thousands upon thousands of people would receive emails every few days introducing them to a new aspect of the Internet. It was my first experience with massive online learning.
There were also conferencing systems, early conferencing systems. Early discussion board systems. People would log on and leave messages. Simple to be able to use that technology. We began to see systems like FirstClass developed specifically for online learning. Here are technologies that may not be familiar with you because they're so old. They disappeared almost a decade ago but they were important elements in the development of the Internet we have today.
Of course, we had instant messaging. I remember using ICQ. In English, it stands for "I seek you." ICQ. Get it? Very clever. That was copied by AOL instant messaging and Microsoft messenger. My ICQ number was 1287181. It was one of the earliest. I was so proud of it, a low ICQ number, and then the company went away.
At the time, things began to be more formalized and an idea came out, partially out of the United States, partially out of Canada, mostly out of the military and the aviation industry, to create something called learning objects. The idea of a learning object was to patent some educational content, digital content, in a standardized way. There was something called LOM, Learning Object Metadata, that was used to describe these objects.
The intent here was to create a system whereby educational resources would be discoverable, sharable, and interoperable, where we could have a common pool of learning resources that these technologies could draw upon. This is a very significant development and people today say learning objects were a waste, but they were not a waste because they established the fundamental principles of educational objects, educational resources, and the sharing and distribution of these resources.
Then the IMS, the Instructional Management System consortium, based mostly in the United States but with participation around the world, built a series of standards around learning objects. One of these was content packaging. Content packaging was a technical way to represent the original distance education course packages. Learning design was an attempt to emulate what was called programmed learning in the course packages, a way of leading the student through the materials one step at a time. It was the idea of managed learning or learning management.
Over time, the concept of learning objects and learning object repositories lead to the idea of learning object repository networks. We can picture this really simply in our head. We think of learning objects as objects, maybe like books, maybe like Legos, maybe like flowers, whatever. A repository is just a place where we keep a whole bunch of them. The idea is we create our learning object and we store it in the repository.
Over time, as different institutions developed their own repositories, to encourage the idea of sharing, they created repository networks. I spent a number of years in Canada with people from across the country building a repository network of Edusource. Edusource no longer exists, sadly, but the idea was interesting and we learned a lot during it.
One of the things we learned was the tension that exists between open online resources and commercial resources. When you're creating a network of repositories, how do you enable sharing freely while at the same time allowing commercial resources to remain commercial and not shared in the way music was shared? This was early 2000/2001/2002. Content producers looked at things like Napster and music sharing and they were having heart attacks.
One of the reasons why our repository network failed was because of the constraints that commercial publishers wanted to place on it. There's a fundamental dichotomy between open content sharing and commercial markets and that's what we were experiencing in repository networks.
There were also open content repositories developed around this time. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) created software and a set of specifications for uploading and downloading objects from repositories. That was taken by MIT and turned into something called DSpace. That exists even to this day. It's used mostly for academic publications, not so much for learning objects and learning resources. That's because academic publications is a big industry, learning resources not a big industry. So far so good? Excellent.
It's like this story. We progress through and bit by bit we're adding elements to the mix here. It's important to see this not just as a history but as a cataloging of the elements that are going into contemporary online learning. Here's another major element, and this element was developed around the same time as the learning management systems and around the same time as the learning objects, and that is the idea of learning communities.
I remember doing a talk about Etienne Wenger and mispronouncing his name the whole way through. That was the first talk I recorded on audio so the evidence falls into the saying, "Sometimes there are mistakes you cannot escape." The concept of the community of practice is important. It actually has its origin in the philosopher Thomas Kuhn who talked about networks of researchers who shared a common paradigm.
Kuhn is most famous for the idea of scientific revolutions, but equally important, I think, is his characterization of what he called "normal science." What "normal science" is, and I should probably put it in quotation marks, what "normal science" is is not simply the facts and the data related to a discipline. Physics, the discipline of physics, is not simply about the formulas but it's the vocabulary, it's the interaction, it's the shared assumptions, it's a common understanding of what evidence is important and what evidence is not important. It's the dialogues. It's the feel for what it is to be a physicist.
Kuhn used to say that the knowledge of being a physicist isn't the material at the front of the chapter; it's knowing how to solve the problems at the end of the chapter. It's a way of seeing the world and being able to solve the problems is demonstrating that you see the world in the right way.
This is a kind of learning that is generated not through transmission, not even through knowledge construction, but through something else. The ideas of community and practice are important and the fundamental building blocks to the concept of learning that we have today. Like everything else, there were the, what would we call them, open communities of practice. We've heard so few formal accounts. There's almost no history of them.
Then there were the more commercialized communities. I remember being hired by the University of Alberta to create a commercial community practice called MuniMall and it was modeled on a book called "Net.Gain" by Hagel and Armstrong. The idea of this online community was that it would be like a shopping mall. A shopping mall of physics or, in my case, a shopping mall of municipal governance.
The idea was content providers would share their resources or, more accurately, sell their services and their resources, and participants, people who work in that community, would interact with each other. The interaction part of MuniMall worked really well and, in fact, the community lasted for 10 years from the original design. The commercial part, not so much. Interesting lessons.
As we began to see more of these connections, we began to see learning objects. We began to see online communities that look like shopping malls. We began to see content packaging. There was a stream of thought based on the idea of open source software, based on the idea of open sharing and open content. It came, over time, to be called Open Educational Resources. This name, Open Educational Resources, was formalized by the UNESCO in the early 2000's.
The idea represents educational content that is shared openly. They came up with an early version of open content and an open content license and the idea here is that a person or a company or a university would create an educational resource like a learning object (but maybe not a learning object; we don't need to be that particular) and would attach to it a license that allows it to be shared freely. The resource has two parts, the content of the resource and the license.
A major initiator of that support for open educational resources, I'm sure many of you are familiar with this, is Creative Commons, and, in just the same way, Creative Commons is a way of attaching a license to a piece of content to allow that content to be freely shared. This is really important. It's really important because the default assumption for content is that content is privately owned and cannot be shared. In my mind, that's the single largest barrier to open learning as of today, the default assumption that open learning is illegal, and so we need the licensing to make open learning legal.
If it was up to me, it would the other way around. If it was up to me, content would be free by default but if you attached the license to it then it would be commercial, but people don't agree with me on this. It's interesting, though. I look sometimes at the roots of open content licensing and creative comments and think that open licensing and Creative Commons come out of the same place that open source licensing comes out of, places like Berkley, places like Stanford, places like MIT.
At MIT, I give a talk and saw Richard Stallman's office with a paper handwritten his name on the door (since he's not that permanent). It's interesting that this perspective, that the default is commercial, and the exception is open, has its origin in these major commercial American universities. We will come back to that.
My involvement in open educational resources, aside from producing them, producing photographs, producing reporting, whatever, was in the area of sustainability. I did a study for OECD on models and sustainability of open educational resources. This is where the thread of sustainability enters the picture. Hasn't been in the picture so far. We've had the thread of opening resources versus commercial resources or open source software versus commercial software, but now we have this idea of sustainability, which is almost like the middle ground.
The core idea of sustainability is, if you have or if you want to produce open educational resources, how do you pay for them? That's a good question. I analyzed a few different models of sustainability that existed at the time. This is a quick summary. That picture looks much nicer on my screen.
One model, and this is a model that's actually in the field of academic publishing, is called the Gold model. It's a model where the author pays a fee in order to publish the resource and then the publisher makes the resource available. There are some journals, academic journals, that operate along this principle. I don't know of any educational resource initiative that operates on this because I haven't seen a big willingness on the part of people who create educational resources to pay for their publication.
It happens informally a lot. I pay for my own website. In a way, that's an author pay system. People pay for their own Internet access and that's kind of like an author pay system. There's certainly an element of author contribution here. The size of that element of author contribution tells us how accessible the market to create open educational resources is for people. People don't often think about that.
Another model that's very popular in the United States is the foundation model. You have the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, you have the Wellcome Trust, you have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There's the Shuttleworth Foundation and there are many other foundations. What these foundations do is contribute money to develop the development of learning resources.
The thing with the foundation model is, foundations run out of money or foundations stop providing money. So when you're funded by a foundation, you are always faced, at the end of this funding, with the question now of "How do we become sustainable?" About half the time what happens is the open educational resource becomes a commercial resource.
I just spoke of David Wiley. He was involved with a company called Flat World Knowledge. Flat World Knowledge
Here's the public service model, and that's actually mostly my model (where I work). That's where government pays for the cost of the infrastructure and the cost of ongoing support. It'd be very similar to the public broadcasting model. Is there a public broadcasting in Colombia? There is? It's one of these things I should check before I do my talk. In Canada we have the CBC, which is a publicly funded radio, television, and Internet broadcasting.
Just as an aside, it should be available here - if you want to hear great new Canadian music go to CBC Radio 3.. Fabulous. I hope it's available here. I listen to it all the time. It's all independent Canadian music. It's like the open educational resources of the Canadian music industry. I love it. That's an aside.
Finally, there's the community model. The community model is very important because the community model taps into the idea of the community of practice and it taps into the idea of the people who consume, to use a bad word, that consume the resources are also the people who produce the resources.
In the end, this is the model that I recommended to OECD. The pro-commercial organization promptly rejected it, but the model is that people create their own educational resources. People create their own educational communities. One of my major arguments for this is, in the long term it's the only truly financially sustainable model, the community based model of resource production. Any other model, I think, will eventually lead us to a commercial model.
We have, now, this other piece of the puzzle. Around that time, things really became interesting because the idea of consumers producing their own content was found not only in learning but in the Web as a whole. In English there's a term "prosumer." It's a combination of the term producer and consumer. Is there a similar term in Spanish? Sorry? Prosumiero? I'll work on the pronunciation of that after the talk.
This is happening around the middle of 2005, 2006. People were now gaining access to websites and web services that allowed them to create their own content. These are all sites you're familiar with. Blogger.Right? Blogging exploded. People don't talk about blogging so much now but there's a lot of blogging happening right now. YouTube. Right? Remember when everything was YouTube? YouTube was going to change the world? It actually did change the world in many ways. I'm using YouTube now. Hi, YouTube people. A site I use a lot to store photos, because I take a lot of photos, is Flickr.
It's interesting because these content sharing sites adapted an innovation that was created by the instant messaging services. Remember I talked about ICQ? The way ICQ worked was you have a list of friends. AOL called them buddies (typical AOL casual language). I don't know what MSN network called them because I never used MSN network. The idea is you would have a list of friends. When we started using systems that allowed us to create our own content like blogging systems we imported this idea. The original version of blogging was something called the blogroll. I don't know if there's a Spanish word for that but in English it's the blog roll. It's a list of blogs that you read.
Also in other things, content sharing sites like what came to be called social networks the list of friends almost became more important. What you had was a combination of content creation and a list of friends. Everybody focuses on the social of social networking, but the content creation is equally important. Facebook is the world's largest repository of photographs. People don't realize that. They should because they've been uploading them like crazy.
A content sharing network like Twitter borrowing from SMS, which is why they use 140 characters. With these kind of services comes a bit of an evolution in our understanding of what a website actually is. It used to be all about presenting content. Web 1.0, that was old learning. That was the content based paradigm. Web 2.0 became about interaction and communication and it made us think about content a bit differently.
Content is very important. It became data. Content was something that was stored in a database and then presented in different ways or shared or manipulated around what was called the mash-up.
The mash-up, what you'd do is take content from one database and content from another database and mash it up. You would take Google Maps, for example, and a list of every Starbucks and create a map with all the Starbucks on it (which I never use because I hate Starbucks). In Canada we have Tim Horton's coffee.
What's interesting is these websites became places not only where you shared data, they became places where you manipulated data and created new data. Websites actually became like little programs, like little applications. There was a slogan, "the Web as platform." That phenomenon is still very much at work today. Every website you go to almost is a platform of some sort. Different platforms, different ways of doing things, but what they are all doing is integrating data. All of them, except old websites that were created in 1995 and nobody's done anything with them since.
Here's what I worked on. This is a version of Web 2.0, a version of the whole idea. What I would do is, I would take data from different websites in a data format called RSS and all you need to know about RSS is it's content computers can read. That's all you need to know. I would take that content and I would use my computer programs to join it and use my computer programs to filter it and produce output. That's pretty handy.
I started, for example, and I did create a single feed (which is what the output is called, a 'feed'), a single feed of all the content about a certain subject. I have one you can look at it now, I'll do it right now, listen to the music, on www.mooc. [indecipherable 0:42:21] . It looks like a great site, that I write every day, but I don't. I read it. It's pretty interesting. I don't do a thing to create it. It's just aggregated content on the subject of MOOCs joined together and then output as a newsletter.
This is an incredibly powerful technology. I cannot emphasize how powerful this technology is. It puts into the hands of people the capacity to create qualitative resources, the capacity to bring resources from wherever they may be on the Internet and create a single resource. Or the capacity to create a single web page that is dynamic, that is always current, and draws on data from different places.
If you go look at a weather page they operate in the same way. Exactly the same way. There are hundreds of weather stations around the world and they pull these weather stations, the content is in a certain code, they decode the content, and then they present the information. That's how weather sites work. This leads us directly to the concept of connectivism.
You see how easy this is? We've gone from connecting content, connecting content, to connectivism. The idea here now is that we have all of these resources, all of the content produced by all of the people on their blogs, on YouTube and Flickr accounts, wherever, and you can have all of these people with lists of their friends in social networks maybe or as email contact lists or whatever. They create this network. We have the technology now, finally, to join all these things together.
Connectivism is the theory of education that you come up with when you think about how education can work using this connected technology. The term, of course, derives from George Siemens who wrote an important paper called "Connectivism" and he describes connectivism pretty much as a pedagogy.
The phrase, "I store my knowledge in my friends," is one of the slogans from his original characterization and the idea is I do not need to memorize everything I know, in other words I don't need to know everything I know, I simply need to know where to find it. It's a new type of skill. It's the skill of creating networks and traversing networks. It's a new kind of understanding.
My contribution to connectivism is the depiction of knowledge as a network state. What I mean by that very precisely is to know something is to be in a certain connected state. That's kind of a hard concept, in one sense, but it's an easy concept in another sense.
To know something, in my theory, is to be able to recognize it. That's how I know Diego when I see him. He doesn't wear a name tag, although if I did that's how I would recognize, but I look at him, I see his face, I do this. Sorry, I'm just kidding. I recognize him.
That's how a physicist solves the problem at the end of the chapter. The physicist looks at the problem and recognizes "Oh, it's that kind of problem." What is that recognition? What is that capacity? We, as humans, are composed of a network as well. It's a neural network. You have, I don't know, 100 billion neurons. These neurons are all connected to each other.
To learn is to create those pathways between neurons. To know something is to have a certain set of connections. What happens technically and literally? When I recognize Diego certain connections fire in my brain. Those connections are created from previous experiences. That's how I created them. I got out there, I went to Columbia, I saw Diego, I walked around, I talked with him for a while. I'm not very good with faces so it took several visits. I formed the neural network in my mind.
What's interesting about connectivism is that societies learn that way, too. Societies have knowledge that way, too, and this is what George was seeing. George was seeing social knowledge. I see personal knowledge. It's two different kinds of knowledge but it's created the same way.
In society, we connect to people and we connect objects like learning objects, like flowers, like maps, like YouTube videos, like photographs, like pictures of my cat. We connect all of these together. What a society knows is expressed by those connections. Society learns by creating new connections. There is some knowledge that only a society can have. It's knowledge so large, so complex, no individual person can have it.
There are examples all around us of that kind of knowledge. Look at this room. Could any of you or any one person build this room? Not possible. Nobody could know that much, especially if you include the computers and the software on the computer and all your clothing and all the wiring and the lighting systems and the translation booth and the knowledge of two languages to make that work. No one person could do it, but collectively, or maybe more accurately cooperatively, all of us together, through interaction, create the knowledge that is represented by this room.
This phenomenon of creating knowledge in an object is called [indecipherable 0:50:40] in English. I have no idea what that would be in Spanish. It's the same thing for an anthill. An anthill shares knowledge one ant to the other by creating physical artifacts. A scent, a tunnel, an object left behind. That's how ants communicate, using objects.
We have this picture of connectivism. We have this picture of learning as connecting, as knowledge, as a network of connections. We have this idea of learning as immersion into an environment. What we want to do, what we want to happen, is for people to recognize.
We know that we cannot create recognition just by telling people things. You cannot create recognition just by describing. Sometimes people can recognize me by description, but generally it doesn't work very well.
In order to recognize you need to be in the situation, you need to be practicing with the materials that you want to be able to recognize, the type of material. There's a whole complex series of connection through inferences that we make. Jay Cross characterize this as informal learning, and what is informal learning? Informal learning is learning that you conduct for yourself, through your interactions in a community. That's a model that should by now in this talk sound very familiar.
What Jay is adding to the concept of informal learning is that now there's no structure, now there's no organization, now there's no professor. People learn for themselves and they design their own learning. This was demonstrated, and I thought demonstrated very effectively in the EduCamps at the edge of [inaudible 0:53:10] here in Columbia. It's a model that's been replicated elsewhere, where the idea is you bring people together, and you don't have a formal agenda of, "First we'll learn this. Then we'll learn this. Then we'll learn this."
What you have scattered around in a room are different stations. People who have knowledge go to these stations and share that knowledge. People who need knowledge go to these stations and listen to the people who have knowledge.
Except they don't just talk and listen, they actually have whatever it is that they're interested in right in front of them. They can learn to create blogs by creating blogs, learn to record audio by recording audio. The structure is not defined. There is this concept, and this is what EduCamps come out of, this concept of conference that is generally called barter camps.
A barter camp is simply a room, or a series of rooms, and a starting time. You say, "We will have a barter camp at such and such a place at such a time." You might suggest a topic, online learning, audio recording, high definition photography, whatever.
People arrive in the room, and if they have something they would like to share, they write it up on the wall. If people are interested in learning about that, they sign up for it. If you put something up on the wall and nobody signs up for it, that's fine. You go somewhere else, and you learn from someone else.
There is no preset structure there. The idea of running these barter camps is, "Whatever we talked about was the right thing to talk about. Whatever the outcome was, was the right outcome." It's the idea that, when people interact together in this kind of environment, in this learning environment, they are able to self organize.
They are able to prioritize their own learning. It's a very interesting and different educational experience, and it gets you right into the community that you are trying to learn about. The technological equivalent of the barter camp is the personal learning environment.
This is a diagram by Scott Wilson who works in Great Britain. The idea of the personal learning environment is that you treat the entire word as your learning environment. Then you connect to different kinds of resources. You can connect to blogging sites, photo sites, learning management systems, to-do lists, videos, your own website, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you want. The actual technology is RSS or other standards similar to RSS.
The same sort of bringing together of content, that I described earlier, happens in a personal learning environment. Learning as a whole in this model, becomes a network created by hundreds, thousands, millions of individual personal learning environments.
Our learning network is, each one of us connected to our list of friends, our list of learning resources, our list of activities. Connecting to them, making new connections, interacting, creating this new [indecipherable 0:57:30] . By this interaction, by a creating these connections.
Into that mix now, comes the idea of open courses. If you think about it. Here's our personal learning environment. Here's a learner, a student, a person who wants to learn. All of these around the student, are open educational resources. If you organize them a little bit, or even just create an environment for them here, and called it a course, now we have an open online course.
The idea here is, that an open online course is composed of. Well, I'll come back to that, whatever a course is composed of, but the important thing is that it is open. That anybody in the world can access that course. Without paying money, without filling in a form, giving your email address, and your telephone number, and your dog's birthday.
Stephen: Open courses have a long history. Open courses began to exist in the idea of "OpenCourseWare" created by MIT. Yes, the same place that we got creative contemplacency from.
We get a number of initiatives. MIT OpenCourseWare, and then there's the OpenCourseWare Consortium of various universities producing the same thing.
What this is is all materials that you would need in a course, the readings, the curriculum, the problem sets, maybe some videos, etc.
Connections is the same thing. It was created at Rice University. What they did is they created an environment that course authors could enter and use to create their open courses. Pretty innovative. A lot like Blogger, only for courses.
OpenLearn is an initiative of the Open University of Great Britain -- still exists, very important, very widely used -- that has complete course packages.
You remember at the start of this topic, talking about the two models of distance education? One model was the content model. This is the twenty-first century version of that model.
Edith, a self-standing course package, is programmed learning. It takes you step-by-step through the material.
We have the commercial models, we have the publicly supported models. We also have the sharing or open-source models. I mentioned three here, WikiEducator, Curriki, and Wikiversity.
They are all initiative that use a wiki, which is simply a website that anybody can read and anybody can edit. They use these websites to create courses or to create curriculum.
The model they follow is Wikipedia, only they use the Wikipedia model, instead of creating an encyclopedia, they create coursework. Good idea.
David Wylie -- remember him? -- created a wiki for his course in open educations, the course that he taught at Utah State University and, later on, at Brigham Young University. The idea that he had was to make the course materials that he was offering his class not just readable, but editable by anybody.
Reinhard Weiner wrote up a whole bunch of his classes for him. Well, I didn't write the whole class, but I wrote bits and pieces and added stuff and gave myself all kinds of credit.
Man 1: Good tip.
Stephen: Alec Couros, who's an instructor in Saskatchewan, Canada, launched open courses and what he did is he opened up his online communications environment. He was using, and still uses, I think, a product called Illuminate. Today it's called Blackbird Collaborate.
What he did is he said, "I'm having my course in Illuminate at such-and-such a time. My class, from here in Saskatchewan, will join me, and anyone else in the world who wants to join me can do so as well.
Now, that was pretty cool. His [indecipherable 1:03:09] and there's people from around the world were sitting in on Alec's classes and interacting and discussing the topic of the day.
If you think about it, it was a way of giving the students in his class a way to become a part of a wider community. They wanted to learn of it, because now, instead of just talking to each other, they started talking to experts around the world.
That also happened in David Wylie's class. Now, instead of just getting content from the professor, they were getting content from anywhere around the world.
What's really cool here, I think, is by opening the content and opening the interaction, we're almost able enough to blend these two major threads of distance learning, the content and the interaction. Opening them both, we can make them both work together just in the same way we did with e-learning, just in the same way we did in things like [indecipherable 1:04:27] and informal learning. Now we're doing this in an institutional environment.
The very first Nice chain to be called massive open online courses. When you first look at them, they're a horrible mess. What they are really is a combination of all of the things that I've been talking about so far in this talk. All of the different pieces of the puzzle come together to form these massive open online courses.
The very first MOOC was hosted by George Simmons and myself. It was called "Connectivism and Connected Knowledge" and we launched it in 2008. This picture is a representation created by one of the students in the class. It was a representation of a class. We didn't do this. We couldn't do this.
The idea here of MOOCs is to take the concept of open content, the concept of open interaction and open community, and the concept of open classes and bring them all together. That's exactly what we did.
We offered it out of the University of Manitoba. It was a credit course and the students who were enrolled in the University of Manitoba needed to do some assignments and we opened it up to anyone in the world and we had nearly 300 people join us and that was a real surprise to us. That's when open online courses became massive open online courses.
How did we design this? Remember, we are creating a network and remember that to learn is to create a network, knowledge is the state of the network. I asked what constitutes successful knowledge, successful networks? That's a good question. We all know about networks that can fail. The power grid is a network. When we have a blackout it fails. A community of people is a network, but if a disease comes through and wipes out half of the population that's a failure.
These things are called cascade phenomenon. What it is is the network is effected by a force that attacks every entity all at once and it leads to segmentation and network fail. A viral idea or a piece of propaganda is a cascade phenomenon. You have an idea. It can be something simple like a tune, like a [indecipherable 1:07:55] tune maybe. They were pretty viral. One person says it and then two people and four people and eight people and eventually everybody's singing a hit song.
An idea like racism. Again, one of these viruses that starts in one place and they can spread through society as a cascade phenomenon. It's an example of network failure. You need to design networks so that they can grow, so that they can adapt, so that they can change, so that they can learn. Just the same way as humans. You need to design humans in the same way except you don't get to design humans. It's hard. You don't really get to design societies, either. They're too large for one person to design.
What you do is you can design the pieces that go together. You can design the properties that, when combined, will lead to more effective network. This is what I call the semantic principle. Sorry about the name. What these are, are my idea of principles of successful networking. I don't pertain that they're necessarily true or that all of these can only lead to work but they are what I see at this point in time from my vantage point.
Autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity. Diversity. You think about a network, you think about a successful network. A successful network is made of pieces that are different from each other, not the same. Imagine you had a conversation where everybody said the same thing. Imagine you had a debate where everybody had the same idea. These would not be productive. They would not lead to anything interesting. Networks need diversity.
Networks need individuals with different points of view. One of the things that we really tried to promote when we designed our MOOCs was to promote the idea that people would read different things and not the same things. We did not have a single assigned text. We had 100. Nobody can read 100 texts but you would pick and choose from those texts and then everybody would have a different perspective and that's how we had interesting conversations.
Openness. We need to be open to new information. Closed systems become stagnant. Closed systems literally choke on their own waste. The system has to have input, has to have output. Raw materials that come in, finished product that goes out. The idea here is for any communication to happen there needs to be an open flow from one entity to the next entity. This is why so often we find openness in conflict with commercialization, because commercialization very often, not always, but very often is based on a model of closing what was previously open.
Autonomy. This is a hard principle for many people to accept, but it's the idea that each individual manages his or her own learning. As John Stuart Mill said, "Each person in a society perceives his own good in his own way." This is essential to produce diversity. This is essential to produce communication and interaction. It is essential to support learning.
If you do not have autonomy then the knowledge of one becomes the knowledge of everyone. If the one is corrupt then everyone is corrupt. Autonomy is what protects the system from cascade phenomena that damage the network as a whole.
Finally, interactivity. This is the idea that I was talking about earlier that knowledge is created by the interaction between the members. It's really important to think of this because in traditional learning, remember the transactional theory of learning where the knowledge is in the head of the professor and then will be put into the head of the student. This model isn't like that. In this model, the knowledge is created by the interactions.
When we interact with each other, we as a group, or maybe not a group, but we as a network will create knowledge that only the networks could create because it's too large for any one individual. Then each individual in the network will look at that knowledge that we created and learn their own thing from it. All of us together form a society. That society is greater than any one of us. Then each of us individually draws an individual meaning, individual knowledge, from that society.
That gives us a story about MOOC pedagogy. That gives us a story about self-directed, informal learning where the process is informal rather than the content, where the emphasis is on selecting these resources, finding these resources, creating them, mashing them up, mixing them, using them to communicate with each other.
The pedagogy of MOOCs is the pedagogy of immersion into a community, of interaction with that community. The technology supporting the MOOC is the technology that has been used to support these learning object repositories, these social networks and social networking sites, these individual places where you can create content, these RSSs that join content together.
Think about the sort of content repositories you have now. One famous content repository that, all at once, was called the Khan Academy. All the Khan Academy was, originally, was a bunch of individuals. Very badly done, but well enough done that they worked. They weren't produced by a professional corporation. They were produced by some guy who knew a little math and physics and wanted to share. That was our learning object repository.
It's not a horrible institution that created objects anymore. It's a community based model. When it began, Khan Academy was a community based model. Then the Gates Foundation got a hold of him and it's not community anymore. It moved into a different model which will eventually lead, in my mind, to commercialization.
There are different technologies. There are a huge, huge range of technologies today for creating, updating, polling, and sampling these repositories. I mentioned Sword, which is a deposit for polling contributed content to a repository, Core, which is a way to connect repositories, and Saw. This top is too short to allow me to even begin to list these, but, trust me, there is a lot of technology for creating and linking repositories.
Interesting work that is about to begin, that is beginning, is our ability to build personal learning environments and MOOCs that tap into repositories. This is software I built in order to do this task. It's called Grasshopper. The model is really very simple. You get input from community, input from content. You put it into a database. You turn your content into data. You mix it and mash it up and then you send it forward as email letters, as web pages, or as RSS or other feeds that will feed into somebody else's Grasshopper.
This is also a model of the activity that individuals are expected to perform when they take a MOOC. Aggregate, re-mix, re-purpose, feed forward. That is the pedagogical design of a MOOC, at least the MOOCs the way they should be. In this environment, we are working with open content and it works best with open content. As soon as we put a barrier then your aggregation and re-mixing begins to fail.
We also opened not just the content, we opened the instruction itself. We opened the way we organize our courses. We combine our courses in a wiki. We opened up the course sections. The year 2008 we did two sessions a week. We had several hundred people at first join these. It got kind of chaotic but that was fun. Different degrees of openness lead to different types of open educational resources and different kinds of open courses.
James Taylor or Jim Taylor from the University of Southern [indecipherable 1:19:47] has come up with what he calls a logic model, which is neither logical or a model but I digress. I'm kidding. Talking about different aspects of openness. Accessing open educational resources. Accessing open support via volunteers. This is what I would call accessing the community, interacting with the community.
Open assessment. This is the next stage of these open online courses is open assessment. Then finally, open credentials, open degrees. There are degrees of openness here beyond what we have experienced thus far. We've begun to explore them in the MOOCs that we've begun following up.
In CCK09, our second MOOC, much to our surprise, the students from CCK08 came back and then, even more to our surprise, they started teaching the course. We had competing teachers of the same course. It was all very interesting. Jim Grim's course, DS106, and I can do a whole talk on that, several talks, had an emphasis on projects and creativity. DS stands for digital storytime. It's about how you use different media to tell stories. They explore different types of media in different ways of telling stories.
He opened that up and what he opened up was the list of assignments that he gives students. He said, "I don't want to be the one to decide on the assignments. You," to the world, "you come up with assignments and then the students will do them." people from all around the world suggested different assignments and it became creative channels. It was amazing. It was wonderful.
Another course we did was critical literacies. That focused on the underlying skills because one of the common comments we have is people need to have certain literacies, certain basic abilities, in order to be able to learn for themselves. I gave a talk and asked could we use a MOOC to teach how best to use a MOOC? We use a MOOC to help people learn basic skills.
It still is inclusive, I think, although we learned a lot. I started in 1995 with something called "Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies" as my first open content. This whole idea of critical thinking and critical reasoning has been something interesting over the years. This is the latest phase of that. I think, personally, that we can indeed use distributed, open, online learning in order to foster the skills needed.
You need to think of this as a process where people learn through immersion and they learn good argumentation through immersion. They can learn how to spot good resources through immersion. It's exactly how somebody learns how to make a salad or cook a steak. You put them in a kitchen, you tell them to do things, they begin to do things, they watch the master, and eventually they become it. It's the same with critical thinking. It's the same with critical limits.
After we had been doing MOOCs for three years, commercial MOOCs came on the scene. The first one that was launched was the Stanford AI course last year. It attracted, I don't even know what the real numbers were, but something like 160,000 registrations. I think something like 40,000 people finished the course, I think. I don't know.
Different sources have different numbers. The main message here is the numbers are huge. Then there were commercial spin-offs from this based on models like Khan Academy, based on the traditional elements model. The idea is they would be MOOC companies. They would offer courses that were very similar to the Stanford AI course.
The Stanford AI course was not a MOOC the way we did it.
The Stanford AI course was the course materials and the course sessions open and accessible online. Then assignments were given. What they added, which I thought was really interesting, was automated evaluations of submitted assignments. I find it very interesting that this model of content-focused MOOCs, which is what they are, they're content-focused MOOCs, there is no element of community in them, these models came out of the same places as creative comments, as MIT open source.
They come out of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, the large commercial US universities. There's a certain way, a certain approach, that they have.
Now, we're in a world of MOOCs and certainly in my world, and maybe in your world, when I read about educational technology today everyone is talking about MOOCs. MOOC this, MOOC that. We offered a MOOC on the future of higher education. I was at a website. Here it is again. www.mooc.ca. If you go to that you will find links to hundreds, maybe thousands, of MOOCs.
MOOCs of the connectivist model that we use, we call them CMOOCs, MOOCs of the MIT, Stanford nexus or XMOOCs, MOOCs that are network based like the ones that George and I built, MOOCs that are task based like Jim Grune's DS106 with all the projects and assignments, MOOCs that are content based like Stanford AI. Of course there are other [indecipherable 1:27:17] .
The future of MOOCs...I'm really sorry about this diagram. That's me drawing by hand inside the Illuminate environment, but it's a visual representation of the future of MOOCs. At the center, because there is a historical origin of this, are the content based XMOOCs. Around that center is the network, the community of practice, the interaction and participation. All of the elements that went into making the C, the individual creations, the sharing, the aggregation, re-mixing, re-purposing, forwarding. None of that is in the center. All of that happens outside of the center.
In a university context, none of that is in the university. All of that happens outside the university. Outside of the CMOOC are the web services that people use. Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google Plus. Hi, Google Plus people. Delicious. Outside all of that is open assessment. Open assessment may be priority assessment, it may be open assessment as in Indiragandhi national open university. It may be testing. There's a site called Brain Bench that does online testing. It may be [indecipherable 1:29:03] badges. This is the least well defined, but you can see this ecosystem being formed.
This ecosystem is the future of online learning. So where are we going? I'm almost done with this talk. This is the good part so hang up your phones. What's coming very soon, maybe even tomorrow, who knows, I don't know, but soon, open educational apps. Of course. They're based on the app store model. What is the app store? The app store is an object repository. That's all it is, filled with products because it's commercial.
We're moving to an environment, especially looking at Android, where there are open apps already available. There are a lot of commercial applications. If you're wondering about the future of books, the book becomes the e-book becomes the app. Instead of buying a physics text book you will buy a physics app. That's the content. You still need the community around that.
MOOCs, with access to app repositories, people will use different apps, they're already beginning to use them, to create other apps and to share. That's why you need open apps, so everybody can use them. These, in turn, as they get more and more interesting, educational content will be supported by things like IMSs, learning technology integration. All that is is language that allows one app to launch another app.
Remember back in the 1990s we used to have launchers. Now we have learning technology interaction. The idea is if you have a learning resource and you have access to online MOOCs and that learning resource wants to start a chat you use LTI and starts the chat. If you use the same resource on a different MOOC you use LTI to launch a different chat. It's a bit complicated, well, it's a lot complicated. In essence, it is a way one thing can launch another thing the same way even though it's not the same as the first one. That wasn't clear at all. It's an app launcher. With the app launcher in MOOCs, an open app market will emerge.
Here's the same concept represented visually. You see how bad the text based engine is. You have all these different kinds of systems, your learning management systems that I talked about at the start, MOOCs, and they use something like a launcher, LTI, so launch, eliminate, or big blue button or a PhD application or perhaps a spreadsheet or widget. The idea of LTI is that it is connecting distributed applications to educational worlds.
The next step is we move beyond the idea of stand alone courses at all. This is already beginning to happen. When it hits it's going to be this huge wave. Right now, the model is a course belongs to a university or a course belongs to a college or a course belongs to a school. What if it didn't? What if the course was just out there? Then the university accessed the course as an external resource?
That's what's happening. That's what the course server model is. They have a very narrow definition of a course, but basically you have a course and then all of these university partners access this course. If you have one course being accessed by a university, why not by two universities? Why not by three universities?
Even better, why not have the people of one university communicate with the people in the other university? Why not have these people communicate with the wider community? You have this idea of the course at the center, it's that same picture we had earlier, the badly drawn picture, the course at the center shared by different universities. It becomes the nexus for a community, the nexus for a community practice, around that particular course.
In the far future, courses will be out there on their own. They'll have their own management, their own structure. Or maybe not. They might just be a self-organizing community that a university taps into. You sign up for physics at MIT and your professor say good, sign up to the global physics community network. That's your course. Interesting. Makes you wonder why you're paying MIT $35,000 a year. Assessment models are going to change dramatically.
Now already, today, there is commercialized assessment that stands apart from courses. Here is the model. Again, this is part of the courses and part of the university's plan. You sign up for your course at MIT. The professor says, "Here is the worldwide physics community. Go there, learn something, come back to me."
You go there. Now you're in the worldwide physics community. You're interacting with all the people and you're learning from learning objects and watching videos and then you go back to the MIT professor and the MIT professor says, "OK. Now we have an assessment for you." He sends you to the Washington Post Kaplan assessment service. You do your assessment and then Kaplan sends back your assessment results to MIT and MIT gives you a degree and you've just received an MIT education. Only $34,000.
In the far future, this model would be subverted because people will realize that it is ridiculous. In the far future, the idea of an assessment service will make less and less sense because you have been participating in MOOCs. You have been participating in your community. You have shared your content, your communication with other people. You have made connections. They know you. They know your ideas. You begin to develop a reputation in that community.
That reputation in the community is your assessment. Right now it's very simplistic. We have clouts that counts the number of Twitter followers and says if you have a large number of Twitter followers you must be very intelligent. Pretty stupid. Pretty simplistic. That's what killed my clout. Imagine if you're using big data network analytics so that if you write a post or you create some content a system can track the ripple effect of that content through the network. It can see the influence that you have, can see the push back that is created, which is also good.
You want people not just to agree with you but to disagree with you. The worst thing that can happen is if you are ignored. Seeing who is listening to you, seeing who is arguing with you, seeing where you place in that network. Where you place is a set of coordinates. That set of coordinates is a grade. That's assessment of the future. Almost done.
Sustainability. How on Earth are we going to pay for this? $34,000 MIT degrees is not going to work. There are many, many people now attempting to defend traditional education with traditional classes and traditional universities and at the top you have MIT and Stanford and all the same people who take these ideas and commercialize them. Then you have your mid-level universities like University of Alberta, University of Toronto, and then you have Frank's Garage College or whatever.
This model won't work. This model will be replaced, must be replaced, by a community based model and the reason for that is in the long term it's the only sustainable model. It's the only way to pay for a system that enables everybody to be educated.
What you're going to see developing over time, what we are already seeing develop over time, is this community infrastructure. This is very often the part that is going to be provided by a social service or a government entity.
Some entity with the resources to create a communications infrastructure and the interest to see it happen. Governments understand the need for communications infrastructure and the need for a certain level of education that is provided for everybody. That's why your government has invested so much in education. That is why my government has invested so much in education.
There is a dramatic relation between education in society and the level of achievement and the standard of living in that society. This is why governments find this so important and why, in my mind, they should find it even more important than they do.
You will have a commercial layer. It would be foolish to think there would not be specialist commercial services and there will always be competition between these services and the government infrastructure. That's just a little bit at the center.
The vast bulk of learning will be these communities that are created. It doesn't show up well on that slide. I should rewrite that slide. The vast bulk of education will be content communities where learning content is created by the learners themselves and then shared with each other.
It's an iterative process. It's a process that actually feeds into the professional domain of activity. I'll give you an example of what I mean. Climate monitoring will be something that is very important to people in the future. What is the air temperature, what is the rainfall, what is the wind? You need to get very good, very precise data from a wide number of locations. It's not just at the airport.
People that are experts in climatology would design this system. Professors will be involved. Designers, instrument designers, will be involved. The guy who goes out and installs the weather station will be involved. Students, as well, will be involved. Individual students will play individual roles.
The way to think of climate monitoring as a profession is to think of it as this large network with the experts very tightly connected and interacting at the center and then loosely connected to professionals and then more loosely connected to technicians and then even more loosely connected to students. But everybody playing a role in the actual work of measuring the climate.
You don't have the artificial climate student center and then the real climate. Everybody's involved in actual climate measuring, actual climate modeling, actual climate predictions. Learning becomes a member of the profession. Being a member of the profession means being a learner in that profession. Everybody learns, everybody teaches, everybody creates, everybody consumes. As a whole, you create an educational system out of this.
At the edges, the very edges, you have commercial media, you have commercial support, you have products that people buy, Internet access, computers, things like that that have to be paid for. At the center you have the government infrastructure, the core that makes the entire system possible. The bulk of learning in this model is the big middle, the donut that is composed of all of society. That isn't an actual model. I just made it up. I just made up that analogy, but that is the model. That is my talk.
Those are flowers. I don't know what they're called, but I thought they were interesting. They were just on the road. Thank you so much for your kind attention and your patience. I know we'll have interesting discussions about these concepts through the day. Thank you very much.


text:
Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
I got this OSCS clone kit over a year ago and have finally gotten it to this point. I've built and painted up many different helmets in my day, and I have to say, this was the most difficult. More difficult than Fett you say? Well not the paint job, but cutting out the front of the helmet so it can fit around my melon, that was a pain in the neck. For those who don't know, with this bucket, the front gets cut out right in front of the ears and then the faceplate is the re-attached with magnets.
Anyway, I like it, here are some shots:)


text:
The phenomena known to call center supervisors where agents have an inability to remember training, coaching, troubleshooting steps, or coaching from one day to the next.
"Customers have been calling about that issue for weeks! We talked about this yesterday, and you were trained on it. You must be suffering from call center amnesia"
by Setzerx4 July 16, 2012
The vengeful act of crapping on a lover's chest while they sleep.Buy the plush


text:
Get the Wolves newsletter
16:52 6th February 2014
Interview with new Academy Head of Recruitment
Adorning the corridors of the Compton training ground, are photographs of all who have emerged through the ranks at Wolves to progress from Academy to first team.
There are those who have moved on to bigger things elsewhere such as Robbie Keane and Joleon Lescott; those still flourishing at Molineux now such as Carl Ikeme and Danny Batth; and even those who have been and come back such as Leon Clarke.
The ambition of adding more photographs to the gallery currently on show is now in the hands of those who work for the highly-regarded Category One Academy.
And for the recently-appointed Head of Academy recruitment Kieran Scott, that is a challenge to both relish and embrace.
"Wolves are a massive club which has now found itself in League One, but it is a club which appealed to me because they strongly believe in youth," says Scott.
"When I had the interview with Gareth (Prosser) Kevin (Thelwell), Stuart (Webber) and then Jez (Moxey), they were all really vocal about the proportion of first team players they wanted to come from the Academy, which was music to my ears.
"In my position all you are asking for is for players to be given that opportunity.
"Having Category One status, and the new indoor dome under construction, is a big part of it, as well as the club wanting to challenge the likes of Aston Villa, West Brom, Stoke and Birmingham in the local area.
"That is something I feel I can do.
"In my last position at Burnley I was often up against scouts from Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Everton, Bolton, Huddersfield, Blackburn, Preston – and many more.
"I am used to the challenge of fighting for players and we were really successful at Burnley when we did that.
"We were aggressive in our approach and went for the players young to try and instil into them what the club was all about and get them involved at an early stage.
"That's what I will try and do at Wolves.
"I want to be at a club like Wolves which really believe in youth and it has also got the facilities and staff to back that up."
Scott arrives at Molineux with substantial experience in recruitment over almost a decade already.
After ambitions of a playing career with Ipswich were ended early due to injury, an interest in the tactical and talent identification side of the game saw Scott start working for the Scout 7 company carrying out first team assessments for many different clubs.
That led to a position at Bournemouth working under Eddie Howe and Jason Blake, and then Southampton, where he started to specialise in Academy recruitment.
From there Scott landed the role of Head of Academy Recruitment at Burnley, the position he has now taken up at Wolves, starting last December.
There are already many players he has already spotted who have enjoyed international success at junior level or progressed to first team football.
Many of the intake of scholars at Burnley even now will have been taken on via his recommendation, but his complete focus now is on producing similar results at Wolves.
With that Category One status, and working for a department headed up by Stuart Webber, Scott believes it is an exciting time to be involved in recruitment at Molineux.
"Stuart has come from Liverpool and has an excellent background," he says.
"He is very good at what he does bringing in the likes of Raheem Sterling and Jerome Sinclair at Liverpool to name but a few.
"It was an appeal for me to come and work with Stuart, and I look forward to utilising the continued support offered by Stuart and the department.
"Category One gives us the ability to go out and scour the country in looking for the best players.
"We will be in a position to sign them because we will have a schooling side to the Academy that only Category One clubs can have.
"And the Cat One games programme is a massive factor when recruiting any player.
"You also come up against the top clubs every week which is good for pulling players in from overseas and getting players to re-locate from elsewhere in this country.
"For me player recruitment has been something which always interested me even during my playing days, from my early scouting career I had to balance off many different jobs to be able to go off scouting and staying up writing reports late into the night whilst travelling around the country.
"I am still young, at 30, which I view as a positive because I've already been involved in player recruitment for ten years and have built up some very good contacts.
"Hopefully, if all goes well I see myself as being here for a long period of time.
"I've been at Southampton for two years, at Burnley for two years, at other clubs for similar times, but now I want to settle at a club where I can start to see the fruits of my labours with the players coming through.
"If we are signing outstanding players at 10, 11, 12, I want to see those players when they are coming through to the first team.
"And I love a bit of pressure, I thrive on it - I am looking forward to going out and battling with whoever it is to try and bring players to Wolves.
"The top clubs are going to have to work very hard to get a player because I will be there battling them.
"In my opinion this is a very good club going in one direction – which is up – because we have an excellent Academy and staff with facilities to rival anyone in the country when the dome is complete."
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text: Hello, I'm looking at buying a 2002 Suburban from Canada. It is legal to import. The speedomoter shows KMH as primary and MPH as secondary. More of a concern is the odometer is in kilometers. It isn't required, but I'd like to convert the cluster to a U.S. setting. I see they have things like this on ebay. How hard is it to swap it myself? Also, how do I program the odometer? I assume it is illegal for me to do. Is this something a dealer has to complete? Thanks


text:
EpiPen Price Hikes: What to Know »
"Aug. 22, 2016 -- The rising cost of a life-saving allergy drug dispenser is raising eyebrows at the pharmacy counter and on Capitol Hill.
The price of the EpiPen, which treats severe allergic reactions, has gone up sixfold in recent years. "...
(azelastine hydrochloride) Ophthalmic Solution, 0.05%
OPTIVAR® (azelastine hydrochloride ophthalmic solution), 0.05% is a sterile ophthalmic solution containing azelastine hydrochloride, a relatively selective H1 -receptor antagonist for topical administration to the eyes. Azelastine hydrochloride is a white crystalline powder with a molecular weight of 418.37. Azelastine hydrochloride is sparingly soluble in water, methanol and propylene glycol, and slightly soluble in ethanol, octanol, and glycerine. Azelastine hydrochloride is a racemic mixture with a melting point of 225°C. The chemical name for azelastine hydrochloride is (±)-1-(2H)-phthalazinone,4-[(4-chlorophenyl) methyl]-2-(hexahydro-1-methyl-1H-azepin-4-yl)-, monohydrochloride and is represented by the following chemical structure:
Empirical chemical structure: C22H24ClN3O•HCl
Each mL of OPTIVAR® contains: Active: 0.5 mg azelastine hydrochloride, equivalent to 0.457mg of azelastine base; Preservative: 0.125 mg benzalkonium chloride; Inactives: disodium edetate dihydrate, hypromellose, sorbitol solution, sodium hydroxide and water for injection. It has a pH of approximately 5.0 to 6.5 and an osmolarity of approximately 271 to 312 mOsmol/L.
What are the possible side effects of azelastine ophthalmic (Optivar)?
Get emergency medical help if you have any of these signs of an allergic reaction: hives; difficult breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.
Stop using this medication and call your doctor at once if you have a serious side effect such as:
- severe burning, stinging, itching, or eye redness after using this medication;
- eye pain;
- trouble breathing; or
- fever, chills, sore throat, flu symptoms.
Less serious side effects may include:
- mild burning or stinging
- mild itching, irritation or...
Read All Potential Side Effects and See Pictures of Optivar »
What are the precautions when taking azelastine hydrochloride (Optivar)?
Before using azelastine, tell your doctor or pharmacist if you are allergic to it; or if you have any other allergies. This product may contain inactive ingredients (such as preservatives like benzalkonium chloride), which can cause allergic reactions or other problems. Talk to your pharmacist for more details.
Before using this medication, tell your doctor or pharmacist your medical history.
This drug may cause temporary blurred or unstable vision after you apply it. Do not drive, use machinery, or do any activity that requires clear vision until you are sure you can perform such activities safely.
This medication should be used only when clearly needed during pregnancy. Discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor.
It is not known whether this drug...
Last reviewed on RxList: 8/5/2008
This monograph has been modified to include the generic and brand name in many instances.
Optivar FDA Prescribing Information
Additional Optivar Information
Optivar - User Reviews
Optivar User Reviews
Now you can gain knowledge and insight about a drug treatment with Patient Discussions.
Here is a collection of user reviews for the medication Optivar sorted by most helpful.
Report Problems to the Food and Drug Administration
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit the FDA MedWatch website or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
Allergies & Asthma
Improve treatments & prevent attacks.


text:
[quote user="MattMeyerBud"][quote user="bigblue4417"]
During crunch time of Sundays AFC title game, Baltimores best
receiver was being covered in the slot by a second-string
receiver/emergency defensive back. And Anquan Boldin was repeatedly having his way with Julian Edelman.

So whats going to happen when the Patriots defensive backs have to handle Hakeem Nicks, Victor Cruz, and Mario Manningham?

Bad things, man.

The Giants have much better receivers than they had four years ago,
and the Patriots dont have the same caliber of defensive backs that
they enjoyed the last time these two teams met in a Super Bowl.

It didnt help that starting cornerback Kyle Arrington
left Sundays game with an eye injury, but the Pats defensive
backfield has had a rag-tag feel to it all season, and if they nearly
lost at home on Sunday to a team with a far less potent offense, the
Patriots will need the coaching performance of Bill Belichicks life in
order to win this game.

Apparently, the folks who make the odds believe Belichick will pull
it off, given that the Pats are three-point favorites. For amusement
purposes only, dont be shocked (but be very amused) when that number
starts moving toward the Giants.
[/quote]
i was SCREAMING at the TV to throw the ball to boldin. I couldn't believe my eyes...
oh god do I hope Edelman is on cruz
[/quote]there was one play, i think eli either got sacked or threw it away, but they showed cruzs route and he ran like a 5 yard slant,beat his man, then went back outside over the top. he almost ran a circle around the cb. cb got OWNED. it was perrtay.


text: Hey all! Just thought I would let everyone know that Rigid Industries is offering up some light bars on Facebook! It's a photo contest and there are lots of Dodge's and Fords on there so lets show em some GM/Chevy pride! I've got my rig on there and if you were so inclined I would appreceate any and all votes! The link to the Rigid industries contest app is below. Thanks again for your support, I would love to see GM's and Chevy's dominate this contest! http://woobox.com/zm9a3n/vote/for/7679


text:
Hello to everyone!
Luminary Tour Guide Event Starts now!
You can now post Screen Shots of one place of the map of Luminary with your in-game name and server.
Information on what you can have in that map you posted like mobs, item drop, quest, etc. must be indicated. If it's right, you will receive a random in-game item reward.
Post now!!


text:
A friend who will listen to baby mamma drama for hours on end. Generally someone who is so stupified or sedated that they can listen to a drama queen ad nauseum.
Lynn be so crazy. They let her out of the jitter joint and the first thing she do is buy some 40 oz. and spend the day talking up in there with her gynochiatrist. She calls it the poor woman's shock therapy.
by El Franko August 10, 2006


text:
Huvadhoo Aid
Huvadhoo Aid
Employer tags:
Industry:Esc Factor:
Social Impact
Off The Grid
Huvadhoo Aid
Gaaf Dhaal Hoadedhoo, Maldives
Recommend to a friend:
Huvadhoo Aid is a Non Governmental Non Profit Organisation working for the rural development of Huvadhoo Atoll. As a non-profit organisation the funding sources are limited and the amount of funding which the organisation can generate is also limited. It has number of youth volunteers who work for the development of the region. We are an organization that requires a fee from the volunteer.
About us
We are Huvadhoo Aid, a Maldivian human rights NGO who works together for the promotion of youth, women and the development of the community in Huvadhoo Atoll, Maldives. We offer international volunteers the opportunity to come and spend some time with us working on whatever projects they are interested in. From teaching placements to environmental awareness and from counselling to sports instructors, there is something for everyone to get involved in. For a full list of our standard placements, alongside more information on what we do, please visit www.huvadhooaid.org/volunteering. Note that volunteers are not limited to selecting from this list, and anyone who thinks they can benefit the community here is welcome to come and be a part of our organisation. All enquiries can be directed to firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Carey Price's fiance Angela Webber
Carey Price plays hockey for the Montreal Canadians. Thanks to John for the suggestion
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text:
The Antidote to Cosmo
Elizabeth Kantor | Posted 07.29.2012 | Canada Living
Read More: Women's Empowerment, Women, Women in Business, Women's Issues, Elle Magazine, Women's Body Issues, Verily Magazine, Women's Magazine, Body Issues, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Female Models, Fashion Magazines, Canada Living News
So have you seen that statistic about what fashion magazines do to the female brain? Apparently it takes just three minutes of looking at the sculpted bodies of the models to make 70 per cent of women "depressed, guilty, and ashamed." But the new Verily magazine offers something a little more realistic to today's woman.


text:
Jefery Levy
1,596pages onAdd New Page
this wiki
this wiki
| "This isn't enough evidence."
This article is Trace Evidence. You can help the Crime Lab by investigating it further.
|Jefery Levy
Jefery Levy is a director on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
|This section is a stub and requires expanding


text:
Amanda Bennett:
We need a heroic narrative for death
Amanda Bennett and her husband were passionate and full of life all throughout their lives together — and up until the final days, too. Bennett gives a sweet yet powerful talk on why, for the loved ones of the dying, having hope for a happy ending shouldn't warrant a diagnosis of "denial." She calls for a more heroic narrative for death — to match the ones we have in life.
Similar topics
- Culture
- Death
- Health care
- Life
This video was produced by TEDMED. TED's editors featured it among our daily selections on the home page.
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text:
Another World - Sea World
Trip Start Sep 07, 2008
81Trip End Dec 10, 2008
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Before we chose Seaworld to visit, we looked seriously at the 'Dolphin Encounter' which is a separate park where you get the beach, food and drinks, and around 20 minutes to actually go in and swim with these amazing creatures with an all inclusive cost of around USD238 per person. Now, there's no discounts for children, so do the maths x 7 and the exchange rate, and you will see why we thought we could possible give it a miss. Anyway our second option was the 'feeding of the dolphins' at Dolphin Cove, Seaworld. So that was first up. You pay $7 for a little tray of sardines, and then you go in, groups at a time, and get to hand feed the dolphins and pat them, as they come up to you. That dolphin experience cost us $35 (a much cheaper option) and Ok it's not the same as being in the water with them, but it was an absolute highlight, that we will always, always remember
Straight after that we headed over to see Clyde & Seamore. They are extremely talented sea lions, and star in their very own show. It's a pirate show, with a big pirate ship as the background setting, and the trainers are dressed up appropriately. It's a story of how a pirate captain tries to find treasure. It's so genuinely funny, they are all up there (trainers and sea lions), having an absolute ball. This is not a show to take seriously, but to just marvel at how they can do this day after day, and make it all seem so fresh, and so real. This was probably my favourite, just for its sheer humor, and entertainment value.
For the others, their favourite was unanimously the dolphin show called 'Blue Horizons'. This show involved a number of dolphins who simultaneously performed perfect acrobats, together with human acrobats that dived off swings, rode the dolphins, flew and danced through the air with harness, simulating the flight of birds, hence the whole performance was based on a girls dream, and the performers were all dressed like exotic birds. The whole show, was an unbelievable spectacle, with clever choreography, colourful costumes and of course all brought together by our friends from the ocean. Not to be missed
The other show we loved, was Shamu the Orca Whale. Seeing these massive creatures hurl themselves out of the water was an amazing sight, and it was all based around dreams, and making your dreams come true. We were shown a movie depicting a young boy, who had a dream to work with Whales and had a carving of a whale around his neck, the next thing this 'boy' who is now a man, and one of the trainers, appeared on stage, with this carving still around his neck. As we had walked in to get our seats for this show, we were approached by a man that obviously works on the show, and he offered Tara an opportunity to 'star' in this show; she turned it down. Harrison asked if he could be in it, but he didn't want to say yes until he knew exactly what he had to do, blow by blow. I told him, that sometimes you just have to take a chance, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but he too, would not take the plunge. Needless, to say, when a young girl from the audience, got to stand up in front of everybody and tell them what her dream was, and was lead up to a small stage to stand right with these whales, and the carving placed around her neck, I could only look at Tara and Harrison ... what could I say?
After we'd done all the shows, we went to see the Penguin Enclosure, The sharks, the stingrays and on and on. In between that, we went to Journey to Atlantis so the boys (and Greta) could get their 'ride fix'. Great rollercoasters and Gary said it was the best log ride he'd done (including Disneyland).
We finished up on the other side of the park at a ride called 'The Polar Express', where we went on a 'journey' to the North Pole to see Santa
Well nothing is complete without a play in the park. Seaworld has its own version called Happy Harbour playground and is like a little carnival, with rides, merry-go-rounds, sandpits etc.
I was pleased to just sit down and watch them burn that last bit of energy.
An incredible park, that was worth every cent it charged. Yes it appears expensive at USD600 (but that is for 2 parks and includes Aquatica), but with all those animals to look after day after day, I'm happy to pay it. The dedication of all the staff that are so talented it is an inspiration.
The lesson for today - live your dream.


text:
Hi all,
I did a split and had both halves make a new queen. I was able to watch one of the queens emerge on the 5th of this month, I was wondering what is the timeline for her to go out mate then start laying?
I checked the hive yesterday and I saw a queen but no eggs. So that would make it 10 days from emerging.
What am I looking at?
Thank you.


text:
So I have a new Kommer's Big Eddy fillet knife from CRKT. It's an inexpensive knife but I like it so far. Question on the honing is: I'm a Lansky user. This knife has a hollow-grind on the right side, and this right side has an apparent minor grind to the edge. The left side is flat-ground, and has an apparent grind that about matches th3 30-degree setting on the Lansky. This would indicate to me that since this is a fillet knife (typically maybe a 17 to 25 degree hone), there should be an angle on the flat side too.
Anyone sharpened one of these before or have any advice?


text:
Hello Beekeepers!
We just found out we are eligible to apply for a $250,000 grant in a contest offered by Chase Bank and Living Social. There is a interesting Social Network catch. In addition to letting them know what an asset you are to your community, how this grant would help you expand your business and convince them you deserve the grant, you must have at least 250 votes from people on Social networks. We currently have 54 votes, so we really need your vote just to be able to apply for this grant. Its not a contest for the most votes, so you can go and vote for as many businesses as you would like.
To vote, please go to https://www.missionsmallbusiness.com/ and sign in using your Face book account (and possible other social media accounts like Twitter). Scroll down and type Country Rubes in the space and we should come right up.
This grant would allow us to rent a manufacturing space, hire employees, scale up our production capabilities, and continue to come up with new products, all while keeping our products affordable with high-quality craftsmanship to help beekeepers be successful.
And please share this link with your Face book friends so they can vote.
I would like to add a piece written by a friend of ours , Joiex Duncan who got it in a nutshell
'A couple of our dearest friends (and Ziggi's godparents) are competing for a small business grant. Their business started as an idea to address the issue of bees and a way to safely and effectively remove the infestation of mites that has been such a problem in the bee keeping community. They developed a system to eradicate this problem without the use of chemicals or any harmful products. Their business quickly expanded beyond their own power and they soon found their selves putting their self-sustaining organic farm on the back burner while focusing on keeping up with the demand for their product. This grant would help them to meet all of the demand for this brilliant and sustainable solution to a serious problem by being able to obtain manufacturing space, hiring workers to assemble and distribute the product, and enhancing marketing ability. Please go to the site, sign on via your facebook. Scroll down and Vote for "Country Rubes".
And if you have any questions at all, please feel free to call or write, would love to hear from you.
Thanks all
Janet & Mike
Country Rubes Farms and Beekeeping Equipment


text:
Send "Rhinestone Cat Tags Mousy Painted Swarovski Crystals (Option of Heart Or Star Shape) Unique" to a friend
Rate "Rhinestone Cat Tags Mousy Painted Swarovski Crystals (Option of Heart Or Star Shape) Unique"
Write a review about "Rhinestone Cat Tags Mousy Painted Swarovski Crystals (Option of Heart Or Star Shape) Unique"
Small: 1" x 1" wide, about .02 oz (for tiny and small dogs)
Can hold up to 4 lines of text, the more text, the smaller the font
A few things you will need to order the tag:
1. Size: Small (1x1") for teacup, small medium breeds
Large (1.5x1.5") for large breed dogs
3. Shape: heart or star shape
4. Metal Color : Silver Nickel (silver colored, more durable, holds
engraving better) OR yellow bronze (a softer metal, will need cleaning as it will
patina or turn into an antique gold color in salt air or damp environments)
Crystal Coating: Layer added to top of crystals for protection. Super Coating: thicker layer of coating protection is added on top of crystals. Super coating will slightly change the look of the crystals to a non-faceted look, but still showing the crystals.
Each pet id tags is made to order, engraved and cut out of solid nickel silver or yellow bronze, polished & dipped in a protective coating, and hand painted. Then the fabulous Swarovski crystals are added (one at a time!), and a protective coating finishes the top of the id tags for added protection. Tag rings included. Beautiful in person!
** If for some reason the crystals or id tag is damaged during wear, the manufacturer will fix this for you at a cost. Customers are to handle this directly with the manufacturer.
Engraving limitations:
Small tags can easily hold 4 lines of text, 5 lines make the text very small.
Back engraving:
Heart tags:
Line 1: 15 characters
Line 2: 17 characters
Line 3: 15 characters
Line 4: 12 characters
Line 5: 9 characters (line 5 is not recommended)
Bone tags:
Line 1: 15 characters
Line 2: 13 characters
Line 3: 13 characters
Line 4: 15 characters
Line 5: 13 characters (line 5 is not recommended, limits line 4 to 13 characters)
Star tags:
Line 1: 15 characters
Line 2: 13 characters
Line 3: 12 characters
Line 4: 13 characters
Line 5: not available
FEO (front engraving tags)
(one line only on the front of the tag), usually a name
All Small FEO Tags- limit 5 characters (6 characters are possible, but not recommended, if you have a longer name, select a larger size tag)
All Large FEO Tags- Limit 6 characters (7 characters are possible, but not recommended)
Please remember, the more engraving you have, the smaller the font will be. All tags are set up to be centered with the largest engraving print possible to ensure the tag is easily readable.
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text:
Nisswa church's Creation Care Team undertakes green projects
As part of its mission to "renew our community and congregation with a fresh commitment to care for creation and one another in new ways," the Lutheran Church of the Cross Creation Care Team has undertaken numerous projects since forming in 2008.
The team established forums between Sunday services related to "Thinking Green," like local foods, composting, organic gardening, food preservation, solar energy, etc.
It sold stainless steel water bottles to encourage people to reduce single-use plastic water bottles and includes a "Green Congreg-ation Tip of the Week" in the church bulletin.
In 2009, team members began hosting "Sharing Markets" on Sunday mornings in the church narthex, encouraging everyone to bring their extra garden produce, flowers, jellies and baked goods. People may take whatever products they desire and leave a cash donation, which is given to the Lakes Area Food Shelf at the end of the summer.
Through this project the Nisswa church has been able to annually donate $700-$1,000 to the food shelf.
After learning about the health and economic benefits of growing and using fresh, local foods, the care team undertook building a community garden to provide gardening space for people of the community and congregation to grow fresh produce, foster a sense of community and provide a public gathering place for gardening and garden related events.
After receiving a grant from the State Health Improvement Program (SHIP) in August 2010, the care team began construction of the 70- by 100-foot garden with a 10-foot fence and 56 4- by 8-foot raised beds with easily accessible water within the garden for all plots.
The garden is available to people of all ages and incomes. The annual fee for a plot is $20.
Next, the care team had a local landscape designer create a comprehensive plan for the area surrounding the garden to beautify and enhance it.
The first phase of that comprehensive plan was recently completed with a flagstone path and patio with a cedar pergola surrounded by plantings. More plans are in the works, including an extended sidewalk, a labyrinth area for meditation and reflection, and solar panels outside the community garden to help reduce electricity costs at the church.


text:
Flash flooding claims another life
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Mother Nature flexed her muscle and turned Fountain Creek into a roaring river overnight, leaving a man dead early Thursday morning.
Police found the man's body in Fountain Creek near the bridge on Nevada Avenue near Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs.
It's been exactly one month since flash flooding killed a Colorado Springs teen. A 53-year-old man was in killed in a flash flood on Highway 24 in early August.
A police officer patrolling the area near Fountain Creek found the body around 4:15 a.m. The officer reported over the police scanner, "I'm on top of the bridge. He's in the water, stuck in the trees. He's not responding."
Colorado Springs Fire Department's heavy rescue was called to recover the body from the creek. Its team braved the raging water to pull the body from creek just before 5 a.m.
"Unfortunately we lost one of our citizens this evening," said Lt. Scott Reiman with the heavy rescue team.
Reiman said it was a busy night for his team and police as they rescued people in dangerous situations brought on by the flash floods.
"The downpour started late afternoon yesterday and culminated with the heavy flows in our rivers and streams tonight. Fortunately, we had a number of people in their vehicles that got rescued, an RV park that got evacuated. Unfortunately, we lost one of our citizens," said Reiman.
Reiman said the man was in his 50S. Information has not been released about his name or the reason why the man was near the creek bed early Thursday.
The water was flowing at 5,000 cubic feet per second when the body was pulled from the creek. One firefighter described a cubic foot as equivalent a basketball so the water passing under the bridge could be visualized as 5,000 basketballs passing through each second.
"The water was all the way up to the bridge, pushing against the bridge. That's probably a 15- to 20-foot depth," said Reiman.
There was another close call upstream in Fountain Creek near the bridge on Tejon Street near I-25. Police rescued a homeless man caught off guard by the creek's high water around 3:30 a.m. The man was okay and was not taken to the hospital.
Police keep a close eye on areas in flood plains during heavy rain. There is a significant homeless population living near Nevada and I-25. The creek's banks are a popular campground for homeless people.
Officers with Colorado Springs K-9 Unit walked the area around the creek around 7:30 a.m. to make sure other people were not swept away in rushing water. Officers said they did not have any other missing persons reports and their trek was standard procedure after heavy rain. Officers spoke with homeless people camping near the water.
We tell them to keep moving, it's very dangerous, and last night was a great example of how fast the water can rise," said Sgt. Brian Cummings.
Joe Taylor camps along the creek bed. He said his former addiction to drugs and alcohol eventually left him homeless. He's called his camp along Fountain Creek home for 2 years. The creek washed away his tent, and almost took him and his dog with it.
"I felt the tent start going this direction," said Taylor pointed to the creek from his spot on a higher bank. "I said, 'OK, Blue, it's time to go.'"
Police are asking people like Taylor to move away from the creek bed. They don't want to see another life swept downstream.