San Francisco parklets: Good for business?

  SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Putting a park in a busy commercial district to beautify and increase street traffic sounds like a good idea, but some San Francisco residents say it isn't. ABC7 takes a look at the growing pangs of the city's growing parklet program.

A parklet is a parking spot turned into an urban oasis. There are big ones like those near Union Square and smaller ones like the one on Fillmore Street in Pacific Heights.

"We wanted a parklet not just because it was good for our business, but it's a great thing for the community," said Craig Stoll of Delfina. "It's fun and it slows people down."

Residents along busy Valencia Street in San Francisco say there are already too many in their Mission District neighborhood. Five parklets have been installed within three blocks, some right across the street from each other and two more are planned.

"For the most part they're cafe seating for the businesses near them -- sidewalk cafes. And the occasional sidewalk cafe in the neighborhood, I really like. It adds vibrancy to the neighborhood," said resident Kathryn Bowsher. "The question is, how many of them do you need?"

The first parklets in the city were created as temporary spaces in 2005. Five years later the city jumped in to help people make them more permanent structures. They've been so popular, other cities including New York, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago have sought advice from San Francisco on building their own.

"The whole idea is to look differently at how we use our streets, to make them not just for cars, but for pedestrians, for walking, for biking, for hanging out," said San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim.

According to the San Francisco Planning Department, there are currently 27 parklets in the city, another seven have been approved, and 33 more are proposed. More than 70 people have expressed interest in installing one.

"When you look at the total sum of the parking spaces that are removed, it's not a huge amount of parking, but what it gives back to the community is so much more," said Rahaim.

Businesses pay up to $20,000 for the construction, planning and permits for a parklet, then pay the city $200 a year to keep it there.

"I love the parklet," said Tony Azzollini, owner of Caffe Roma on Columbus Street. "It's been very good to us." He says the parklets add a European flair to the neighborhood by providing more sidewalk seating. "It's brought my business up 35 to 40 percent, so in the past year, my numbers are great."

He says that increase in business equals more tax revenue for the city, making up for any revenue lost by taking out parking meters.

But not all the parklets appear to be so well used -- some of them sit empty during the day. A study released last year by the San Francisco Great Streets Project found that while most parklets increased foot traffic in the neighborhood, not all of them were as widely used, on some days foot traffic actually went down.

People who live near parklets say the city needs to make sure parklets get installed where they will be most beneficial.

"The more difficult the parking becomes, the more desperate the people coming to the neighborhood become, and they start taking spots they really don't fit in on the residential streets [and] blocking driveways," said Bowsher.

City planners say they are monitoring the growth of the parklet program, but so far they don't see too many.

"At one point we're going to have to look at that if we have four on a block, maybe that's too many, and we'll take a look at that," said Rahaim. "I don't think we are there yet."

>> More: Google map of San Francisco parklets

Written and produced by Ken Miguel.

(Copyright ©2012 KGO-TV/DT.

View the original article here

Forget the business case, open online courses are about learning

Massive Online Open Courses are not the solution to education in the 21st century - but they do offer something new. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/REUTERS

Ever since MITx was unveiled last December, futurists have been predicting what it might all mean for higher education. They're calling it "The Great Disruption", a brand name worthy of Nostradamus. The Globe and Mail says it's about time. The Atlantic is envisioning a post-campus America.

For those of us actually enrolled in Massive Open Online Courses, though – or those like me who have enlisted both to teach and learn within these experimental course environments – this great disruption feels more like an augmentation than anything else.

I think higher education has something to learn from the experiences that I – and learners like me, merging non-traditional avenues with formalised classroom experiences – are engaging in. Those of us who have chosen graduate studies in spite of the much-lamented death of the tenure-track professoriate have little reason to assume that we will have any sort of protected or privileged place in the academy's next incarnation.

Yet here we are. We are, at least for the moment, part of the system. But many of us are wary of being fully subsumed into it, because we've been cautioned against betting the farm on that tenure path. So we keep a foot outside the tower, seeking out alternative paths to augment our learning and research; we are keeping options open.

Yet neither do we necessarily reject the academy. For myself, I don't belong to the Do It Yourself University camp that sometimes suggests that Moocs and unstructured online network participation are the solution to education in the 21st century.

Our world relies too heavily on credentials for me to believe that the #change11 (an introductory course about instructional technology for researchers) experience would remain as open as it is, if it were suddenly forced to carry the burden of standards that falls, rightly or wrongly, on formalised higher education. The logic that drives open online credentialing experiments is, thus far, only experimental.

Moocs do disrupt business as usual, yes. Those of us in the #change11 Mooc are engaged in the course at no cost, and nobody except us is holding our learning or performance to any particular external standards. Unlike MITx, the 36 week #change11 course offers no credential. These factors all make it a significantly different experience from studying at my bricks-and-mortar university.

What #change11 gives me, though, is access to a multitude of semi-organised ideas and expert facilitators, plus a semi-coherent network of peers to work through the weeks with. That network remains largely stable even as topics and facilitators rotate weekly.

It is this participatory element – the being part of a large, distributed network of people from varied backgrounds, focusing on the same topic – that enables open online experiences to offer value, even to those of us already studying in conventional institutions. That, and the speed and flexibility inherent in networked learning.

In a Google-able culture replete with neo-liberal demands for reform, efficiency, and innovation, Moocs help those of us interested in emergent ideas participate in a public learning experience that is otherwise not really available by conventional means.

As I forge ahead with my own research, the lack of fit between learning and success on academic terms and those that social media rewards and reinforces become increasingly apparent. Journal publications lag years behind blog posts in my area of specialisation. The theory that guides my research seldom addresses the online contexts in which I'm trying to apply it. But my Mooc peers and facilitators do. And so I apply the ideas shaped by traditional academic environments to those shared in distributed digital environments.

The Mooc augments my PhD studies by making it possible for me to be a public thinker and learner; by giving me up-to-the-minute access to the conversations shaping and driving my field, and the opportunity to participate in these conversations. They are available on the wider internet, certainly. But Moocs help curate and cohere them, and also overtly create them. Moocs don't just bring disparate networks and opportunities into focus; they carve out explicit teaching and learning spaces within the information overload of contemporary social media.

Will these type of practice ultimately have an impact of the teaching and learning spaces of traditional institutions? I hope so. But not necessarily in the ways heralded by media.

Too often, Moocs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it – are written about primarily as dramatic new business models.

It's true that there's potential in that direction. And Sebastian Thrun and others seem intent on mining it, while all of us watch breathlessly.

But that market lens on massive open coursework misses one of the central elements of the great disruption: education is not solely a business, or a credential-machine. It's also about learning.

And with Moocs, those of us acculturated to academia have the opportunity to learn new, responsive, participatory ways of fostering public knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional institutions. The disruption may be profound, certainly. But so may be the possibilities.

Bonnie Stewart is a PhD student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. She blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and identity and parenthood at http://cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart.

View the original article here

Open for business? Why universities must collaborate on OpenCourseWare

Is the knowledge monopoly for higher education institutions ending? Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Leading higher education specialists from across the world convened at Cambridge University in April for a landmark global conference on the future of online learning. The contrast here between the ancient and the modern, the traditional and the new, reflects the challenges of standardising the digital learning revolution across higher education globally.

The Cambridge conference was hosted by the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a non-profit consortium, which is now the largest open online education resource in the world. OCWC comprises some 280 higher education institutions, offers around 21,000 courses online, and has many millions of learners across the globe.

The ambition of open online learning is to cut cost and eliminate geographic distance as obstacles to the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Unlike traditional e-learning, OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers all course materials free to everyone with online access. The logic follows that educators from around the world can upgrade their OCW classes; students can enhance their OCW coursework or pursue self-study; and – for the first time ever – the general public is given a window through which to see the depth and breadth of what leading universities are offering and to benefit from reading lists and lectures.

The potential benefits of open online learning are tremendous. However, in order for it to truly deliver a global knowledge revolution, the higher education sector must collaborate more effectively to enhance the impact of online education resources.

One key sticking point is that traditional institutions have previously enjoyed a knowledge monopoly in higher education. However, in the digital age, knowledge is instantly accessible, and universities and colleges must now actively share their role for developing and spreading knowledge with many other institutions and indeed individuals that require enhanced collaboration.

Concern exists among some higher education institutions that by releasing knowledge into the public domain, they will increasingly become little more than certification factories, with no clear role as the arbiters and producers of knowledge. The worry is that students will study online for free, after which they will shop around for higher education institutions that are willing to test to a given standard and – if they pass – provide them with an appropriate qualification. This point was also discussed in Cambridge last week.

This shouldn't be a threat to higher education institutions, especially given the ambition in Europe, and indeed much of the rest of world, to dramatically increase the percentage of the population with a tertiary education. Online learning offers the opportunity to teach many more students than we do now: a higher education institution could potentially have 1 million students, including lifelong learners who find it difficult to take part in on-campus courses.

The business model for higher education institutions would be different, of course, forcing them to change from a system of tuition fees to one of course-completion or certification fees. However, as long as they have a thorough system of testing and provide high-reputation certified qualifications, offering online learning might even be an advantage, allowing more time for other institutional work, such as research.

For some, the real danger is if higher education institutions lose their monopoly on certification. The answer here must be to enhance the quality and reputation of our institutions.

Students generally attend an institution not only because they want to learn something, but also because a qualification helps them with their future career. The greater the reputation of the certifying institution, the more valuable the diplomas, certificates and degrees will be.

People may well be less willing to pay for tuition at an institution with a poor reputation, preferring to attend a free, virtual one. They will continue to pay, however, for a qualification from high-quality institutions such as Cambridge. These diplomas, certificates and degrees are reliable proof of what they have learned and at what level, providing a valuable ticket for a future career.

In general, the higher education sector has little reason to view the digital learning revolution as a threat and should embrace the massive opportunity it presents through more active participation and collaboration. Online education can not only help provide higher education institutions with increasing numbers of students, but also new potential revenue streams, whilst embedding their reputation for high quality knowledge and teaching in the digital age.

• Student numbers in higher education make open education inevitable

The world's higher education system must accommodate nearly 80 million more students by 2025. Sir John Daniel (Common Wealth of Learning) calculated that this would require building three campuses for 30,000 students every week for the next 13 years. Since this is unlikely to happen, other ways to provide education have to be found.

• What is a sustainable model for open education?

Various models are being tested now. Some of these are based purely on volunteers, such P2PU (Peer to Peer University); most focus on combining the existing higher education structure and open education (such as MITx, Open University UK or Delft University of Technology)

• Government interest in open education is growing: In 2011, the US started a four-year programme involving a total of $2bn, which includes development of open educational resources (OER) for community colleges. Many other countries, such as India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, Vietnam, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have introduced specific measures or subsidies to promote OER. Unesco is pushing this by encouraging governments to sign the Paris declaration on OER next June.

• And has to grow further!

Open education can help governments deal with a number of challenges in higher education, such as bridging the gap between secondary and higher education, reaching life long learners, globalisation, competition for talent and financing the increasing number of students.

Anka Mulder is secretary general of Delft University of Technology and global president of OpenCourseWare Consortium

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up for free to become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

Forget the business case, open online courses are about learning

Massive Online Open Courses are not the solution to education in the 21st century - but they do offer something new. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/REUTERS

Ever since MITx was unveiled last December, futurists have been predicting what it might all mean for higher education. They're calling it "The Great Disruption", a brand name worthy of Nostradamus. The Globe and Mail says it's about time. The Atlantic is envisioning a post-campus America.

For those of us actually enrolled in Massive Open Online Courses, though – or those like me who have enlisted both to teach and learn within these experimental course environments – this great disruption feels more like an augmentation than anything else.

I think higher education has something to learn from the experiences that I – and learners like me, merging non-traditional avenues with formalised classroom experiences – are engaging in. Those of us who have chosen graduate studies in spite of the much-lamented death of the tenure-track professoriate have little reason to assume that we will have any sort of protected or privileged place in the academy's next incarnation.

Yet here we are. We are, at least for the moment, part of the system. But many of us are wary of being fully subsumed into it, because we've been cautioned against betting the farm on that tenure path. So we keep a foot outside the tower, seeking out alternative paths to augment our learning and research; we are keeping options open.

Yet neither do we necessarily reject the academy. For myself, I don't belong to the Do It Yourself University camp that sometimes suggests that Moocs and unstructured online network participation are the solution to education in the 21st century.

Our world relies too heavily on credentials for me to believe that the #change11 (an introductory course about instructional technology for researchers) experience would remain as open as it is, if it were suddenly forced to carry the burden of standards that falls, rightly or wrongly, on formalised higher education. The logic that drives open online credentialing experiments is, thus far, only experimental.

Moocs do disrupt business as usual, yes. Those of us in the #change11 Mooc are engaged in the course at no cost, and nobody except us is holding our learning or performance to any particular external standards. Unlike MITx, the 36 week #change11 course offers no credential. These factors all make it a significantly different experience from studying at my bricks-and-mortar university.

What #change11 gives me, though, is access to a multitude of semi-organised ideas and expert facilitators, plus a semi-coherent network of peers to work through the weeks with. That network remains largely stable even as topics and facilitators rotate weekly.

It is this participatory element – the being part of a large, distributed network of people from varied backgrounds, focusing on the same topic – that enables open online experiences to offer value, even to those of us already studying in conventional institutions. That, and the speed and flexibility inherent in networked learning.

In a Google-able culture replete with neo-liberal demands for reform, efficiency, and innovation, Moocs help those of us interested in emergent ideas participate in a public learning experience that is otherwise not really available by conventional means.

As I forge ahead with my own research, the lack of fit between learning and success on academic terms and those that social media rewards and reinforces become increasingly apparent. Journal publications lag years behind blog posts in my area of specialisation. The theory that guides my research seldom addresses the online contexts in which I'm trying to apply it. But my Mooc peers and facilitators do. And so I apply the ideas shaped by traditional academic environments to those shared in distributed digital environments.

The Mooc augments my PhD studies by making it possible for me to be a public thinker and learner; by giving me up-to-the-minute access to the conversations shaping and driving my field, and the opportunity to participate in these conversations. They are available on the wider internet, certainly. But Moocs help curate and cohere them, and also overtly create them. Moocs don't just bring disparate networks and opportunities into focus; they carve out explicit teaching and learning spaces within the information overload of contemporary social media.

Will these type of practice ultimately have an impact of the teaching and learning spaces of traditional institutions? I hope so. But not necessarily in the ways heralded by media.

Too often, Moocs – particularly the emergent big-name university offerings that have essentially harnessed the capacity of open online learning and scaled it – are written about primarily as dramatic new business models.

It's true that there's potential in that direction. And Sebastian Thrun and others seem intent on mining it, while all of us watch breathlessly.

But that market lens on massive open coursework misses one of the central elements of the great disruption: education is not solely a business, or a credential-machine. It's also about learning.

And with Moocs, those of us acculturated to academia have the opportunity to learn new, responsive, participatory ways of fostering public knowledge, both inside and outside of traditional institutions. The disruption may be profound, certainly. But so may be the possibilities.

Bonnie Stewart is a PhD student at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her research explores social media identity and its implications for higher education. She blogs ideas at http://theory.cribchronicles.com and identity and parenthood at http://cribchronicles.com. Find her on Twitter at @bonstewart.

View the original article here

Open for business? Why universities must collaborate on OpenCourseWare

Is the knowledge monopoly for higher education institutions ending? Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Leading higher education specialists from across the world convened at Cambridge University in April for a landmark global conference on the future of online learning. The contrast here between the ancient and the modern, the traditional and the new, reflects the challenges of standardising the digital learning revolution across higher education globally.

The Cambridge conference was hosted by the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a non-profit consortium, which is now the largest open online education resource in the world. OCWC comprises some 280 higher education institutions, offers around 21,000 courses online, and has many millions of learners across the globe.

The ambition of open online learning is to cut cost and eliminate geographic distance as obstacles to the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Unlike traditional e-learning, OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers all course materials free to everyone with online access. The logic follows that educators from around the world can upgrade their OCW classes; students can enhance their OCW coursework or pursue self-study; and – for the first time ever – the general public is given a window through which to see the depth and breadth of what leading universities are offering and to benefit from reading lists and lectures.

The potential benefits of open online learning are tremendous. However, in order for it to truly deliver a global knowledge revolution, the higher education sector must collaborate more effectively to enhance the impact of online education resources.

One key sticking point is that traditional institutions have previously enjoyed a knowledge monopoly in higher education. However, in the digital age, knowledge is instantly accessible, and universities and colleges must now actively share their role for developing and spreading knowledge with many other institutions and indeed individuals that require enhanced collaboration.

Concern exists among some higher education institutions that by releasing knowledge into the public domain, they will increasingly become little more than certification factories, with no clear role as the arbiters and producers of knowledge. The worry is that students will study online for free, after which they will shop around for higher education institutions that are willing to test to a given standard and – if they pass – provide them with an appropriate qualification. This point was also discussed in Cambridge last week.

This shouldn't be a threat to higher education institutions, especially given the ambition in Europe, and indeed much of the rest of world, to dramatically increase the percentage of the population with a tertiary education. Online learning offers the opportunity to teach many more students than we do now: a higher education institution could potentially have 1 million students, including lifelong learners who find it difficult to take part in on-campus courses.

The business model for higher education institutions would be different, of course, forcing them to change from a system of tuition fees to one of course-completion or certification fees. However, as long as they have a thorough system of testing and provide high-reputation certified qualifications, offering online learning might even be an advantage, allowing more time for other institutional work, such as research.

For some, the real danger is if higher education institutions lose their monopoly on certification. The answer here must be to enhance the quality and reputation of our institutions.

Students generally attend an institution not only because they want to learn something, but also because a qualification helps them with their future career. The greater the reputation of the certifying institution, the more valuable the diplomas, certificates and degrees will be.

People may well be less willing to pay for tuition at an institution with a poor reputation, preferring to attend a free, virtual one. They will continue to pay, however, for a qualification from high-quality institutions such as Cambridge. These diplomas, certificates and degrees are reliable proof of what they have learned and at what level, providing a valuable ticket for a future career.

In general, the higher education sector has little reason to view the digital learning revolution as a threat and should embrace the massive opportunity it presents through more active participation and collaboration. Online education can not only help provide higher education institutions with increasing numbers of students, but also new potential revenue streams, whilst embedding their reputation for high quality knowledge and teaching in the digital age.

• Student numbers in higher education make open education inevitable

The world's higher education system must accommodate nearly 80 million more students by 2025. Sir John Daniel (Common Wealth of Learning) calculated that this would require building three campuses for 30,000 students every week for the next 13 years. Since this is unlikely to happen, other ways to provide education have to be found.

• What is a sustainable model for open education?

Various models are being tested now. Some of these are based purely on volunteers, such P2PU (Peer to Peer University); most focus on combining the existing higher education structure and open education (such as MITx, Open University UK or Delft University of Technology)

• Government interest in open education is growing: In 2011, the US started a four-year programme involving a total of $2bn, which includes development of open educational resources (OER) for community colleges. Many other countries, such as India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, Vietnam, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have introduced specific measures or subsidies to promote OER. Unesco is pushing this by encouraging governments to sign the Paris declaration on OER next June.

• And has to grow further!

Open education can help governments deal with a number of challenges in higher education, such as bridging the gap between secondary and higher education, reaching life long learners, globalisation, competition for talent and financing the increasing number of students.

Anka Mulder is secretary general of Delft University of Technology and global president of OpenCourseWare Consortium

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up for free to become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

TEDxMonterey - Alan Lovewell - The Fishermen I Have Known

TEDxMonterey - Alan Lovewell - The Fishermen I Have Known