Abstract:

During the past two decades, technology in education has evolved through various movements and metaphors including using technology to enhance the curriculum, extend the curriculum, and transform the curriculum.  Now there is a shift to using technology to share the curriculum.  There are web sites springing up around the globe related to sharing courses, course materials, resources, and teaching ideas.  MERLOT, for example, has more than 26,000 members and 12,000 shared learning objects as well as an annual international conference.  CAREO is a similar project developed in Canada.  And, of course, there is a the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative which is not only sharing course content from MIT around the globe in English, but is now being translated into other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, including the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) in Taiwan.  Many questions surround such systems and sites.  For example, who will continue to maintain or update such sites?  For what purpose will people share?  Will these sharesites bridge the digital divide?  How will copyright issues be addressed?  What happens when one did not mean to share their course contents or ideas, or, at least, not as widely?  How will such learning objects of today be viewed in 100 or 200 years?  Will online sharing become expected of all faculty members around the planet?  If so, how will that change the face of higher education?  In this keynote session, Curt Bonk will highlight such themes and issues while pushing the audience to think of short- and long-range implications both for their institutions and organizations as well as for themselves.
 

Biographical Information:

Curt Bonk is a former corporate controller and CPA, who, after becoming sufficiently bored with that, received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin.  After serving on the faculty of West Virginia University from 1989 to 1992, Curt arrived at Indiana University in 1992 where he was a Professor of Educational Psychology for 13 years.  In the summer of 2005 he moved to the Department of Instructional Systems Technology at IU. Dr. Bonk is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Advanced Distributed Learning Lab within the Department of Defense and a founding member of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at IU. He has received numerous teaching and mentoring awards from IU as well as the CyberStar Award from the Indiana Information Technology Association in 2002, the Most Outstanding Achievement Award from the U.S. Distance Learning Association in 2003, and the Most Innovative Teaching in a Distance Education Program Award from the State of Indiana in 2003. In 2004, Bonk received an alumni achievement award from the University of Wisconsin.  During the past two years, Dr. Bonk has presented over 175 talks around the globe related to online teaching and learning, including ones at universities in China, Australia, Korea, Finland, Ireland, Taiwan, Malaysia, Spain, Iceland, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates.  Curt has more than 100 publications on topics such as online learning pedagogy, massive multiplayer online gaming, collaborative technologies, synchronous and asynchronous computer conferencing, and frameworks for Web-based instruction and evaluation.  Currently, he is working on the “Handbook of Blended Learning Environments: Global Perspectives, Local Designs,” to be published by Pfeiffer Publishing in December 2005. Finally, he is President of CourseShare and SurveyShare and can be contacted at cjbonk@indiana.edu or via his homepage at http://php.indiana.edu/~cjbonk/.