Online learning communities and open source software are almost an old shoe, of course – but online learning and BuddyPress? That’s a young couple, deeply and freshly in love, going through their first happy months of mutual discovery. What will happen when the initial excitement wears off? Will open education, the experienced groom, turn around and go back to Moodle? Will BuddyPress, the beautiful young bride, drift away to wild young lovers? There are many things that can go wrong in a fresh relationship, and this presentation looked at ten dilemmas and ten things that the BuddyPress and the open education movements should do for each other.

1. BuddyPress &
OpenEducation
A happy relationship in 10 steps

3. The experienced groom: open education

4. increase access to educational opportunity
learner-centred, collaborative, participatory
power shifts: educators as learning facilitators
focused largely on open educational resources
slowly moving towards open policy, open
assessment, open support, open teaching

5. The beautiful young bride: BuddyPress

6. social networking out of the box
open source: free access and redistribution
increasingly used by educational institutions
first plugins to build learning environments:
mostly collaboration and administration
relation with open education largely platonic

7. At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac
Code is poetry.
WordPress

8. The technical approach doesn’t matter
vs
The learning approach doesn’t matter

9. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H. L. Mencken

10. The intelligence of roadmaps
vs
The imagination of learning

11. Anyone can be passionate,
but it takes real lovers to be silly. Rose Franken

12. The sillyness of coders, nerds & geeks
vs
The sillyness of educators & learners

13. Love is the power to see
similarity in the dissimilar.
Theodor Adorno

14. Software architecture
vs
Learning architecture

15. When love is not madness, it is not love.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

16. The madness of hierarchies
vs
The madness of voluntarism

17. The art of love
is largely
the art of
persistence.
Albert Ellis

18. The persistence to address problems
vs
The persistence to ignore problems

19. Love is the child of illusion,
and the parent of disillusion.
Miguel de Unamuno

20. The illusion of an easy solution
vs
The disillusion of being alone

21. The first magic of love is
our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli

22. Open Education does not know
vs
Open Education will not wait

23. Love is an ocean of emotions
entirely surrounded
by expenses.
Lord Dewar

24. The philosophy of open movements
vs
The need to invest in open movements

25. It is not a
lack of love,
but a lack
of friendship
that makes
unhappy
marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

26. The existence of hybrids
vs
The emergence of networks

27. Make love when you can. It’s good for you.
Kurt Vonnegut

28. Being active in many niche networks
vs
Being able to connect these networks

29. In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.
Janos Arany

30. 10 IMPOSSIBILITIES
1. student, course and grade management
2. fine-grained privacy controls
3. one-to-one online tutoring
4. peer-reviewed magazines
5. a multi-author editorial workflow
6. indexing for journal directories
7. library search engine integration
8. academic profiles and portfolios
9. data generation and visualisation
10. visual collaboration tools

31. Photo credits:
www.youthmedia.eu users
Stefan Franke
Roman Henn
Maja Kowalczyk
Mariesol Fumy
Carsten Boock
Laura Günsel
Luiza Puiu
Isi Fischer
Malte Tiedemann
Carlo Sperfeld
Anonymous
Max Wohlers
Mariesol Fumy again
Johanna Torstensson
Mirela Zoranic and
Malte Tiedemann
You guys rock.

32. Contacts
Andreas Karsten
@nonformality
@youthpolicy
http://www.youthpolicy.org
andreas@youthpolicy.org