The AI moment feels unprecedented, but it isn't. David Wiley draws on lessons learned from the internet's arrival on campus to give today's leaders a framework for navigating AI - right now.
As seen in
Keynote
"We've Been Here Before: What the Last Technological Revolution Can Teach Us About the Next One"
Campus leaders are being asked to make consequential decisions about generative AI right now — before the applications are clear, before best practices have emerged, and before anyone knows where this is heading. The pressure to act is real, and so are the risks.
This talk gives leaders a framework for thinking clearly amidst that uncertainty. David draws on a historical parallel he witnessed firsthand: the internet's arrival on campus in the early 1990s. Reflecting on lessons learned during that transition, this talk gives leaders tools they can use immediately — not to predict the future, but to make confident decisions right now about how to leverage AI to fulfill the mission of higher education.
What audiences take away
Keynote
"Open Education in the Age of Generative AI"
For over a quarter century, the open education movement has pursued a single goal: increasing access to educational opportunity. From the very beginning, the primary tactic for accomplishing this goal has been creating and sharing open educational resources (OER) — freely licensed educational materials that grant users permission to engage in the 5R activities.
However, materials powered by generative AI are even more effective at increasing access to educational opportunity than fixed, one-size-fits-all OER like open textbooks. As AI transforms the world around higher ed, the open education movement has to grapple with a critical question: How do we combine the power of generative AI with the principles of openness to finally achieve what OER alone could not? This talk offers a framework for integrating generative AI, OER, and open pedagogy to dramatically improve access and outcomes.
What audiences take away
From North America to Southeast Asia, David has spoken to campuses, associations, and organizations around the world.
"David's inspiring keynote at Open Ed Live gave our global audience exactly what many educators needed: a thoughtful way to connect the rapid rise of generative AI with the long-standing goals of open education. He helped more than 900 attendees see AI not as a detriment to our work, but as a powerful opportunity to ask better questions about access, agency, affordability, ethics, and student learning."
"I had the opportunity to hear David speak at a statewide conference in Virginia about Open Educational Resources. In his closing remarks, he observed that an entire degree could be built using open educational resources, eliminating the cost of textbooks. That idea ignited a sense of possibility and a bold vision at Tidewater Community College. With David's guidance, we brought that vision to life. It was one of those rare moments in a career when you realize you were exactly where you needed to be—listening to exactly the right person. I remain profoundly grateful for David's vision and its lasting impact on students."
David with his family in West Virginia
In high school I was a show choir kid with a dream of going to Broadway. However, "encouraged" by my parents, I studied engineering during my first semester at WVU so I could get a "real job." But music kept calling to me, and I switched to Music Education the very next semester. When I transferred to Marshall University in 1993 I continued studying music... and was introduced to email.
The internet fascinated me. First email. Then Gopher and FTP. Then the World Wide Web. I was absolutely hooked on the web. I taught myself HTML by viewing the source code of other people's websites; first, using Lynx and later, Netscape Navigator. I knew the internet was going to change everything, and created my first startup - InterSpec - to train people in the Huntington area to use the internet. Soon I was making house calls configuring people's computers to dial in to the internet, creating websites for the City of Huntington and other local businesses, and helping the county school board setup a bank of modems so teachers could call in and connect to the internet for free.
In 1997, Marshall offered me a job as the university's first webmaster. It was working in this role that my vision of how the internet could change education started to crystalize. Working on a Javascript calculator, I realized there was something powerfully different between a digital calculator embedded in a website and a physical calculator. Only one person at a time could use the physical calculator, but an almost infinite number of people could use the online calculator at the same time. This magical property of digital resources (which I would later learn economists refer to as being non-rivalrous), meant that we could create digital learning materials once and share them with everyone around the world! In early 1998, when the phrase "open source" was coined, I saw how these two forces could combine to revolutionize teaching and learning materials. While the open source community was focusing on software, I launched the Open Content Initiative, creating the world's first open source license for educational materials. (Years later, a UNESCO working group would rebrand open content as "open educational resources" or OER.) For almost 30 years now, in many roles with many organizations, I've advocated for combining the power of online resources with the power of openness to dramatically increase access to educational opportunity around the world.
In the early 2020s I saw history start to repeat itself. Generative AI began to arrive on campus - just as the internet had decades earlier - again, with the potential to transform everything. Instead of providing everyone, everywhere with access to learning materials as the internet had, generative AI is providing everyone, everywhere with real-time access to intelligence and expertise. Today, I work to combine the power of generative AI with the power of openness to both increase access to educational opportunity and increase the effectiveness and impact of those opportunities.
David currently resides in West Virginia with his wife Elaine and four of their five children, and is back in musical theater — playing John Hancock in a production of 1776. You can learn more about David at davidwiley.org.
David speaks primarily at higher education conferences, association convenings, and campus leadership events.
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