There’s a fascinating interview on Spiegel with James Shikwati, an “African economics expert,” in which he explains how foreign aid is preventing many African nations from rising out of poverty and the host of other problems they face. “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid…. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.”
What does this attitude mean for people working in open educational resources?
It’s a much better name than cc.edu:
Creative Commons is seeking an Executive Director for CC Learn, a new division that will focus on education, broadly defined — from kindergarten to graduate school, to lifelong learning. The mission of this new division will be to promote vigorous networks of Open Educational Resources: materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use, modify and re-use for teaching, learning and research.
More details. Too bad that in this day and age the person has to be located in San Fran… Shucks.
Steve Carson writes about a recent survey of Japanese attitudes toward open education projects at universities (like OCWs). I have to agree with his selection of a favorite bit from the survey:
Q9: What should be the scope of the universities that open up their lecture materials? (Sample size=1,050)
- Just well-known public and private universities 17.2%
- As many public universities as possible 14.2%
- As many private universities as possible 3.4%
- As many public and private universities as possible 64.8%
- Other 0.4%
Two out of three surveyed felt that as many schools as possible should open access to their courses. I agre with them. =)
Author: John Derbyshire
Year: 2006
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
ISBN: 030909657X
This was an absolutely fascinating book that I had a very difficult time putting down each night… Many hours of sleep lost to its pages! The book wanders through lots of territory, including rings and fields, different algebras, etc. Derbyshire’s writing style is the perfect mix of fun historical narrative and clearly explained mathematics. The best thing about the book was the depth Derbyshire was willing to go into with the math and the clarity of his explanations – I very seldom felt either confused or like I wish he had given me more.
This was an absolutely fascinating book that I had a very difficult time putting down each night… Many hours of sleep lost to its pages! The book wanders through lots of territory, including rings and fields, different algebras, etc. Derbyshire’s writing style is the perfect mix of fun historical narrative and clearly explained mathematics. The best thing about the book was the depth Derbyshire was willing to go into with the math and the clarity of his explanations – I very seldom felt either confused or like I wish he had given me more.
On my other blog I’ve posted a half-baked proposal for creating Attribution Plugins for the CC licenses… I’ll be curious to hear what y’all think.
