Monthly Archive for March, 2004

USU/OCW

Published
by
david
on March 25, 2004
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I can’t make a “formal announcement” yet, as we’re still working on the official name (probably Open Sustainable Education) and other details, but I can safely say that we now have administrative approval and pilot funding in place for an OpenCourseWare type project (ala MIT) at USU. The USU collection will be specifically strong in agriculture (i.e., irrigation engineering, orchard development, etc. — Go Aggies!) but include resources from other university courses as well. Formal announcement coming soon…

Our focus in developing the model has been economics, or trying to put together a project that meaningfully contributes open resources of the highest quality possible while costing the least amount of money. If we succeed as we intend, not only will release a wide variety of resources to the world but we’ll also release a model for doing low-cost OCW style projects together with open source infrastructure for doing them.

Of course, there will be support for social interaction around these materials via our OLS project (the OLS pilot with MIT/OCW opens to the public on April 5; more on that soon).

I’m really excited. If any of this sounds like fun, don’t forget the two open faculty positions in our department!

The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Published
by
david
on March 12, 2004
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Found this fabulous analysis of group size as it relates to group cohesion, satisfaction, etc. via Seb’s weblog. Very nice. I’m interested in how this may change online, or not, and what the role of weak ties is here…

OpenCourse.org, and an OLS update

Published
by
david
on March 10, 2004
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Here’s another SourceForge for educational materials project — http://opencourse.org/. They’ve beaten us to the punch and actually opened their doors to three projects! Congratulations to the OpenCourse team, who are funded by NSF/NSDL monies. Our EduCommons project (funded by the Hewlett Foundation) won’t be ready for several months yet. It’s good to see good ideas being implemented all around. I know there’s at least one other group planning similar software….

In other news, OLS (our social software which wraps around OCW) will be opening in early April. Anyone interested in participating in testing during the next two weeks, please drop me an email (*not* a comment).