I was recently asked what I thought of Cory Doctorow’s classic Metacrap paper. He was, of course, dead on when he wrote it. The nagging question at the time was “what alternatives do we have?” And the sad answer was “not many.”
Monthly Archive for March, 2006
So we’ve been talking about this for months now. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was just a button you could push that would pipe the contents of an OCW page directly into a wiki, so you could start remixing away?”
Everyone else here is busy writing real code (eduCommons 2.0 release coming in April!), so I was left to hack together a prototype of the “send to wiki” tool. It didn’t take terribly long; the project is basically a few python cgis and Instiki, the Rails-based wiki. You can see a flash demo of the tool at: http://opencontent.org/resources/ocw2wiki.htm.
Things are still kind of fragile, so I’m not opening it up to the general public for play just yet. If you’d like to get in and tool around, just send me an email. If folks think something like this would be useful, we’ll build a production version of the function and integrate it into eduCommons…
Thanks to Mike Smith who pointed me to this summary of a talk given by Eve Gray at the Creative Commons South Africa launch. Eve is from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, and:
discussed how HSRC’s early experiments with open access publishing paid off. As they made their research papers available for free download, the print revenues went up by 270%.
This is exactly the same experience I had with my first learning objects book back in the day. Nice to see more data coming in to support this argument.
Stephen recently announced that he’s taking a hiatus from his blog and newsletter. Rather than feeling sorry for him, we should be glad for him.
What courage it must take to do such a thing! Stephen is very much in the public eye with the very excellent work he does. The love of fame alone would be enough to keep most people from dropping out for a while. More impressively, Stephen knows as well as anyone the pace at which this all moves, and the costs associated with trying to get back in the game after an absence.
So Stephen’s taking a huge risk here. Why? So he can actually take the time necessary to “think about what I am going to do and how I am going to do it.” If I may say so: God bless you, Stephen, as you think and ponder and work things out. We’ll leave the light on for you - but don’t hurry back for our sakes. We’ll see you whenever the timing is right.
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