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 Archives: March 2006
Making Adaptaion Easier – ocw2wiki
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…
Opening access opens profits
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.