Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Great Article on NIH Open Access Mandate

Gavin links to his great article on scienceprogress.org about how NIH’s New Open Access Policy Can Benefit Everyone. “The new policy is not only notable for its novelty and the whopping amount of research it will make available, but for its storied history.”

1,000 Signatures in One Week!

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration launched one week ago today and has already received over 1,000 individual signatures and over 80 institutional signatures. The CTD News page links to dozens and dozens of news and blog stories covering the Declaration, published everywhere from the US to Taiwan to Pakistan to the UK to Thailand to Guyana to Australia to South Africa. Even if you don’t agree with the specific wording of the declaration, you can’t deny that it has been a huge catalyst for getting the word out about open education…

New CTD News Page

Up at the top of the site you’ll now see a tab titled “CTD News.” This page provides continuously updated links to recent coverage of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. The page is powered by RSS feeds in delicious with the tags capetowndeclaration+news and capetowndeclaration+blog. When you find material online about the declaration, please tag it this way so that those resources will show up here. If I start seeing a lot of garbage in the feed I’ll change my approach.

Florida Public Schools Embrace Open Content!

Via eSchoolNews comes the exciting news that Florida public schools have added a CC-licensed resource to their approved list of curricular materials:

Tired of investing in expensive textbooks and proprietary software programs, Florida education officials are looking to an open online-learning platform to teach young students basic reading skills… Florida has adopted FreeReading.net on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. This is the first open instructional program to be approved through an official state adoption, officials said.

The story also covers the Cape Town Declaration and the “open education movement” briefly. Hooray for Florida!

Shuttleworth Video about CTD

Via Chris Coppola, a video of Mark talking about the Cape Town Declaration.