Once every 5 or 10 years you hear an idea that’s so good that you understand immediately that you should support it in any way you can, even to the point of personal sacrifice of time, money, and effort. I read one of these ideas on Slashdot today:
With the unfortunate passing of Congressman Tom Lantos, parts of Silicon Valley and San Francisco will be holding a special election in June to send a replacement to Congress. Given the area, it would be great to have someone who is both tech- and policy-aware fill the seat — and it looks like that just might happen. Lawrence Lessig has apparently bought ‘change-congress.com.’ A ‘Draft Lessig’ group is forming on Facebook, featuring some of Lessig’s old co-workers at Harvard and Jimmy Wales, among others. No word from Lessig himself yet, but he’s been increasingly vocal about politics of late. If it happens, it would be a huge step forward for the representation of technology in Washington.”
Please, PLEASE, join the Lessig for Congress Facebook group and do whatever else you can to make this happen.
Thought you all might be interested in a little experiment I’m trying in republishing OCW materials in Wordpress – http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/. There’s a ton we can do here with custom themes and plugins that would be really cool. Wouldn’t have the power of something like eduCommons, but would be much simpler to use, too.
Let me know what you think!
The headline says it all. Desmond Tutu has signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Over 1400 individuals and 100 organizations have signed to date. Have you?
Martin has a great post up about the debate between Stephen and I over the Cape Town Declaration written in terms of a comparison between Cato and Cicero. I enjoyed it; I expect Stephen did as well.
Seth Godin expands on Kevin Kelley’s Better than Free.
Seth’s takeaway: “when there are infinite copies of something, charging for one is almost impossible.” Or in Kevin’s words,
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
They both hit the nail right on the head. People trying to figure out how to make open education sustainable would do well to read these articles. If a day or two passes and someone hasn’t translated Kevin’s eight points into education speak I’ll go ahead and do it. But read these pieces NOW.
