pragmatism over zeal
Lots going around late today about Adam Bosworth’s closing keyonte (links to audio) at the MySQL conference. I enjoyed Ryan Tomayko’s writeup most, especially this deceivingly simple line:
Systems that were designed through observation of the web and/or in adherence to the core principles of the web must be more suitable to the web than those that were not.
This recognition will either make or break the entire open education movement, including eduCommons and the OpenCourseWares.
Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights:
I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…
A story in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education (paid registration required, ironically enough) discusses the growing momentum behind the OpenCourseWare movement, and the meeting at MIT two weeks ago. As described in the article, at this meeting several universities at varying levels of progress into their OCWs met to talk about best practices, building additional momentum behind the movement, etc. Attendees included reps from MIT, Utah State University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Tufts, Michigan, the Universia consortium, the China Open Resources for Education consortium, and a new consortium of Japanese schools. Some other “name” schools who are dipping their toes in the pool were there are well. It’s nice to see the mainstream press following what we’re doing, even if they don’t completely “get it” yet.
A kindly phone call alerted me late today that EduCommons.org is now running porn links. “Great,” I thought, “we’ve been compromised.” If only that were the truth. The truth is much more painful. Somehow ownership of the domain educommons.org has mysteriously changed hands. And not only did the thieves steal the domain, they are still running the EduCommons logo at the top and have maintained some of the language from the original site. Effect - to the casual user educommons.org is still educommons.org. “And oh, what’s this!?! David has porn links on his sites now?!?”
Please remove all links to educommons.org until further notice. As all WHOIS information for the “new owner” is bogus, any tips or help would be appreciated.
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).
Recent Comments