Brett Shelton, who is now officially my partner-in-crime, recently had a great idea. I was standing in his door, and he was sitting down in his cozy chair, which is how we conduct most of our converastions.
opencontent
Creating Open Educational Resources
Coase’s Penguin author Yochai Benkler turns his considerable analytical talent to the commons-based peer production of educational materials. Very readable and with great examples, Yochai describes why projects like wikipedia succeed and projects like wikibooks fail. It all has to do with the minimum work unit that can make a meaningful contribution to a project. If a meaningful contribution to wikipedia takes 10 minutes, but a meaningful contribution to a textbook requires an hour, more people will participate in wikipedia. It sounds like the commons-based peer production of learning objects is in, and the open source, distributed production of textbooks is out. Great, clear analysis.
Quick! Someone Oppress These People!
My mom used to say, “I don’t think you could stand on the corner and hand out twenty dollar bills without making people angry.” There are multiple ways of viewing everything, but this isn’t the way I would have seen this development: Developing countries are rapidly increasing the number and quality of college graduates, generating … Read more