Let’s pretend that a major foundation that is interested in the intersection of learning objects and online community had approached me about sponsoring a meeting of people with said interest, and I had funding to bring 12 or so people together for a multi-day summit this summer to discuss the state of the art and where we go from here. Which is all true. Who should I invite? You can only nominate five people, and none of them can be you.

It occured to me today that learning objects, and the “EduCommons”:http://educommons.org/ project in particular, could learn some interesting lessons from libraries and CPAN. ...

It is high time for instructional technologists to get serious about extending free, high quality educational opportunities to everyone. Literally. This modest manifesto lays out a context, rationale, and initial roadmap from here to there. ...

Tonight I’ve added “Brad Choate”:http://www.bradchoate.com/’s excellent “Textile plugin”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php and John Gruber’s “SmartyPants plugin”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ to the list of mayhem and mania the reusability.org blogs support. Here to quick-typin of some purty text.

In this brief piece done for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, I quickly trace the history of open educational content from the foundation of the GNU project up through MIT’s OpenCourseWare and later developments. ...

I guess blogs are places where people scoop each other all the time, but since no one reads mine it won?t seem like so much of a scoop. The OpenContent Project is closing its doors. ...

There have been so many learning objects metaphors that have flown around…. It’s been no secret that I hate the LEGO metaphor, and the seed crystal metaphor I proposed in 1999 hasn’t gone anywhere. So here are a few thoughts about a new metaphor. ...

So Brian Lamb has convinced me that I should swith to movable type for my blog… Shows what a pushover I am… Hopefully this blog will do slightly better than my last.

Disgusted. Disappointed. Deflated. Dangling on demoralized. And, most unfortunately, unsurprised. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Eldred vs. Ashcroft shows that Congress in the pocket of the Content Cartel can not (for the next 20 years, anyway) be regulated by the Supreme Court where matters of copyright term are concerned. Here’s to 20 more years of somehow incenting a dead man to produce creative works by allowing him to control a mouse longer. If you haven’t yet seen the interview with Mickey Mouse in which he discusses the decision, you should check it out. ...

AAGH! Trying to get through the last week of school. Even though I’m not teaching this term, I still have grading to do(?), dissertations to read, etc. As noted below, many big announcements on the work front coming soon. I’ll be blogging again once we actually get into the winter break and things settle down some.