Many iterating toward openness readers know about COSL’s Microlibrary project. The Microlibrary has received funding from the AT&T Foundation, the Qwest Foundation, and the OpenContent Foundation, but we hit a new milestone this past week when we received a donation from a business (not a foundation) reaching out to the community. ThePlanCollection.com is a local company here in Utah, and “offers the finest collection of house plans online with home plans from top architects in the United States and Canada.” Many thanks to the guys at ThePlanCollection for their support!

It’s great to see open education getting press. (More will be coming next week!) At the recent MIT OCW Milestone Event the movement got a lot of praise from Tom Friedman of Flat World fame. Catch the video of Friedman’s keynote talk on OCW over at YouTube.

COSL’s Seth Gurrell is blogging our new OER Handbook project. The project goal is to provide a free online resource (and low-cost printed resource for offline use) that provides an introduction to the OER world and helps people learn how to participate. We’ll be starting with materials from Wikieducator, OLCOS, our recent OER Interoperability meeting, and other places around the web. If you know of additional sources, please let Seth know! We understand fully that the project won’t succeed if only a small number of people are involved. Seth will be working diligently to make sure that we have good participation from the community in the project, and will make sure that this open project stays open from start to finish. He currently is asking for the community’s feedback on the table of contents. Please get involved and help make this resource the best it can be.

The Instructional Technology Department at Utah State University (my academic home and the home of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning) has a faculty opening. We’re not looking for expertise in a specific area of instructional technology - just a super smart, hard working, great-to-get-along-with colleague to help move the field forward. The job description is online, and the first steps of the application process are all electronic. Personally, I’m excited by the follow excerpt from the description: ...

Just found an interesting article about “social objects” via Stephen Downes. Back when I was writing more actively about learning objects, and the desperate need for us to consider the importance of social interaction in learning, I recommended that the proper way to think about educational content was as a campfire. The campfire does, of course, have important nonsocial functions (like providing heat) just like educational content has important nonsocial functions (like conveying information), but the most important function of both the campfire and educational content is the manner in which it draws people together. A good campfire is a thing around which storytelling, singing, and other social interactions happen. The same is true for the best educational content - it draws people into arguments, explorations, discussions, relationships, and friendships. ...

Heather Ford has a nice wrap up of 2007 open content highlights. What makes your list that she hasn’t mentioned?

Well, for a long time I have run my own blogging software - ever since Brian Lamb taught me about blogging!. But over the holiday I gave up, and am now hosting my blog with the fine folks at wordpress.com. Running the software, backing it up, migrating to new versions, applying security patches, etc., was fun for a while. But you know what? I just want my blog to work. I have other things to do in life. ...

From http://www.sciencecodex.com/public_access_mandate_made_law: President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency. The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. ...

What an experience! For all the wonderful comments that have come out of the last bit of writing about the course, I can assure you that no one has enjoyed it more than I have. The OpenEd Italian Group created a great presentation summarizing their thoughts and feelings about the course. What teacher could ask for a better outcome for their students than: We have learnt to interact at an international/multicultural level, thinking, commenting on other participants’ posts and dialoguing creatively and critically about current practices and possible alternative practices in open education. ...

It wasn’t a question of whether or not Stephen would criticize Cape Town, just a question of when he would. :) A response to several of his criticisms is in order. His final criticism is the crucial one, so I’ll start there first and then return to the beginning and work through the others: ...