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: ...

Head straight to the transcript of Jimmy’s announcement, which also includes video. Also read the official Mediawiki Foundation resolution. From the transcript of Jimmy’s announcement: “We’re going to change the GFDL in such a way that Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.” So they’re changing the GFDL itself. Perhaps this will mean universal compatability between GFDL and CC-By-SA? Wow. I’m all but speechless.

A few of my favorite bits from this past week’s writing. Another post with more of my own thoughts and feelings will follow separately. ...

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, available online at http://capetowndeclaration.org/, is an inspiring document about the core principles of open education that extends invitations to would be participants in the movement and makes recommendations important for the future of open educational resources and the open education movement generally (e.g., “taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.”) This document is the result of one of the best facilitated and most fun meetings I’ve ever had the privilege of attending, and is deserving of your immediate attention and eventual signature. I say “eventual” because the Declaration is available now in a draft form and we are asking the broader community to give us feedback. I hope you find time to review the document soon!

I probably didn’t get everyone following the course, but thanks to the holiday here in the States I was able to read much more than usual. Oh how I love this class! ...

It’s time to share another round of student writing! I asked students in the Proseminar course at USU (in which all faculty take three week turns introducing students to their research interests) to put together a paper about issues related to open education. The twist (there always is one) is that they were to write as little of the paper as possible. You see, wholesale plagiarism is discouraged, but weaving together a coherent piece from ten or fifteen different extant sources is tough and an excellent chance to get some first hand experience with reuse. =) Here are links and some summaries to these re-writing exercises, in which students assembled papers from pre-existing pieces: ...

The 10th anniversary of open content is quickly approaching! The phrase “open content” was born in the late spring of 1998, and the first open content license was unleashed on the world in July of 1998 (yes, I know this first license was pretty awful - but hey, it was my first attempt!). In recognition and celebration of all those who caught the open content vision, including Creative Commons, MIT OCW, Wikipedia, Magnatune, and others, OpenContent.org is declaring 2008 “The Year of Open Content!” What should we do to celebrate? Have any ideas? We should start planning now to maximize both the partying and the potential media impact we can have in sharing the idea of open content! Regardless of whether you call your open content “free knowledge” or “opencourseware” or “open educational resources” or “free culture” or some other name, I hope that for one year we can come together to celebrate the incredible progress we’ve seen this last decade. ...

Some of you will know COSL’s Microlibrary project. For those of you who don’t, the Microlibrary is a public service project inspired by the Internet Archive’s Bookmobile which makes weekly trips to public schools in Utah, teaching kids about the history of writing and printing, getting kids involved in making books, and giving every kid in the class a book of their own choosing to keep. The Microlibrary project began last year, and so far in the 2007-2008 school year over 700 kids have participated in the presentation and received a free book. ...

Week 9 musings! Jennifer comments on The World is Flat this week, and makes a number of observations… ...