Twice in the last week I’ve heard the phrase “free knowledge.” I understand that there are many people with more influence in the world than I who like this term (e.g., Jimmy Wales’s “Free Knowledge requires Free Software and Free File Formats”). In fact, I heard Jimmy use this phrase last week at the Shuttleworth/Soros/Hewlett-sponsored meeting in Cape Town. He was describing why he doesn’t like the term “content.” Because “content,” he said, sounds like a static something that can be packaged and shipped. And so he prefers the more living, breathing, dynamic term “knowledge,” which he uses to characterize sites like Wikipeida. Now, fully understanding that many of you could care less, I have to get this off my chest anyway… ...

Twice in the last week I’ve heard the phrase “free knowledge.” I understand that there are many people with more influence in the world than I who like this term (e.g., Jimmy Wales’s “Free Knowledge requires Free Software and Free File Formats”). In fact, I heard Jimmy use this phrase last week at the Shuttleworth/Soros/Hewlett-sponsored meeting in Cape Town. He was describing why he doesn’t like the term “content.” Because “content,” he said, sounds like a static something that can be packaged and shipped. And so he prefers the more living, breathing, dynamic term “knowledge,” which he uses to characterize sites like Wikipeida. Now, fully understanding that many of you could care less, I have to get this off my chest anyway… ...

I’m at an incredible meeting co-sponsored by Shuttleworth, Hewlett, and OSI looking at possibly producing a declaration on open education. For the first session in the morning, participants listed all the open education projects we are working on. You can see the cards we posted on the windows, or the list of projects as we transcribed it into the wiki. We then broke into small groups and analyzed the data from the cards. My group decided to treat each card as if it were a webpage we were tagging in delicious. You can see the resulting collection of tags as a tag cloud, a pie chart, and a bar chart. These data visualizations are an interesting commentary on where the open education movement is spending its efforts. We then gathered back together and reported the work of our small groups.

Week one comes to an end and I’m already blown away by the quality of the contributions to the class and the effort required just to keep up with everything everyone is writing. Please don’t let down! This is an amazing collection of material… ...

Here’s are some highlights of the first batch of writing people following the Open Education class have done, with my thoughts sprinkled throughout. ...

Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next week to sign up… =) I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy): ...

Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next week to sign up… =) I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy): ...

No time for a long post today, just a quick announcement that the first info about our OER Recommender (funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation) went online today: http://www.oerrecommender.org/. The underlying technology, Suggestr, will be open sourced as soon as we have a minute to breathe.

From the Open Education 2007 Conference Committee: We’re pleased to announce that the conference registration for Open Education 2007 is now open. The early registration deadline is Friday, September 7 – after that date all of the rates will go up. So please register early! To register online, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/registration. To view the preliminary program online (subject to change), please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/program. To view details about how to travel to Utah State University, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/travel. ...

This has been the primary question asked by people providing feedback on the OEL draft. Below I provide a four point response. ...