There’s a fascinating interview on Spiegel with James Shikwati, an “African economics expert,” in which he explains how foreign aid is preventing many African nations from rising out of poverty and the host of other problems they face. “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid…. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.” ...

There’s a fascinating interview on Spiegel with James Shikwati, an “African economics expert,” in which he explains how foreign aid is preventing many African nations from rising out of poverty and the host of other problems they face. “If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid…. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.” ...

A twelve tone row, it’s retrograde, and inverse derived from the number e.

When a former PhD student goes on to do absolutely amazing things, your initial instinct can be to try to take some of the credit for their success… :) However, not even I have a big enough ego to think I deserve any nods for Andy Van Schaack’s amazing new company, LiveScribe. Absolutely insane things are coming from these folks… Be sure to check out the sneak peeks at what their technology can do. ...

This is a departure from my normal open content talk, so feel free to pass this post by if you’re not interested in music. ...

No, this isn’t another tired post complaining that we should think of all “consumers” as also being “producers.” Of course we should. This is a post about a much more subtle problem with the way we’re thinking, that I am increasingly convinced is putting the field of open educational resources (OER) at risk. ...

Phil describes Prabhakar Raghavan’s keynote about Web N.0 in some detail (at WWW2007), including the following framework for thinking about user-contributed metadata. User-generated metadata is growing. Anchortext and tags are growing at the rate of 100 Mb/day. Pageviews are around 50-100 Gb/day. Reviews and ratings are small. All of these, are important, but only anchors are central to how people work on the Web. START metadata: * Star: I like this * Tag: creating tags on pictures, etc. * Access: you view a page (in a way I can see) * Routing: forwarding things to friends * Text: write a review, blog article, etc. ...

Lately I’ve been talking a lot with Bekir Gur (one of my absolutely excellent PhD students) about open education in the context of his dissertation writing. For his dissertation he’s taking a critical view of the field of instructional technology and, in the context of several reviews that range from the dominance of psychologism in the field to the the field’s obsession with objectification (remember the IEEE LOM documents saying people are learning objects?), he is arriving at an interesting conclusion: open education, thoughtfully practiced, is one solution to many of the ills currently plaguing the field of instructional technology. Reading his drafts and talking with him has prompted a few interesting thoughts… ...

Every now and then I receive an inquiry about the status of the Open Publication License. Today I received this one: I would like to know about your view on the “Open Publication License” today. I have had some arguments about its status. I have read in the past on some pages that is not recommended to be uses any more and rather one should use the Creative Commons licenses. The wikipedia also states that ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Publication_License). Maybe you can clarify that in a blog post with some comments on the status and how you see the OPL in relation to other licenses or what ia [sic] bad or good about it. So then I could link people to that post and not have to argue about that any more. That would be great. So here is a whirlwind overview of Open Publication License, and where it stands today. ...

As part of our recent application to establish a UNESCO Chair in Open Education at Utah State University, we’re creating an emphasis in Open Education in our PhD in Instructional Technology here. The emphasis is simply a sequence of electives that students will be able to choose from that will provide them with a stronger foundation in open education. I believe this will be something really special, and will help us attract even more passion and great talent into the department and the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, as well as enrolling students from outside our department. ...