Via Open Access News: I propose four main reasons as to why Open Access is beneficial for the way scholarly research is carried out and how its findings are used, and is thus incontrovertibly beneficial for human society as a result. I mention the latter because the stakeholders are, after all, not just the immediate players in the game: we all have stakes in there, too – researchers, research institutions, nations and global society as a whole. We all have an interest in the efficient and effective progress of scholarly endeavour. The reasons I offer, then, for why Open Access is the way to go are these: ...

A great course for listening in on (or viewing!): InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives | Fall 2006, from the Berkeley open educational resource collection.

Teemu and pals are engaged in a project they call MobilED that is developing mobile phone interfaces into repositories like MediaWiki. This is sooo cool… I see all kinds of overlaps with the things we’re doing, I just need to get them listed and prioritized so that I can talk to Teemu about collaborating somehow… =) Looks like he already has a great group of collaborators together. Can I just say again that I love being part of a community of really bright people who understand open sharing?

I recently finished a report on the sustainability of OER projects in higher education for the OECD. The report draws on papers written by Downes and Dholakai earlier this year (2006) for the February OECD meeting in Malmo. I wish I could claim that the report contains an earth-shattering revelation about how to make what we do “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions.” This phrase, “sustainable in the eyes of our home institutions,” translates roughly into “our home institutions kindly allow us to continue working on our projects so long as funding for the project comes from an outside source.” Thinking we can find an infinite source of outside funding is silly, and so we have only one other choice, really - make the OER projects we do so central and critical to our institutions that they have no choice but to continue them once the outside funding goes away… ...

At the OCW Consortium meetings at the Open Education conference in September, I asked whether other OCWs had explicitly CC licensed their metadata. In talking to people then and since then, the general response is best characterized as hemming and hawing. Very folks appear to have considered this licensing status of their metadata. But this seems like a very clear issue to my very simple mind. I mean, what’s the point of creating open access materials if you’re going to hoard your metadata and make it hard for people to find the materials? (This same problem is what seems to have stymied the NSDL for a few years in the early 2000s.) ...

Emergence Event type: Conference Date: 2006-10-19 This was a session shared by Brian Eno and Will Wright in which they talked about emergence and generativity. Below are my notes; more photos are available from my Flickr account. There are a number of quotes in here that are absolutely fabulous. Brian Eno - What Darwin did for Natural History, we now need to do for culture. What is it that changes people’s minds? Culture. (Religion also does / used to do this.) ...

Pop!Tech Theme: Science, technology and the future of ideas Begins: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 at 7:00 PM Ends: Sun, 22 Oct 2006 at 12:00 PM Location: Camden, Maine Last date for registration: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 Last date for paper submission: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 Link: Pop!Tech Homepage

What would you say if given the opportunity to review the learning objects literature in approximately 5,000 words? I’ve had to answer that question for the upcoming Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. A few months back, I asked everyone to share their favorite learning objects pieces and got quite a response. Today I’m happy to present the community with two fruits of my efforts. First, the preliminary draft of the paper. Before you complain, yes, it’s a Word document, but OpenOffice will open it. :) If you have any comments on the draft I would love to hear them in the next few days (don’t have much time left before i have to submit the final copy). Feel free to use Change Tracking and send me your edits, or just leave higher level remarks in the Comments below. (I’m well aware that I’m missing citations and things; I’ll be cleaning those up in the mean time.) ...

The Fahamu Networks for Social Justice has announced their first opencourseware course, with materials from the Oxford University accredited course An Introduction to Human Rights. Great content on a very important issues… check it out. (Fahamu means ‘understanding’ or ‘consciousness’ in Kiswahili.)

Unknown Quantity: A Real And Imaginary History of Algebra Author: John Derbyshire Year: 2006 Publisher: Joseph Henry Press ISBN: 030909657X This was an absolutely fascinating book that I had a very difficult time putting down each night… Many hours of sleep lost to its pages! The book wanders through lots of territory, including rings and fields, different algebras, etc. Derbyshire’s writing style is the perfect mix of fun historical narrative and clearly explained mathematics. The best thing about the book was the depth Derbyshire was willing to go into with the math and the clarity of his explanations - I very seldom felt either confused or like I wish he had given me more. ...