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. ...

AECT Theme: Instructional Technology Begins: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 at 1:00 PM Ends: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 at 5:00 PM Location: Dallas, TX Last date for registration: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 Last date for paper submission: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 Link: AECT Conference Homepage

Linking to my article for the October / November issue of Innovate on openness in education. Check out the rest of the articles too… interesting issue.

Pedro Pernias from the Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos de la Universidad de Alicante (you may know as the author of CMS4OCW used by the UNIVERSIA consortium) has let me know that he has finished translating Getting Axiomatic about Learning Objects into Spanish and posted on his Contenidos Abiertos website. Pedro is doing many things to promote open content in the Spanish speaking world. If you don’t know his site, check it out. ...

One of the most amazing quotes I’ve seen in a while comes from Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs of the Association of American Publishers, in an article about Open Access to Research. [Mr. Alder] rejected the idea that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying that it was in the national interest for it to be restricted to those who could pay subscription fees. “Remember — you’re talking about free online access to the world,” he said. “You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.” ...

As per the alternately infuriating (do we need another reason to *hate* MicroSoft?) and comical article at InsideHigherEd, the US Secretary of Education’s Commission’s on the Future of Higher Education *did* succeed in getting some language around open content into the Commission’s formal recommendations / report - but just barely. The original recommendation in the report read as follows: The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education. ...

On my other blog I’ve posted a half-baked proposal for creating Attribution Plugins for the CC licenses… I’ll be curious to hear what y’all think.

On my other blog I’ve posted a half-baked proposal for creating Attribution Plugins for the CC licenses… I’ll be curious to hear what y’all think.

I am extremely happy to announce that the program for Open Education 2006: Community, Culture, and Content is online! The conference is being hosted by COSL with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and will be held at Utah State University in beautiful Logan Utah. Highlights this year will surely include Creative Commons General Counsel Mia Garlick answering the question “What is commercial use?.” The earth will possibly explode as Brian Lamb and Todd Richmond give talks at the same conference with the titles “DIY Educators Gone Wild: Where are the Instructional Mash-Ups?” and “Open Content: Must Anarchy Reign?” (hint: Todd will answer a resounding yes.) Representatives from UNESCO and OECD will be speaking; the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, the main US funders behind open source in education, will be speaking. Presenters from a dozen or more countries will talk about everything from the technical bleeding-edge to the no tech zones of Nepal. And of course the major OCW projects from the US, EU, and Asia will be represented as well. It is going to be a rockin time for sure. You can check out the detailed program online, though it is subject to minor changes. ...

As most of my readers know, we have been using the name eduCommons for our open source OpenCourseWare software for many years now. (See http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/ for more information). Actually, our first National Science Foundation proposal using this name went in in 2001, I believe. However, today I saw that Creative Commons Canada has launched a small initiative by the same name. I tried to leave a comment on their blog, but was required to login to comment and could not find the register/login link, so here I am forced to use trackback to get my message to them. So here’s the message: ...