I was recently asked what I thought of Cory Doctorow’s classic Metacrap paper. He was, of course, dead on when he wrote it. The nagging question at the time was “what alternatives do we have?” And the sad answer was “not many.” ...

So we’ve been talking about this for months now. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was just a button you could push that would pipe the contents of an OCW page directly into a wiki, so you could start remixing away?” Everyone else here is busy writing real code (eduCommons 2.0 release coming in April!), so I was left to hack together a prototype of the “send to wiki” tool. It didn’t take terribly long; the project is basically a few python cgis and Instiki, the Rails-based wiki. You can see a flash demo of the tool at: http://opencontent.org/resources/ocw2wiki.htm. ...

Thanks to Mike Smith who pointed me to this summary of a talk given by Eve Gray at the Creative Commons South Africa launch. Eve is from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, and: discussed how HSRC’s early experiments with open access publishing paid off. As they made their research papers available for free download, the print revenues went up by 270%. This is exactly the same experience I had with my first learning objects book back in the day. Nice to see more data coming in to support this argument.

Stephen recently announced that he’s taking a hiatus from his blog and newsletter. Rather than feeling sorry for him, we should be glad for him. What courage it must take to do such a thing! Stephen is very much in the public eye with the very excellent work he does. The love of fame alone would be enough to keep most people from dropping out for a while. More impressively, Stephen knows as well as anyone the pace at which this all moves, and the costs associated with trying to get back in the game after an absence. ...

Stephen comments on my recent As We May Interact?: Tools like Flickr, Friendster and Technorati each try to become, if you will, a destination for people, to aggregate as many users as they can. We need to focus less on these big centres and more on how even unpopular tools can be mashed up and aggregated. There needs to be, if you will, a long tail of Web 2.0 tools - but nobody knows how to do that yet. ...

I know this reads more like stram of consciousness than something well organized. But I had to dump something out here… it’s getting cramped inside my brain. ...

A new blog on the block from COSL’s own John Dehlin. The blog follows open education news and hosts the Open Up! podcast, which so far has interviewed me, Steve Carson from MIT, and Stephen Downes. There will be several of us posting from time to time, so come check it out! - http://cosl.usu.edu/openup/ (thanks D’Arcy for reminding me to include the link!!!)

I pulled these paragraphs from my Commission testimony in the interest of time and not blurring my central message (higher education needs to stay in step with society). I submitted this recommendation to the Commission separately, and thought you might enjoy it. I would appreciate comments / thoughts: Affordability. Part of the rising cost of higher education for students is the ever-increasing cost of textbooks - textbooks can add as much as $1000 per year to the cost of college. The National Association of College Bookstores says prices of college textbooks have risen nearly 40 percent in the past five years. In a survey of textbooks by the California Student Public Interest Research Group, new editions of textbooks cost 58 percent more than previous versions, with an average cost of over $100 per book. (Crane, 2004; Pressler, 2004). The impact of these costs is especially severe on low-income students. According to the General Accounting Office, the costs of textbooks represents 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees at public four year schools, and almost a full three quarters of the cost of tuition and fees at 2 year public schools where low-income students are more likely to enroll (Bershears, 2005). ...

A couple of quick links to folks covering the Commission meeting where I got to testify last week: http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/02/2006020601n.htm http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/06/commission I think they liked it! I hope there is a positive impact…

So, I’m working on making the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license easier for people to understand as part of my fellowship at CIS. I’d appreciate your thoughts on the following language. Once we get the language right, we’ll be adding visuals. Educators are sharers by nature - the very essence of teaching is sharing what we know with others. And while none of us has the time to work with as many students as we wish we could, the Internet affords us an incredible opportunity to share our educational materials with as many people as are interested. ...