If it makes sense to mobilze the army and everyone else to come to the aid of the poor and unfortunate after a natural disaster (like Katrina), why doesn’t it make sense to mobilze this level of support for “them” the rest of the time? Is it because, barring a natural disaster, it’s their own fault and so they don’t deserve any help? Is it that we would really rather not help at all, but what with all the images on TV it would be political suicide not to help? Seems rather duplicitous to be helping now. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying we shouldn’t be helping now. I’m saying we should be helping more often. Helping, of course, is what open education is all about.

Enjoyed listening to Chuck Vest talk (mp3) about where education and open education are heading. Vest was the president of MIT when it conceived of and launched MIT OpenCourseWare.

Steve Carson, who does a lot of great instructional technology writing on a blog deceptively titled OpenFiction, finishes a recent post on producer culture with this great quote: In other words, learning objects may ultimately be a consumer culture approach misapplied to a producer culture environment. I guess it is a matter of one’s pedagogy and philosophy of learning object design and reuse. Steve suggests, “Even the idea of learners as consumers of learning objects (even if they “custom-tailor” their learning experience) may be misguided.” He’s much kinder in his statement of it than I would be. In the vast majority of domains I would say that the idea of learners as consumers is outright stupidity. I won’t repeat or rederive Freire’s critque of “banking education” here, but the notion of “learners as consumers” seems to be the same idea expressed in modern lingo. ...

Welcome everyone! You’ve found the new home of “iterating toward openness.” The transition has gone surprisingly well. Much more coming very soon.

Stephen Downes takes a look at my recent piece regarding CC license selection behavior and says “the data don’t support [Wiley’s] hypothesis” that the proportion of creators choosing the license is directly proportional to the rights reserved in the license." Toward the end of my paper I claim that: While WiSH holds up when licenses are aggregated according to the number of conditions comprising them, there appears to be very little support for WiSH at the grain size of individual licenses. ...

I’ve put up a new paper draft exploring the patterns in CC license selection behavior by users on Flickr. You can access it here: Understanding the CC License Selection Behavior of Flickr Users I’d love to hear what you think. I mean to clean it up for “formal publication” after I get your feedback…

Saw a very cool item today called the Freedom Toaster. Basically a kiosk that allows people to burn CDs and DVDs of OSS for free. Now, if only they would put up more info and the software they’re using so that *we* could build one… :)

Lots going around late today about Adam Bosworth’s closing keyonte (links to audio) at the MySQL conference. I enjoyed Ryan Tomayko’s writeup most, especially this deceivingly simple line: Systems that were designed through observation of the web and/or in adherence to the core principles of the web must be more suitable to the web than those that were not. This recognition will either make or break the entire open education movement, including eduCommons and the OpenCourseWares.

Tufts OCW has launched, with course materials in medicine, nutrition, veterinary science, etc. The OCW Finder now includes the Tufts courses as well.

At the request of list members, I am republishing part of the exchange on IT Forum between myself and Larry Lipsitz, and absolutely great guy who publishes Educational Technology Magazine. I’ll leave it to you to guess which voice I am. :) ...