Everybody respects Stephen, and I’m no different. I’m dying to understand his criticisms of the creation of an educational use license for content, but I may be too dense to do so. Below are point by point responses to his criticisms as best as I understand them. If someone else can see that I’m missing the point in one or another, I wish they would fill me in. I hope he will make point by point rebuttals and responses so that I can better understand where he’s coming from. ...

Many people know that I am extremely interested in the growth and emergence of “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/. In addition to keeping the “evolution of moderation on Slashdot”:http://opencontent.org/mod-evolve/ archive, I try to be a student of the archive and what it can teach us about catalyzing the growth of really large, really active online communities. This short foray explores a crisis-response model of large community growth. ...

There is finally a reasonable cc.edu proposal on the table (the proposal and some framing context are reprinted below), but no one has provided any feedback on it as of yet. Do people just not care? The lack of passionate debate, and especially the lack of response from persons of whom direct questions have been asked, has really taken me by surprise. ...

A new school year, a new research group. I’ve formalized my interest in extending access to educational opportunity by forming a new research group here in the Department of Instructional Technology - the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunity (OSLO) Research Group. Hopefully this formalization will give us some traction with funders, and bring some public visibility to all of our efforts to open access to educational opportunity

Those who know my “Religious and Sacred Texts”:http://davidwiley.com/religion.html project will know that I am a religious person. Being so, I couldn’t not post this quote from Salon’s “review”:http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2003/08/14/gibson/index_np.html of Mel Gibson’s new movie about Jesus Christ. Following a recent screening of the film, the Anti-Defamation League voiced concerns that Gibson’s film, which he co-wrote, produced and directed, “will fuel hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism,” and could kick off another round of bloodshed by disconsolate Christians who had just about gotten over their savior’s death. ...

D’Arcy reminded me that we haven’t had a Pitch update in a while, so here’s a breif bit. We’ve settled on a logo, attitude, and general look and feel for the journal (see “http://pitchjournal.org/":http://pitchjournal.org/). We spent this afternoon going over user stories and working out the better part of the requirements. We’re expecting to release a MRD within the next week or so for public feedback and also to gather some support (in terms of any programming people might want to contribute). We’re still going round on php versus python, and if that can’t spark a discussion then probably nothing will.

Although the position is open until filled, we will officially begin reviewing applications for our “Assistant/Associate professor position”:http://personnel.usu.edu/W2-123-03.htm on Friday the 15th. Personally I’m still hoping to see some applicants whose name I recongize from the blogosphere. =) With three new hires in the next 18 months or so, we’re poised to really rebuild the “IT department”:http://it.usu.edu/ here at USU…

There have been a grand total of two posts to the cc.edu mailing lists (the discussion about an educational use-only option for the Creative Commons licensing infrastructure) not authored by one of the CC people. You can access the archives here “http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-education/":http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-education/. Stephen has been vocal in his thinking that cc.edu is a bad idea, and posted a thorough critique to which I responded and requested a counter-response. Zachary Chandler posted one positive message. Does the instructional technology world just not care about improving the open licensing of educational materials?

As part of PITCH we are working on developing a clean growth path for comments attached to a published article to grow into a published article of their own. As we have envisioned many uses of trackback for this purpose, it occured to me: why isn’t there trackback SPAM? Couldn’t a malicious person send a trackback ping (which pointed to a service or product they were trying to market) to any article in any blog supporting trackback? I can hear it now, “Blammo! Instant links to my product on 100,000 sites!” ...

From Stephanie Allen and co’s new blog, “COP^2”:http://www.reusability.org/blogs/steph/ – “At the end of the day, employers do not want well-trained employees; they want employees who do their jobs well.” Looks like some fun research to follow over the summer.