Open-Content

If you believe, like many, that academic publishers like Elsevier are evil, you may want to upgrade your opinion of Elsevier itself to “small but definitely non-zero chance that this organization is not evil.” According to a joint release from MIT and Elsevier: In a move to encourage open education, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) and Elsevier have agreed to make available figures and text selections from any of Elsevier’s more than 2,000 journal titles for use on OCW. As a result of this landmark agreement, select Elsevier content can now be included within the open access OCW course materials - to be freely downloaded, used and shared under a Creative Commons license. ...

Justin and I have been talking a lot lately about what’s wrong with social networking. Much has been written about social network fatigue and about the lack of data portability provided by many of the major social networks. For a variety of reasons, the portability of my identity and the graph of who my friends are and my relationships to them - in other words, me and my social network - is an extremely interesting problem to me. (And as Eric says, every good piece of software starts with a developer scratching his own itch.) Perhaps I’m not so interested in data portability aspects of getting my photos out of Flickr or my bookmarks out of Delicious because it’s already so easy to do. Getting my information about myself and my social network out of Facebook isn’t easy to do… ...

Once every 5 or 10 years you hear an idea that’s so good that you understand immediately that you should support it in any way you can, even to the point of personal sacrifice of time, money, and effort. I read one of these ideas on Slashdot today: With the unfortunate passing of Congressman Tom Lantos, parts of Silicon Valley and San Francisco will be holding a special election in June to send a replacement to Congress. Given the area, it would be great to have someone who is both tech- and policy-aware fill the seat — and it looks like that just might happen. Lawrence Lessig has apparently bought ‘change-congress.com.’ A ‘Draft Lessig’ group is forming on Facebook, featuring some of Lessig’s old co-workers at Harvard and Jimmy Wales, among others. No word from Lessig himself yet, but he’s been increasingly vocal about politics of late. If it happens, it would be a huge step forward for the representation of technology in Washington." ...

Thought you all might be interested in a little experiment I’m trying in republishing OCW materials in Wordpress - http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/. There’s a ton we can do here with custom themes and plugins that would be really cool. Wouldn’t have the power of something like eduCommons, but would be much simpler to use, too. Let me know what you think!

The headline says it all. Desmond Tutu has signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Over 1400 individuals and 100 organizations have signed to date. Have you?

Martin has a great post up about the debate between Stephen and I over the Cape Town Declaration written in terms of a comparison between Cato and Cicero. I enjoyed it; I expect Stephen did as well.

Seth Godin expands on Kevin Kelley’s Better than Free. Seth’s takeaway: “when there are infinite copies of something, charging for one is almost impossible.” Or in Kevin’s words, When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. They both hit the nail right on the head. People trying to figure out how to make open education sustainable would do well to read these articles. If a day or two passes and someone hasn’t translated Kevin’s eight points into education speak I’ll go ahead and do it. But read these pieces NOW.

Gavin links to his great article on scienceprogress.org about how NIH’s New Open Access Policy Can Benefit Everyone. “The new policy is not only notable for its novelty and the whopping amount of research it will make available, but for its storied history.”

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration launched one week ago today and has already received over 1,000 individual signatures and over 80 institutional signatures. The CTD News page links to dozens and dozens of news and blog stories covering the Declaration, published everywhere from the US to Taiwan to Pakistan to the UK to Thailand to Guyana to Australia to South Africa. Even if you don’t agree with the specific wording of the declaration, you can’t deny that it has been a huge catalyst for getting the word out about open education…

Via eSchoolNews comes the exciting news that Florida public schools have added a CC-licensed resource to their approved list of curricular materials: Tired of investing in expensive textbooks and proprietary software programs, Florida education officials are looking to an open online-learning platform to teach young students basic reading skills… Florida has adopted FreeReading.net on its short list of K-3 supplemental reading programs that schools may use state instructional money to purchase for the 2008-09 school year. This is the first open instructional program to be approved through an official state adoption, officials said. ...