Up at the top of the site you’ll now see a tab titled “CTD News.” This page provides continuously updated links to recent coverage of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. The page is powered by RSS feeds in delicious with the tags capetowndeclaration+news and capetowndeclaration+blog. When you find material online about the declaration, please tag it this way so that those resources will show up here. If I start seeing a lot of garbage in the feed I’ll change my approach.
Via Chris Coppola, a video of Mark talking about the Cape Town Declaration.
There’s a hilarious spoof of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education on the iCommons listserv. Gave me a good laugh, and definitely worth a read. I say hilarious, because the spoof really is funny. However, the spoof is also deeply disappointing because its subtext is a completely irrational, anti-sustainability mindset that is the single biggest threat to the success of the open education movement. ...
Lots of great PR for the launch of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education today! First off, lots of people carried the Press Release, including the The Sun Herald, Linux Magazine, Street Insider, EarthTimes, Yahoo!, and of course the Soros and Shuttleworth Foundations. Other coverage includes: Jimmy and Rich had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Scott Jaschik wrote a great article for Inside Higher Ed. Peter Suber covered the launch, calling the declaration “a superb document.” SEO/SEM Journal has a short piece. ZDNET UK’s coverage asks whether or not the problems that have plagued Wikipedia are also in store for open education. Bangkok’s The Nation carried part of the op-ed above. Computing SA’s piece drew on existing material available above. Tectonic has a nice piece with comments from Shuttleworth himself. IT Web also covered the launch. Philip has a good summary of existing commentary on his blog which is worth checking out. Stephen Downes provides plenty of pointers to the folks who find the declaration disappointing. Much of the negative feedback about the declaration has been a feeling that too few people were involved in its creation, and that a wiki format should have been used to involve a larger, more diverse number of voices. Those of us involved in creating Cape Town encouraged people who felt this way to make their own declarations and use this format. Unfortunately, the most active new declaration appears to be the Declaration on Libre Knowledge, with only one contributor so far. I hope that those who wrote so many pages of criticism of what they saw as a closed process with Cape Town will take that same energy and apply it productively to extending Kim’s declaration.
More PR happening already today… All Africa is running a story in which the chairman of an SA publishers’ association says, “If (publishers) want to, we can’t stop them from participating, but we would discourage the Shuttleworth approach.” Computing SA says we’re trying to “transform education” I’ll add to this list throughout the day…
Today is the launch of the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education! There’s already been lots of commentary; I’ve blogged some of it before. (e.g., Stephen is among the critics.) I expect there will be lots more commentary now that the Declaration has actually launched. I’ll be doing my best to blog it all over the next several months. If you haven’t signed the declaration yet please do so! You can encourage others with this banner: <a href="http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/" title="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration"><img src="http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i291/opencontent/support-capetown.png" alt="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration" align="right" border="0" /> ...
Via the incredible Peter Suber, a Wired article about Google’s plans to host terabytes and terabytes of scientific data to which they will provide free and open access.
Whether or not it was a response to my Open Education License draft is unimportant - Creative Commons has announced CC0 - the new CC license aimed at the public domain. CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion. ...
Many iterating toward openness readers know about COSL’s Microlibrary project. The Microlibrary has received funding from the AT&T Foundation, the Qwest Foundation, and the OpenContent Foundation, but we hit a new milestone this past week when we received a donation from a business (not a foundation) reaching out to the community. ThePlanCollection.com is a local company here in Utah, and “offers the finest collection of house plans online with home plans from top architects in the United States and Canada.” Many thanks to the guys at ThePlanCollection for their support!
It’s great to see open education getting press. (More will be coming next week!) At the recent MIT OCW Milestone Event the movement got a lot of praise from Tom Friedman of Flat World fame. Catch the video of Friedman’s keynote talk on OCW over at YouTube.