Open-Content

So by now you’ve heard - Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still - wow. Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard. ...

Several interesting thoughts about sustainability are making the rounds after our recent conference. I thought Kerry struck a particularly alarming chord: Eisenhower National Clearinghouse is a good example - once enc.org, home to a plethora of math-based lesson plans, tutorials, java applets, etc. - now a paid subscription site due to the end of NSF funding. Is this really the eventual end of opencourseware and other open education projects once Hewlett funding and other sources dry up? Do the resources disappear from those who can’t afford them (trans. those who need them most)? Saying things like “oh, the Internet Archive will still have them” is only helpful as long as people keep funding the archive. ...

So I’m sitting here in the annual Hewlett Foundation Open Education Grantees meeting thinking… what is the future of open education? Where is it going? I think there is only one answer: localization. ...

Hadn’t mentioned my new book project here yet, mostly because I didn’t want to be accused of talking up vaporware. However, the new learning objects book is well underway and it’s time to get more people involved than my students. The book is written as a series of conversations around a conference room table, and deals with the what I feel are the least understood / most important concepts in learning objects. Also, the book is being written on the OpenContent wiki, and I would encourage anyone interested to jump in and have a go and writing new dialogue - or if you’re seriously committed - writing in a new character. And now, the links: ...

In Stephen’s notes on Wenger’s ALT-C talk, Etienne makes this absolutely wonderful comment: It’s a shift, from learning being viewed as a (vertical) relation between a provider and a recipient, to a (horizontal) peer to peer relationship of negotiation of multual relevance. Best definition of meaningful learning I’ve heard in ages. I’ve often thought that if a teacher can’t “convince” a student they need to learn a certain “required” subject (i.e., if they can’t demonstrate the relevance of material so supposedly important it was put into the core curriculum), they should not be allowed to teach it. Period. Of course, when the curriculum and assessments are set by the federal government, there is no mutual negotiation of anything. “Open wide,” says the omniscient panel of PhDs….

This one was just too funny not to repost. Enjoy this conversation between a Microsoft recruiter and Eric Raymond (Founder and Emeritus President of the Open Source Initiative) in which M$ mistakenly makes Eric a job offer.

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.

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… :)