The University of Cape Town has, fittingly, become the first university to sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Here’s to hoping that more universities will follow suit! More info on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration is available.
A very brief post today. I’ve lately heard some people express regrets that that the Cape Town Declaration focuses exclusively on open educational resources. In fact, it doesn’t. The “Cape Town Open Education Declaration” talks about “Unlocking the promise of open educational resources,” saying explicitly that: Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement. ...
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.
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. ...
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.
It wasn’t a question of whether or not Stephen would criticize Cape Town, just a question of when he would. :) A response to several of his criticisms is in order. His final criticism is the crucial one, so I’ll start there first and then return to the beginning and work through the others: ...