General

They say “No good deed goes unpuinished.” So it is fitting that “some people”:http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/research.cgi?item=1057097186 are complaining about the closing of OpenContent. ...

Charles Kerns wrote to say that Stanford has officially released their open source course management system, “CourseWork”:http://coursework-demo.stanford.edu/coursework/. The system looks to do everything most people would want out of the box, and – being open source – can be made to do whatever else you like. Summarizing from the Stanford site: “CourseWork is an open source course management system, designed to provide an open, modular framework for learning objects. It uses OKI APIs whenever possible. Stanford’s implementation of CourseWork runs with the Apache web server, using TomCat 3.0 for the Java servlet server. DTL (Display Template Language), developed at Stanford, is used to create the presentation displays. The database back end is Oracle (but CW has also been ported to PostgreSQL). CourseWork has been run on both Sun Solaris and Linux. ...

There’s a great introduction to the DMCA and TEACH Act over at the “LIBRES Journal”:http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libres13n1/index.htm Thanks to Henk at “In Between”:http://eepi.ubib.eur.nl/iliit/archives/2003_05.html#000143 for the link. Utah State University has just formed a committee to put policy in place ensuring our compliance with the TEACH Act. A committee I’m actually excited to be on!

Could it happen? “Could the Media Lab really be in trouble?":http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/mitlab.html Lots of interesting information here, especially for a certain Instructional Technology department who just finished getting administrative permissions to run a Board of Regents approved learning technologies research lab… [Pointed out by “Seb”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2003/04/10.html#a885]

For some reason it seemed like a good idea to syndicate the publications section of my vita using RSS. It only updates every two weeks or so, but still I like the idea of being able to subscribe to a rather fluid book (continually accruing collection of writings) and receive notification when stuff is added. So for the three people on the planet who might even remotely care, here’s the “RSS feed of the publications section of my vita”:http://opencontent.org/rss.pl. I’ll follow up with a similar feed for presentations, now that I’ve found a “decent tool for synch’ed-audio-PPT-to-streaming-Flash-conversion”:http://wanadu.com/new/site/icreate_desk.html. Of course, this means I have to convert my Keynote files to PPT… And convince people that streaming PPT does not equal instruction.

Only a few weeks left to get applications put together for the NSF’s National STEM [Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics] Digital Library or “NSDL Program”:http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03530/nsf03530.htm. This is a great program which funds a variety of learning objects-related programs, like our “Instructional Architect”:http://ia.usu.edu/

So today I can finally be more specific. “The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation”:http://www.hewlett.org/ and the “Center for the Public Domain”:http://www.centerforthepublicdomain.org/ have given me the green light to hold an initial meeting to discuss the establishment of some infrastructure that will support the distributed, collaborative development of open educational content. ...

“Learning objects: difficulties and opportunities”:http://opencontent.org/docs/lo_do.pdf is an eight page piece cataloging what I believe to be some of the largest obstacles to the successful use of learning object and some of the biggest opportunities for educational innovation using learning objects.

In this brief piece done for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Educational Technology, I quickly trace the history of open educational content from the foundation of the GNU project up through MIT’s OpenCourseWare and later developments. ...

I guess blogs are places where people scoop each other all the time, but since no one reads mine it won?t seem like so much of a scoop. The OpenContent Project is closing its doors. ...