An excellent presentation on Freire at AERA titled I’m Morpheus in this Hip-Hop Matrix: The Industry, Oppression, and the Word provoked some of the most (personally) interesting thinking I’ve done in a while. Short version: I’m now thinking that talking about the scalability of educational opportunity is immoral, and that there is a far bigger problem facing instructional technology researchers than simply making education more effective. ...
Back in August of 2003 I proposed that rather than create a new education license, we rebrand the By-NC-SA license as the cc.edu. The idea had lots of traction on the list - Stephen even agreed eventually ;) - as did many others (see August - December 2003 posts). However, because of some push back from CC about rebranding as a strategy, the discussion moved another direction and to the frustration of many eventually fizzled out. ...
Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…
So we’ve been updating all sorts of things lately. OpenContent.org has been laying more or less unproductive for a while, so it seemed like time to update it as well. OpenContent.org is now a mini-portal into several collections of open educational resources and the discussion forums around those. Have a look around, and if you can think of an open access collection I haven’t listed there (which you no doubt will), let me know. If you think OpenContent.org should be doing something completely different, let me know.
Many probably saw this on “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org, but for those who didn’t, “Freenet”:http://freenetproject.org/ creator Ian Clarke has announced that he is leaving the United States. GrepLaw has an “interview”:http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=03/09/02/0125236&mode=flat with Ian in which he discusses some of his reasons for deciding to make the move. While I must say that I completely respect his decision, this is a horrendous loss for us and certainly only the first of many. God speed, Ian.
Everybody respects Stephen, and I’m no different. I’m dying to understand his criticisms of the creation of an educational use license for content, but I may be too dense to do so. Below are point by point responses to his criticisms as best as I understand them. If someone else can see that I’m missing the point in one or another, I wish they would fill me in. I hope he will make point by point rebuttals and responses so that I can better understand where he’s coming from. ...
There is finally a reasonable cc.edu proposal on the table (the proposal and some framing context are reprinted below), but no one has provided any feedback on it as of yet. Do people just not care? The lack of passionate debate, and especially the lack of response from persons of whom direct questions have been asked, has really taken me by surprise. ...
A new school year, a new research group. I’ve formalized my interest in extending access to educational opportunity by forming a new research group here in the Department of Instructional Technology - the Open Sustainable Learning Opportunity (OSLO) Research Group. Hopefully this formalization will give us some traction with funders, and bring some public visibility to all of our efforts to open access to educational opportunity
There have been a grand total of two posts to the cc.edu mailing lists (the discussion about an educational use-only option for the Creative Commons licensing infrastructure) not authored by one of the CC people. You can access the archives here “http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-education/":http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-education/. Stephen has been vocal in his thinking that cc.edu is a bad idea, and posted a thorough critique to which I responded and requested a counter-response. Zachary Chandler posted one positive message. Does the instructional technology world just not care about improving the open licensing of educational materials?
Spotted on OLDaily: “Jeff Jarvis says out loud what everybody has been thinking: ‘The real point: Ultimately, your content is more valuable than professional content.’ Think about that. When you open the morning mail, and you have a letter from your Aunt Mabel and a copy of a glossy magazine, which do you open first? A lot follows from this simple observation, and while I’m not sure how much of it AOL understands, it is clear that the get at least some of it.” Read more at “The BuzzMachine”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2003_07.html#004146. This article included another real gem: “It isn’t content until it’s linked.”