Open-Content

At the iCampus meeting last weekend I had the chance to catchup with one of my favorite folks, John Seely Brown. He asked what I was doing these days that was interesting, and I told him about a “competency-based learning 2.0” mashup I’m working on. When he asked where he could read about it, I said “nowhere since I haven’t finished it yet.” He then scolded me, saying, “Do I have to tell you what a blog is for? Come on…” So, correctly chided, here’s what I’ve got cooking. ...

Possibly the most broadly useful, best quality course in any opencourseware out there… The Power of Positive Parenting.

Via Open Access News: I propose four main reasons as to why Open Access is beneficial for the way scholarly research is carried out and how its findings are used, and is thus incontrovertibly beneficial for human society as a result. I mention the latter because the stakeholders are, after all, not just the immediate players in the game: we all have stakes in there, too – researchers, research institutions, nations and global society as a whole. We all have an interest in the efficient and effective progress of scholarly endeavour. The reasons I offer, then, for why Open Access is the way to go are these: ...

A great course for listening in on (or viewing!): InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives | Fall 2006, from the Berkeley open educational resource collection.

Teemu and pals are engaged in a project they call MobilED that is developing mobile phone interfaces into repositories like MediaWiki. This is sooo cool… I see all kinds of overlaps with the things we’re doing, I just need to get them listed and prioritized so that I can talk to Teemu about collaborating somehow… =) Looks like he already has a great group of collaborators together. Can I just say again that I love being part of a community of really bright people who understand open sharing?

At the OCW Consortium meetings at the Open Education conference in September, I asked whether other OCWs had explicitly CC licensed their metadata. In talking to people then and since then, the general response is best characterized as hemming and hawing. Very folks appear to have considered this licensing status of their metadata. But this seems like a very clear issue to my very simple mind. I mean, what’s the point of creating open access materials if you’re going to hoard your metadata and make it hard for people to find the materials? (This same problem is what seems to have stymied the NSDL for a few years in the early 2000s.) ...

Linking to my article for the October / November issue of Innovate on openness in education. Check out the rest of the articles too… interesting issue.

Pedro Pernias from the Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos de la Universidad de Alicante (you may know as the author of CMS4OCW used by the UNIVERSIA consortium) has let me know that he has finished translating Getting Axiomatic about Learning Objects into Spanish and posted on his Contenidos Abiertos website. Pedro is doing many things to promote open content in the Spanish speaking world. If you don’t know his site, check it out. ...