Open-Content

Next week I have the opportunity to present a few remarks to the US Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Since I had to submit my comments ahead of time, they’re actually done, and I thought I would share. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you have, as I don’t actually talk to the Commission until next Friday. (UPDATE 06 Feb 06: I have included the new Introduction and Summary as delivered to the Commission.) ...

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my RIP-ping on learning objects article has been summarzed at some length in Spanish. This is what open licensing is all about…

When a people find themselves more fully possessed of opportunities to exercise their rights as human beings than another; when a society becomes aware that it is in possession of greater comforts and enjoyments than another; and when at this same moment these prospered people come to understand that it is within their power to extend these same opportunities to those who have before been without them, a solemn responsibility comes to rest upon those more empowered. ...

There have been lots of articles around the blogosphere of late ringing the death bell for learning objects. It’s hard to tell if they’re right or not, because no one can agree about what a learning object is (although I enjoyed reading that a urinal apparently qualifies). And perhaps that very statement is all that needs to be made. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not. My primary interest always has been, and I suspect always will be, in increasing access to educational opportunity to people who have been denied that right for any of a variety of reasons. I loved the learning objects idea because the “write once, use anywhere” idea had a lot of economic appeal - once an object had been created for whatever reason, we could copy it (for free) and send it (for very close to free) almost anywhere around the world to be employed in the exercise of an individual’s right to education. ...

One of the most amazing web-based tutorials I’ve seen in a very long time: try ruby! You should really give it a try.

So I think the upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 has worked. If you find kinks in the site as you bump around, please let me know.

Due to some recent publicity at digg.com and elsewhere, there have been lots of people coming to the OCW Finder (30,000 some yesterday alone). I’ve updated the listings and included tags for video and audio, making it easier for folks to find those sorts of courses.

I hesitate to even link to articles like Errol Louis’ rant against Wikipedia because I hate to drive any more traffic to them - they’re already getting far more than they deserve. You can almost hear the popular press breathing a collective sigh of relief. It’s as if they’ve been hoping and praying for something like this to happen for months. You can almost hear them saying “See! We told you so! Don’t listen to those ‘bloggers’! Stick with the establishment!” Talk about misdirecting blame. What do ‘bloggers’ have to do with wikipedia? Pot, I’d like to introduce you to the kettle. I believe you’ve met? I wonder how podcasters managed to get left out… ...

Ira Fuchs made the closing keynote at Sakai today and gave a great list of open source software that he saw as potentially revolutionizing higher education. I list those (with a few others we talked about at dinner last) here: Sakai, Kuali, Open Source Portfolio Initiative, eduCommons, Asterisk, Zimbra, OJAX. Ira’s talk set out a really fabulous vision of open source software use in higher education, built around his vision of EduCore (he stressed this is the working title only). The best part of his speech was the announcement that beginning immediately a three month study is being conducted to take the EduCore idea several steps closer to becoming a reality.

Check out this fab collection of educational blogs over at incsub. This is the short list for this year’s awards in a variety of categories. Some really excellent educational blogs here, and almost certainly at least one you don’t already know about.