Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Open Content

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Over at “iterating toward openness” at OpenContent.org, David Wiley makes several good points in his post regarding the recently reported deal between Pearson Education and the Montgomery County Public Schools (Washington Post).  According to the article the school district will be “paid $2.25 million to develop an elementary school curriculum” and then Pearson will augment their work and make sales around the world.  The phrasing suggests that the money will be for what the school system will do in the future rather than just being payment for currently existing work.

Also, the article states that the future payment(s) will give Pearson “the expertise of one of the nation’s top school systems and the right to use its name and its top employees as sales tools.”  All of this is logical additional value because it is hard to believe that there could be much more than the thinnest veneer of copyright protection available for a “school curriculum.”  Chances are good that the Montgomery school system personnel are not really providing a lot of originality since for generations teachers have been copying each others materials with minimal iterative improvements being made along the way.  Furthermore, the more these materials conform to the developing public domain standards, the less protectable they are under copyright.

It seems that Pearson puts some value in the Montgomery school system name and in just having access to the staff.  And it may even be that some of what they are paying for is just good will – almost as if they made a donation to the school system and just didn’t want their shareholders to be upset so they make it look like they are buying something.  It would be interesting to see if the school system and/or Pearson would make the terms of their agreement publicly available.

AMSER = FREE ONLINE RESOURCES

Friday, June 11th, 2010

AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.  AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout.  Check AMSER out at www.AMSER.org.

College Inc.

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Thought provoking video regarding the for-profit (non-open) model of higher education:

Hybrid Education 2.0 – CMU OLI

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

What if you could teach a college course without a classroom or a professor, and lose nothing?

According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, there’s no “what if” about it. Earlier in the decade, Carnegie Mellon set out to design software for independent learners taking courses through the university’s Open Learning Initiative, an effort to make courses freely available to non-enrolled learners. But rather than merely making course materials available to non-students, like MIT’s famous OpenCourseware project, Carnegie Mellon wanted to design courses that would respond to the individual needs of each student. It currently has courses in 12 different subjects available on its Web site, mostly in math and science.  Rest at InsideHigherEd.

Open Access 101

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

POSSCON

Monday, April 20th, 2009

POSSCON = Palmetto Open Source Software Conference.  This was the second edition of this now annual conference in Columbia, SC and it drew approximately twice as many attendees as last year.  Thanks to the primary sponsor, the Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management, the conference was free.  Also, the sessions were taped and they will soon be made available at the conference website www.POSSCON.org.

MIT Leads the Way, Again

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 20 – In a move aimed at broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship, faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.

The new policy, which was approved unanimously at an MIT faculty meeting on Wednesday, March 18 and took immediate effect, emphasizes MIT’s commitment to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.

Rest at MIT.edu

Knowledge for Free

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

The Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) of the ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (OECD) recently (2007) put out an interesting (but somewhat lengthy) report entitled Givng Knowledge for Free.

Leaders

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

The Hewlett Foundation has some excellent open education resources available at this site.