Yesterday was one of those great open source days for me. The idea that there is a global community of smart and creative people who share ideas openly and help each other is powerful, but also a little abstract. But when you reach out, and the community responds and makes it all happen, it’s a […]
The OpenCourseWare Consortium has been one of the original OER pioneers. Earlier this year, we were able to announce that the membership of over 200 institutions has published more than 8000 (!) courses. As a movement and an organisation, we have arrived at an interesting and challenging moment. The focus is shifting from content to […]
My colleague Juliet Stoltenkamp, the head of e-Learning at the University of the Western Cape, and I have been meeting with lecturers from different departments to speak about OCW and encourage them to publish some of their courses. Today we met with Karen Wallace from Chemistry and her feedback and comments really struck a chord […]
We just sent out the announcement for an upcoming hands-on Mozilla course on open education. It’s organised by our friends from the Mozilla Foundation, with (some more friends) from ccLearn – and covers open licensing, open tech, and open pedagogy in a snappy 6 week package. There are case-studies, prototyping, web-seminars and we are looking […]
It takes two consecutive 11.5 hour flights to travel from Cape Town to San Franciso, and another 3 hours by bus to Monterey for the Hewlett Grantees Meeting. It’s well worth it however, since 4 out of the 5 original Peer 2 Peer University team will be here, and I can’t wait to see you! […]
Gently nudged by Steve Song, I am re-reading John Seely Brown‘s “The Social Life of Information (google books)”. Below are a few excerpts that are very relevant in the context of the www.peer2peeruniversity.org. If you replace “videos” with OER, this sounds very similar to the kind of learning communities P2PU is trying to create. Especially […]
Pratham Books/ Read India is one of those inspiring projects that India seems able to generate more easily than many other transition economies: cool business sense and entrepreneurship hit a social cause. Gautam John and his colleagues have managed to squeeze the publication costs of educational books to an absolute minimum, producing lots and lots […]
My friend Rishab Ghosh occasionally invites me to moonlight with the Collaborative Creativity Group at the United Nations University MERIT. Most recently I participated in designing the Wikipedia survey, which is coming to an end as I post this. Nobody likes to fill out online surveys, but Wikipedia gets an incredible 65,000 hits per second, […]
We just launched an information site about the Peer 2 Peer University ahead of an article that is supposed to appear in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. I am blogging about it now, because by the time it comes out I will be on my way to the vast open plains of The Karoo … […]
Ars Technica, usually the place of choice for in-depth technology reviews, publishes a fantastic fact-checking exercise on the estimated “damages” that the strong Intellectual Property lobby commonly promotes. The find that the two most often cited numbers, “750,000 jobs lost to IP theft” and “$200 – $250 billion cost of IP infringement to the US […]
