Sharing Nicely

OK – enough – time to start writing again. Partly because one has to keep those fingers busy and the mind occupied, partly because I am hoping this will make it easier to keep my PhD supervisor informed of what is going on (and make sure it is going on), partly because it’s just too embarassing that the last post is months old …

Very quick update. I am back in Cape Town, running the Freecourseware Project at the University of the Western Cape (http://freecourseware.uwc.ac.za) which is linking UWC with the international open courseware movement. We are aiming to integrate other peoples’ (MIT, UKOU, etc.) resource into teaching at UWC, and share our resources with the world. We are also the first African member of the OCW Consortium.

I have been speaking to many people in the education environment about open courseware (and a little bit open access) and the one key issues that consistently comes up is QUALITY and how we can make sure that open resource have a certain level of it. Sparked by my recent trip to India, I am currently reading The Argumentative Indian and curiously it is related, since Sen argues that the tradition of public debate and argument is an important (and so far overlooked) perspective for analysis of India’s current situation and that is has a crucial role for holding together this very heterodox democratic nation of 1.2 billion people. His ideas remind me of Popper’s writing on Scientific Discovery, just applied to political structures and society (I think Benkler in Wealth of Networks goes in the same direction?). I find all of this fascinating, but it seems to boil down to one interesting (for an Economist) question: What inherently determines quality of knowledge creation and which mechanisms are more effective (since none are perfect) than others?

Enough – after such long absence, I am exhausted … this blog stuff … sigh