Opinions On Open

I’m blogging over at P2PU these days, mostly about issues of specific relevance to that project, but I posted a response to a Chronicle of Higher Education piece today that is equally at home here. Apologies for the cross-posting.

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article titled “Global firm to pay Montgomery, Md., schools millions for elementary curriculum.” Essentially, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) have signed a deal with Pearson, the global publishing behemoth, under which MCPS will develop educational curriculum and transfer the copyright to Pearson. In exchange, [...]

Last month, a graduate student at Georgetown University in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program interviewed me via email about new media and my career path, especially pertaining to my role at Creative Commons. It was mainly for his course, so it wasn’t posted anywhere, but then I remembered this [...]

The US Congress finally – finally! – passed a comprehensive health care reform package yesterday. This is fantastic news for all Americans, and indeed perhaps the globe. We can quibble about details of how it could have been even better, but the fact is that this legislation contains many crucial [...]

The Open Educational Resource movement, based on the idea that educational content which is publicly licensed for modification and redistribution is a positive innovation in education, has just begun to break into the mainstream. Conceptually, the idea has been in the public sphere for years now with projects like the [...]

A recent editorial in Nature is entitled “Do scientists really need a PhD?” Briefly, the vaunted status of a PhD as the ticket to running interesting research projects and being a part of the global academic enterprise is being questioned. Indeed, in some places, such as the BGI (a genomics [...]

I joined CC two years ago this January, and since then my views about CC’s role in culture and education have evolved. Back then, I was pretty much a novice to this space, though sharing in education sounded like a no brainer to me. But I’ve had time to grow [...]

Recently George Siemens posted some thoughts on the topic of openness as an ideology, and a dialogue began to take shape around whether the open education movement is best served by pragmatists or ideologues. In true blogger fashion, I want to ignore a lot of the context and put my [...]

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA
A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to [...]

Something I hear frequently is this wish that all “educational uses” be considered “fair uses,” thereby presumably freeing the resources from the usual constraints of copyright. How shall we count the ways that this seemingly simple idea is confused at best, and horribly wrong at worst? Let’s see…
1. Define “educational [...]

One of the most frustrating aspects of working in the education field is those persistent performance gaps that seem so resistant to change. Over the decades, there has been no shortage of specific cases where traditionally intractable differences were erased, at least for a time, whether we are talking about [...]

Current textbook initiatives give the impression that educational quality will suffer without textbooks. In response to economic crises, these initiatives focus on saving the textbook, by either reducing its cost or digitizing many of its components. However, this public perception, that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, begs the question. [...]

Journalists and media organizations face a foundational crisis: the web challenges their traditional conceptions of what the end-product of journalism is.
The availability of open data, open publishing tools, and open licenses combined with the a low barrier for information access allows anyone with the time and motivation to transform into [...]

Digital textbooks and open learning are in the news again, just in time for back to school. The New York Times has published an article called “In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History” by Tamar Lewin, who profiles the increasing adoption of digital textbooks by school districts as a way [...]

I like Boston; it’s unassuming. The city doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is, namely, a smallish town with high rises in some directions and green, trimmed shrubbery in others. Granted, I have not seen much of the city; having wandered to the Commons after my talk, I [...]

What I originally thought would be the highlight of the Open Video Conference did not come to pass. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody (The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) canceled last minute due to flight delays, sending conference organizers scrambling in the wee hours to find a suitable [...]