By Stephen Downes
August 18, 2004
Announcing the Commonwealth
In
various fora I have warned of the danger that Creative
Commons will commercialize. It would be too great a
temptation, I argued, to create special 'business' Creative
Commons licenses for commercial content, possibly charging
a fee for managing the license. When the Creation Commons
'Education' licenses were proposed a few months ago, I
warned that this was first step in the process (here, here, here, and here). That day has now come. The
commercialization of Creative Commons has taken a large
step forward with the development of what is being called
the 'Commonwealth'.
From one of the web sites: "The goal
of this discussion list is to develop a new form of hybrid
commercial / non-commercial license for various kinds of
intellectual property with particular emphasis on software.
We hope to combine the best of open source and proprietary
models. In so doing, we'll explore questions like: Can we
create the greatest social welfare and the greatest
innovation? Can we simultaneously benefit businesses,
developers, and end users over the long run? Can we build
models of the process of software growth and diffusion?"
Now on the one hand I have long argued that there should
be a common marketplace for commercial and non-commercial
content - that is, indeed, at the heart of my digital rights management proposal. But
Creative Commons was built upon a different premise: that
it is the home for free online content - it is for
that reason that it enjoyed such widespread support.
That is why I opposed CC Education. I always wondered why
Creative Commons never had anything like a voting process,
why its decisions were made centrally, why it was run more
like a business than a part of the open source community.
With the arrival of Creative Commons Inc. (aka the
Commonwealth) I think we know.
Sometimes, I get tired of saying "I told you so..." By Matt
Haughey, Creative Commons, August 16, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Play and Learning in The
Brain
Maish Nichani summarizes this nicely in
elearningpost: "Nice article on the importance of play in
learning. Learning is not all about external rewards and
punishments, rather “the human brain determines our
learning potential, and subjective experience is, clearly,
more than just stimuli and responses. Furthermore, it has
been shown that even the most intricate system of rewards
and punishment cannot change certain species-specific
behaviour. In fact humans exhibit much behaviour where the
reward is only rarely external, but rather ‘natural’, as in
the children’s play with crayon and paper." By Robert B.
Cialdini , Learning Lab Denmark, August, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Perplexing Problem? Borrow Some
Brains
It's not mentioned in this article,
listed via elearningpost, but the advice here is very
similar to that documented in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds. The premise is
that, with some caveats, a group of people will
consistently find a better answer than a single person, and
often a better answer than even the best individual in the
group. The upshot for this article is that managers should
not think that they are in the uniquely best position to
propose a solution - with some very few exceptions, they
are not, and the decision they reach will be worse than one
they would have obtained had they consulted with the group.
By Robert B. Cialdini , HBS Working Knowledge, August, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Rip. Mix. Feed. How?
Some nice
work bvy Alan Levine, who has been on a tear lately (he
must be on vacation). In this item he describes his use of
a tool called Blogdigger to create topic-specific feeds
of learning objects listed in RSS feeds, much the way
Edu_RSS creates topic-specific pages from blogs. By Alan
Levine, CogDogBlog, August 18, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
New Format Hastens Textbook
Accessibility
From the article: "Students with
disabilities can anticipate faster access to curriculum
materials now that the U.S. Department of Education (ED)
has formally endorsed a voluntary national publishing
paradigm known as the National Instructional Materials
Accessibility Standard (NIMAS). The standard will make it
easier to convert traditional textbooks into formats such
as Braille or text-to-speech." By Cara Branigan, eSchool
News, August 12, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Reading: Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of
Networks
Found while looking for an image from
the book, a nice set of notes summarizing Albert-Laszlo
Barabasi's Linked: The New Science of Networks
(Perseus, 2002). This book is well worth reading if you
haven't seen it yet. "Barabasi provides a rich yet readable
source for the non-mathematician seeking to understand and
apply the emerging science of self-organizing, scale-free
networks." More... More... By Doug Simpson, Unintended
Consequences, August 25, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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