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by Stephen Downes
February 12, 2009

Estimating "Reuse / Remix" Value of 7 OER Projects
This post would be useful even if it only summarized the seven OER projects, but it also assesses them from the perspective of reuse and remixing. The post was undertaken as a "rogue quest" for David Wiley's OER course. projects summarized include OpenLearn, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, Open Yale Courses and Rice Connexions (I can't help noticing how these are all branded to major institutions, which creates the (false) impression that on ly these institutions are producing OERs). Jared Stein, Flexknowlogy, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Connexions, Open Educational Resources, Project Based Learning, OpenCourseWare] [Comment]

How the Crash Will Reshape America
The second part of the crash will hit when the bottom falls out of public spending, especially in the U.S. (even a very large stimulus package will only partially offset this, and tax cuts will make it worse). We are already seeing that education will take a large part of the impact. People like Richard Florida can blithely say some regions will simply decline - but it's more complex than that. There isn't enough space here to discuss this. But we are looking at the same forces that have kept less wealthy regions of the world impoverished coming here. Do not be lulled into believing that it's just the new high-tech economy replacing the old. Our new impoverishment may force us to adopt new technologies, such as e-learning, but there is also a significant effort afoot to permanently convert public wealth into private (and increasingly stateless) wealth. George Siemens, elearnspace, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Online Learning] [Comment]

Net Neutrality: This Is Serious
Tim Berners-Lee writes on the issue of net neutrality. If you can't think of what you want to sent to the Canadian hearing (the CRTC (Canadian regulator) has just agreed to an extension for comment to Monday, February 23rd) send them this. "Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it." Via Joe Think. Tim Berners-Lee, Weblog, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Canada] [Comment]

Why Aren't Ebooks Taking Off? Not Enough Pirates
Why haven't ebooks taken off? According to one point of view, it's because there hasn't been enough ebook piracy. Why would I buy a Kindle, for example, if the only thing I can use it for is stuff I have to pay for? Via TechDirt. Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: File Sharing, Books] [Comment]

The Digital Marketplace
Everybody wants to be the (central) one-stop shop. Here's California's version: "The Digital Marketplace (DM) is an innovative one-stop-shopping platform for the discovery, selection and authoring of digital resources. The DM was developed specifically with faculty and students' needs in mind and provides a unique solution to the higher education marketplace. You told us that you want more affordability, more accessibility and more convenience... the Digital Marketplace delivers." It's the same old federation model, where a group of partners attempts to corner (and enclose) the marketplace. Various Authors, Website, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Accessibility] [Comment]

eLML - eLesson Markup Language
Joel Fisler writes in a comment to remind us of ELML as an alternative to DITA. From the website: "The eLesson Markup Language (eLML) is an open source XML framework for creating structured eLessons using XML. For easier lesson authoring eLML we offer the web-based WYSIWYG Firedocs eLML Editor and to create eLML template layouts without any XSLT-knowledge you can use our new Template Builder. Check out the eLML-tools page for more useful software and check the download page for the latest eLML release. The eLML project is hosted at Sourceforge and offers all the regular tools (CVS, bugtracker, forum etc.) that you might already be familiar with when working with Sourceforge." Various Authors, Website, February 12, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Open Source, Project Based Learning, XML, Metadata] [Comment]

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