FLOSS In School - Open Source Software in the Education System

Dan Colman takes issue with a recent comment by Anya Kamenetz comparing TED and Harvard. From the post:

So a quick request to the “edupunks” and “edupreneurs” out there. As you’re democratizing education and lowering tuition through technology, could you make sure that whatever you’re finally offering is an education in more than mere name? You feel me?

David Wiley has a new post on why open educational resources made sense for the Open High School of Utah (OHSU). From the post:

The reason for the O in OHSU is local control. While there are numerous secondary benefits to using OER, the primary reason OHSU was originally committed to openness is this: for learners to reach their full potential, teachers need to be fully empowered to help them learn.

Michelle Thorne has a new post announcing a Creative Commons “roadshow.” From the post:

Each CC Roadshow is designed for those interested in finding out about CC for the first time, looking for an update on recent developments, the Australian Version 3.0 licenses, or just wanting to know how CC is being used by people in their local area.

Dorothea Salo has posted slides addressing the state of open access in higher education. Readers will need to zoom in on the slides to reader her notes.

Stephen Shankland is reporting that the OpenSolaris operating system project will phase out development and support for OpenSolaris. While many open source advocates in education use Linux, the shutting down of OpenSolaris represents one less choice for educators.

Dave Cormier has a new post on why he wants to help with an upcoming open course. From the post:

Too often, I think, we feel the need to agree with the concepts that we are in the process of covering in a course. In a transmission model of learning, things tend to get parcelled out into positions that must be categorized before they can be learned.

Mark Milian is reporting on Project Gutenberg’s goal to digitize 1 billion books. From the post:

Project Gutenberg persists as a leader in the field, offering more than 33,000 out-of-copyright books as free downloads.

Reuven Carlyle has a new post suggesting that the best way to reform government is to increase access to high education, including through open education initiatives. From the post:

We need to educate more people to higher levels not only through traditionally more, extremely expensive “high demand” static slots paid by taxpayers but through radical approaches to access to information.

Thanks to Education_Ind for the link.

Alan Levine has a new post addressing the issue of “drop outs” in open courses. From the post:

The notion of “drop out” seems to assume that the measure of success is people doing all the assignments/activities from start to finish, filling the forums and blog space with their activity.

Viplav Baxi also has a post on why there’s more to an open course than the network.

David Wiley is announcing a draft version of the Open Education Conference 2010 program.

Peter Sefton has a new post addressing two of the most common reasons faculty give him not to produce OCW. From the post:

In this post I want to mention my two favourite objections to going open, which come up every time I start talking (ranting?) about OCW and OERs at USQ [University of Southern Queensland].

Taylor Walsh has written an article on OCW at elite institutions. From the post:

There are, indeed, signs of change afoot in the elite tier, with first movers coming from the cash-strapped public university sector.

Richard Poynder has a lengthy interview with Jeff Rothenberg on digital preservation. From the interview:

So far as retro-digitisation is concerned, the Report points out that funding is limited and “the quantity of non-digitised material is huge”.

“uocunescochair” is announcing a new project to locate and share open educational resources. From the post:

Our goal is to provide an operative, accessible and supported Open Repository to centralize and make available all key OER documents on OER.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

WikiEducator has begun a page discuss remixing experiments on its site. Thanks to Wayne Mackintosh for the link.

Joseph Thibault has a new post addressing the question: “Where are the Good Moodle Courses?” From the post:

Certainly the quality of all courses is not based solely on the quality of the content (as made available through a Moodle backup file).

Charles Profitt has posted his slides on “Free and Open in Education.”

Michael Nielson has a new post about moving towards “open science.” From the post:

The most critical issue however is rapid deployment of expertise to specific problems. To apply a distributed rapid innovation model we need the means to rapidly identify the very limited number of people with appropriate expertise to solve the problem at hand.

Keith Hampson has a new post responding to Brian Lamb and Jim Groom’s recent EDUCAUSE Review article on edupunk. From the post:

Open education has taken on a overly simplistic and highly political quality during the past year.

Though summer is mostly done, Jonathan Opp gives a list of books relating to openness. From the post:

Some books are new. Some are recent favorites. All offer examples of how the open source way is being employed in areas beyond technology.