Free Software Linux

Some of you might remember Cameron’s post back in June regarding the United Nations University (UNU) Media Studio’s decision to license their Media Studio and Online Learning sites under CC BY-NC-SA.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation hase probably done more than anyone else to further open education, and it's at it again, this time with a centralised site for Open Educational Resources (OER): To ensure that all the valuable knowledge created about OER and the OER cause is readily accessible to a broad audience, the Hewlett Foundation partnered with IssueLab to create a comprehensive OER document repository. This web site is the result of that partnership.

It is: one in which 1. The research the university produces is open access. 2. The course materials are open educational resources. 3. The university embraces free software and open standards. 4. If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good. 5. The university network reflects the open nature of the internet. where "university" includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration. The Wheeler Declaration.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article. Some excerpts that struck me as particularly relevant:

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal. In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM. The IMS code, and a detailed writeup, is freely available.

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality. A tool like Send2wiki, combined with the WikiArticleFeeds Extension to generate RSS feeds for republishing/reorganizing in an open content repository would allow a great deal of flexibility for creating and remixing open content.