XplanaZine

Every day here in Boston, the mailman comes walking down the street about the same time my wife is leaving to head to Starbucks for her morning coffee. The mailman always greets her with a typical south Boston “How ah yuh” (pronounced pretty much like the state of Hawaii), and my wife always responds with a friendly “Howdy do.” To be honest, I’m not sure that either one of them really understands the other. It’s more like they’re simply reading voice and contextual cues. It’s the morning; a greeting is in order; the other person is smiling; they must be asking about my well being. Continue reading ‘Passion Trumps Words when Communicating about Learning’

Stephen Downes pointed out some inconsistencies in my article from last Friday in which I outlined the gap between where we are and what I think it will take to have a free curriculum. My original article was a response to comments by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. Continue reading ‘I Believe the Curriculum Will Be Free, But…’

Jimmy Wales has a post on Lawrence Lessig’s site about how curriculum will become a free commodity in the upcoming years. He writes:

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that. Continue reading ‘Of Course the Curriculum Will Be Free — It Always Has Been’