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I wasn’t too impressed. Perhaps it’s partly that none of these ideas are particularly new to me (although some of the individual examples of how companies are using them were), and perhaps to someone who has never heard about Wikis, networking, collaboration, Web 2.0 etc, this could be a great book. However, it is very clearly a business book, written for executives, and with a language and writing style that I am not used to, and don’t particularly like

With the best OERs in the world, we still agree that we sometimes need to have human involvement, whether in classroom instruction, as an online mentor (which can be very taxing, something that Professor Wiley has experienced in this course).I think it would only be a healthy sign if a huge industry of training companies grew up around OERs, that provided value added services - like hands-on instruction, mentoring and guidance by distance, follow up and setting deadlines, printing textbooks or DVDs, etc. If they then released all their material back to the commons, whether because they were compelled (through CC share-alike) or as a goodwill gesture to the community, the whole movement would benefit. This is a strong argument against the CC NC license on educational material.

An additional thought after reading about all these companies that opened up their internal processes to collaboration both from the internal staff, and from external customers, was the idea of a more open and flexible university. Some enlightened professors are great at engaging their students in defining the contents of the class, but generally both our programs of study (which courses we have to take to graduate), and the contents of them, are determined by individual faculty.