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Learning modes and principles of open, commons-based peer-production therefor have the potential to provide the "gold standard" of enhancing future skills, competencies, connections, capacities of people and their organisations on a global scale. In short: peer-to-peer learning around open, commons-based peer-production is a game changer in international development cooperation.

Super interesting area. I worked this topic into a presentation on educational innovation as one of the leaders in its directionality and its success.

tell me more about...I'm a sociologist and how we shape today we make the history of tomorrow...

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."

"Think of your meanest high school mean girl at her most gleefully, underminingly vicious. Now give her a doctorate in your discipline, and a modicum of power over your future. That's peer review."

Great article. Funny, descriptive and useful. Anyone non-academic who works with academics should understand the pressure of peer review and this article introduces it wonderfully. I want to dig deeper into this idea of open peer review.

See my bookmark to: 'Open peer review is a welcome step towards transparency ...'

I took a course taught by this professor on Coursera - The History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education. Davidson contributed the Hacking the Academy, a source I posted elsewhere. Her blog is a great exploration of creativity in Higher Ed (or the lack thereof). The blog is on the HASTAC site - Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Alliance Collaboratory. LOTS going on there... I enjoy her blog because of the lively language and the provocations - at least they are provocative for so-called traditional schools.The recent blog post reviews a film about education The Ivory Tower; "...that the movie is strong and powerful on the problem, and a bit weak on solutions." Haven't seen it. Davidson puts in a plug for HASTAC: "HASTAC has been addressing the connection between equity and innovation since its founding in 2002." I'm digressing. This is not a critique of her particular blog post, just a suggestion that the blog is interesting and HASTAC site has lots on it that is relevant to the topics we're exploring in this course.

Online education

open knowledge online teaching and learning

Thanks for sharing this write up. Though it is written in the context of African continent, it holds true for any developing country. MOOCs have potential to reach out to the masses if rightly implemented. accessibility to technology at the learner end is a a major issue and it needs to be addressed first to make MOOCs relevant and sustainable.

"Is Luciana Fasani too cool for school or better prepared than most teens for a rapidly changing workplace? A qualified make-up artist and hair consultant and now studying the performing arts, the 14-year-old Cape Town teen tells Nelia Vivier about stepping up to today's job market and life in future.. "The educational system today only values one type of intelligence - if you do not fit into that mold, you are made to feel unhappy and stupid" "Schools and schooling ar becoming increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No-one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes, or politicians in civic classes, or poets in English classes - John Gatto"."Our school crisis is a reflection of the greater social crisis (in South Africa) - children and old people are penned up and locked away to a dgree without precendent... a community that has no future, no past, only a continuous present". "We live in networks, not communities and everyone I know is lonely...school is a major actor in this tragedy....We appear to be creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander..."

A good overview of open education in the future. Personalized education will play a great role in preparing people for a job market.

Interesting video with ideas about Education.

Education is due for a change, beginning with training teachers to teach in new ways. Learning needs also vary, making it important for a teacher to be able to teach in a variety of ways to get knowledge across, e.g., math solutions may be achieved in several ways - one student may get it the first time while another may need a different explanation. Young people need to be encouraged to learn and know that learning will get them somewhere. Finding a teaching model that works for the majority is definitely a challenge - perhaps more than one or a combination of models?

Education South Africa - February 2013 With the 2012 Limpopo textbook delivery saga, and the rising cost of printed textbooks, one public school has decided to take a bold step into the future and convert to using E-books for all their learners.

This sounds like a good idea but then the students must have the tablets and computers to be able to read the books. Unfortunately I don't think this will work in many of the poorer rural schools that need it most.

The great idea of this project could be used by every educational organization, as the article say, the cost are clearly low.

FREE CULTURE is available for free under a Creative Commons license. You may redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig. " America needs a national conversation about the way in which so-called 'intellectual property rights' have come to dominate the rights of scholars, researchers, and everyday citizens. A copyright cartel, bidding for absolute control over digital worlds, music, and movies, now has a veto over technological innovation and has halted most contributions to the public domain from which so many have benefited. The patent system has spun out of control, giving enormous power to entrenched interests, and even trademarks are being misused. Lawrence Lessig's latest book is essential reading for anyone who want to join this conversation. He explains how technology and the law are robbing us of the public domain; but for all his educated pessimism, Professor Lessig offers some solutions, too, because he recognizes that technology can be the catalyst for freedom. If you care about the future of innovation, read this book." -- Dan Gillmor, author of MAKING THE NEWS, an upcoming book on the collision of media and technology

Hi Kim, Thanks for sharing this great work by Lawrence Lessig published ten years ago.

Due to rising prices of printed textbooks, majority of higher universities are working with publishing companies to come up with a plan. Check out the program they have come with.

This model of education would be very difficult to establish but it will save a huge amount of trees all over the world. I PADs as full text books for students is on of my favorite.

Descubre, Fundación Andaluza para la divulgación de la Innovación y el Conocimiento I would like to introduce the Spanish Fundación Descubre (http://fundaciondescubre.es/) and, inside it, the network called "Divulga red" (http://divulgared.es/), thought to connect people (professional and amateur researchers and citizens in general), communicate and collaborate among them. DivulgaRed let people reveal research topics and the value of the science in different fields, sharing ideas with other researchers and group of people, all with the basis of a collaborative work. I had the pleasure of giving two talks in high-schools telling about optical communications and novelties that people can have in a near future. In a very good atmosphere, students and their own teachers asked me questions and I can enjoy a very nice atmosphere making my knowledge in this topic public. Even more, teachers in the high school were later discussing with me about possibilities in Education, and both they and me built some experiments to be made by students in the high school during the semester. So, as a concluding remark, every body who wants to share a new idea, or to obtain a new point of view, or simply who wants to introduce or simply to learn about a new topic is welcome in Fundación Descubre and DivulgaRed project. Regards. Dr. Antonio Jurado-Navas

An article that contains a link to a video with a nearly 1 and 1/2 hour debate on the purpose of education and the future of online learning. One of the participants is Sebastian Thrun, who is the CEO of Udacity, a service that offers free courses.

Terasem Movement, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charity endowed for the purpose of educating the public on the practicality and necessity of greatly extending human life, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness. Terasem accomplishes its objectives by convening publicly accessible symposia, publishing explanatory analyses, conducting demonstration projects, issuing grants and encouraging public belief in a positive technologically-based future.

David Wiley discusses openness. Given new media and technology, digital works and the internet, what will we do? The reaction to the invention of the printing press was to limit the dissemination of information. Given the internet will we open up now?

What Role Can MOOCs Play in the Development Agenda? Five Key Questions By: Rajika Bhandari on Tuesday, July 15, 2014 With the Millennium Development Goals nearing their deadline, the development sector has been rife with speculation about what the post-2015 development agenda will look like and what role, if any, higher education should play in this future outlook. Personal note: This highlights the reality of so called 3rd world countries and the real reach of MOOCs

Introduction Sophisticated knowledge of the natural world is not confined to science. Human societies all across the globe have developed rich sets of experiences and explanations relating to the environments they live in. These 'other knowledge systems' are today often referred to as traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous or local knowledge.