An important perspective on open access. From the article, "Despite being freely available on the Web, research articles are not by default linguistically or conceptually accessible to the global public(s) they are partially intended to reach with the move to OA."

Excellent addition -- thank you for sharing it.

Great post to help us balance the conversation, Colin. As you probably noticed, I'm one of the those evangelists for self-determined learning, but I do respect the point. I'd argue that traditional schooling has often sapped us of the ability to self-direct, and as teachers, we should be trying to gradually move our students in this direction -- for their own long-term benefit. One way we tried to do this in OKMOOC has been to draw a fairly clear line in the Activities as to what to do, but allow for as much (or as little) flexibility in those activities as a student is comfortable with. It probably still won't work for everyone, but that's part of the experiment. Thanks for being part of this!

Here's a link to book: http://www.openingscience.org/get-the-book/