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Microblogging then allows us to not only enrich our most intimate social connections but also the less-intimate “weak ties”–the guy you met at a conference, the group of Australians you met at a hostel last summer in Europe, the girl who sat next to you in high school English–those people who, until the advent of microblogging, most of us would have lost touch with. It is this extended, “meaningful” socialization with many people, made possible for the first time by Facebook’s inclusion of its Newsfeed feature into the interface, that catapulted the platform from online social activity website popular amongst students and backpackers into its current incarnation, “de facto public commons”.

If the course designers feel that the best instructional materials are online versions of traditional textbooks, that's fine. Or they can use a smorgasbord of teaching modules and exercises developed by other open-learning projects, such as those created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University. Interactive-learning Web sites and even instructional videos on YouTube are also perfectly acceptable resources.

Traditional textbook publishers, which now promote e-textbooks, aren't the solution, insisted David Lippman, who teaches math at Pierce College and is a self-confessed open-source purist. "I find the publishers' online offerings nothing more than the old ancillaries they've always offered bundled up in a proprietary system," he said.

Maybe we collectively need a Sociology 101 textbook (with all of the supplemental materials included). Ohio (or Washington or Texas or Florida) releases an RFP for the creation of a "Sociology 101" textbook. Maybe you win the bid ... maybe Pearson wins the bid. The difference is, the publisher does not own the copyright - the State of Ohio owns the copyright - and chooses to share that textbook with everyone with a CC BY license. Everyone can now use / modify the open textbook, Ohio has saved a bunch of money for its students, so did other states / countries, and the publisher still had an income stream.

intrinsic goal orientation, self-efficacy for learning and performance, time and study environment management, help seeking, and Internet self-efficacy.