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"Haters can keep hating, but the train has left the station. You can either get on board and help streamline its direction, or you can stand in its way and incrementally slow it down as it plows right through you," threatens Segal.

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

Colleges following what the company calls the Textbook Zero model would offer a section using open-education alternatives for every required course and elective needed to earn the degree. Lumen is now testing the model with an unnamed community college on the East Coast, and is also looking for colleges interested in applying the model to general-studies and computer-science degrees.

" I was a bit concerned that some readers may have gotten the impression that I was saying it was ok to "Be Awesome Instead" of being open. That was absolutely not the point I was making. Being open - truly open - is absolutely critical for reasons I will describe below. The point I was trying to make in my post is that we should be awesome instead of being whiny; we should be contributors rather than naysayers."

A shift from traditional textbooks to e-books is gaining speed in Utah, as the state Office of Education coordinates efforts to develop digital texts in science, math and language arts. At least two state math texts are already available and the first of the science texts will be released this summer. The state texts will be open source, meaning anyone or any school in the state may use them for free.

"The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.""

"Who knows - maybe one day learning scientists will be as accurate at predicting learning as weathermen are at predicting the weather. While that may sound like a dig against both professions, I actually mean it simply as an acknowledgment of how incredibly complex and dynamic both phenomena are."

"It raises the question of which is better for students: an imperfect textbook or no textbook at all? To address this concern, publishers of open textbooks are beefing up academic oversight to offer peer-reviewed material that they say is comparable to proprietary textbooks. And, they're finding an audience."

"Project Management for Instructional Designers (PM4ID) is - as the name suggests - a book about project management tailored specifically for instructional designers. This book is a revise / remix of a pre-existing, openly licensed project management textbook which was donated to the commons by a benefactor that desires to be attributed as Anonymous."

"Compatibility of Creative Commons Licenses The Share-Alike clause in some of the Creative Commons licenses makes it so that creative works licensed with some CC licenses cannot be remixed with creative works licensed with some other CC licenses. Read these questions and answers from the CC FAQ and then check your understanding by playing the game linked below."

"It's time to call these fake open initiatives out for what they really are. It is time for us to stand up for and protect the idea and name that are so critically important to improving the affordability, quality, and equity of education around the world. If you need a handy, slightly derogatory term to use in describing fake open initiatives, I highly recommend the term "fauxpen": Faux in French means "false" or "fake." So fauxpen means "fake open." Examples of how to use this term appropriately would include "Fauxpen Education Alliance.""

" when access conditions in the research lab do not mirror access conditions in the real world, efficacy studies tell us nothing about the actual efficacy of a product. We have to add a consideration of students' ability to actually access and use (and as I have argued elsewhere, own a copy of) the product to discussions about efficiacy."

"BCcampus organized an open textbook summit again this year (the first one was last year). I attended, because I'm writing my own open textbook on 'Teaching in a Digital Age.' BCcampus has published its own blog post on the lessons learned, but I came away with something different, from a potential author's perspective."

""The implementation of an OER strategy is really difficult, and the assessment of an OER strategy is really difficult," he says. Lumen has helped to advance both. "That's unique," he says. "That's what they've contributed.""

"Yes, ownership is sort of implied in the "reuse" R, and is legally permitted by open licenses. But for all of their willingness to share access to open educational resources, how many OER publishers go out of their way to make it easy for you to grab a copy of their OER that you can own and control forever? "

"the biggest problem as succinctly as possible: Caring Doesn't Scale. This three-word sentence captures so much. First, it clearly communicates that "scale" has become a virtue. More importantly, it implies that old-fashioned virtues - things like caring about people - simply can't compare in importance to modern values like scale."