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Marian C. Diamond

Open University, the distance-learning behemoth based in England, has vastly increased its visibility with open courses, which frequently show up in the Top 5 downloads on Apple’s iTunes U, a portal to institutions’ free courseware as well as marketing material. The Open University’s free offerings have been downloaded more than 16 million times, with 89 percent of those downloads outside the U.K., says Martin Bean, vice chancellor of the university. Some 6,000 students started out with a free online course before registering for a paid online course.

Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world’s foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.

If the fear of giving students an open forum to publish to their personal Web pages without an editor's approval keeps schools from exploring Web logs, consider that self-publishing encourages ownership and responsibility for content. UserLand COO John Robb notes, "Web logs are attached to an individual in the way a discussion board isn't. There are rules to using a Web log. If students break them, they can lose their site."

Creating online communities where student writing takes center stage means inviting audiences to read and reflect on published work. For educators, this involves reaching out into virtual and professional communities for collaborative opportunities. For instance, working writers and journalists could volunteer to serve as editors of student blogs. Additionally, alliances between K-12 and higher education would benefit preservice teachers who could gain valuable teaching and technology experience responding to student blogs, while students would benefit from having reliable readers critiquing and encouraging their work.

Content management platforms on which blogs are built make this entire process easier and more efficient. But while new uses of Web-based applications can make writing more real for students, educators will still need to consider how to evaluate what happens when students write online.

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”