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Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed suit against an Australian record company for misusing copyright law to remove a lecture by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig from YouTube. With co-counsel Jones Day, EFF is asking a federal judge in Massachusetts to rule that the video is lawful fair use, to stop Liberation Music from making further legal threats, and to award damages."

Examination of the Boundless textbooks case by asking the question, 'What is unique in a foundational text book?'

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

The simple act of copying can increase your creativity. Here are 7 foundational elements of copying.

Sakai and uPortal merging?

"...a pilot program undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation that, in conjunction with a number of universities, is making verifying and updating Wikipedia pages part of college coursework."

Free Software Foundation and GNU founder Richard Stallman has declared that Google's Chrome OS should not be referred to as "cloud computing" as it actually encourages "careless computing."

Description by Grainne Conole of mapping eLearning tools or initiatives to pedagogical frameworks.

"It's all about collaborative learning, where the teacher is less of a 'sage on a stage' who knows all the answers, and more of a 'guide on the side', who encourages the students themselves to ask questions and find the answers from the incredible wealth of resources now instantly available to them on the Web."

"The Mozilla Foundation and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU), among others, are working to create an alternative - and recognized - form of certification that combines merit-earned badges with an open framework. The Open Badges Project will allow skills and competencies to be tracked, assessed, and showcased."

May not have quite the same clout with the NZQA :) but though you guys might be interested in this...

Use Etherpad in Moodle for live docs.

"Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits." The judgment - part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven - found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper's website. 

"Blanchard's and Moore's research finds that developmental milestones are changing as a new generation of young children approach learning and literacy in ways not thought possible in the past. According to this new report, digital media is already transforming the language and cultural practices that enable early literacy development, making possible a new kind of personal and global interconnectedness. The research reveals that: * Opportunities to engage with digital media increasingly prevail through the use of mobile devices-and in developing countries access to mobile devices is more commonplace than access to other technologies * Developmental milestones are changing as young people's access to mobile and digital technology grows. * Digital media positively impacts children's opinion of learning, providing engagement opportunities not always seen with print materials."

European site for quality in elearning. Not sure how useful it is yet.

Remember, not everything you see or hear is copyright!