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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

Copyright restrictions in Australia limit use of materials outside the traditional classroom.

Good slides from Terry Anderson on openness in education and some of the disruptions hitting universities.

"...exploring how universities and colleges can help teaching staff, researchers, support and administrative staff to develop their digital literacies"

"The OERu anchor partners have shortlisted eight university- and college-level courses to be developed as prototypes for refining the OERu delivery system". I wonder whether the psychology course might be of interest to us?

Twenty-seven-year-old researcher, lecturer and journalist Jennifer Jones has a fluid but pared-down working approach. She openly conducts her work as a researcher and lecturer through her personal website, using her blog and Twitter, on which she has 3,000 followers. She works virtually as she travels between two university employers in the Midlands and the West of Scotland. Her inspiration comes from media activists and groups like Occupy, who use the free resources of the net to group like-minded people for action and discourse. All of her activity is open for scrutiny and for tracking - there are no pseudonyms - and she records everything she does on her website.

Pirate University http://t.co/zovi7GgK (via @JeanBurgess) Realising @Johnxlibris' #Twitter as Inter-#library loan http://t.co/YBBEAGME #yam

Why do Intro to Sociology @Waikato & pay for the privillege when you can do it for free from Princeton? http://t.co/Dzhxeruw #waitalk #yam

Marcus Wilson on the rise of the new moocs.

Why Uni home pages don't work.

"The manifesto for teaching online was a key output from the Student Writing project at the University of Edinburgh. It is a series of brief statements that attempt to capture what is generative and productive about online teaching, course design, writing, assessment and community. It is, and may remain, a living document that is reviewed and reworked periodically with colleagues, students and amongst the programme team of the MSc in E-learning programme. Its primary purpose is to spark discussion, and to articulate a position about e-learning that informs the work of the project team, and the MSc in E-learning programme more broadly. This position is best summarised by the first of the manifesto statements: Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit. Online can be the privileged mode."

"I think we ought to take Chris Anderson seriously and start giving the course away."

All classes online but students must all participate at the same time and live on campus.

Are universities going to end up being managed by non-academic bureaucrats?

Another OERu style of initiative?

Michael Peters reviews MOOCs from an economic, post-modern university type standpoint. Quite long. Most of the comments are garbage!

A mixed article on online learning and the effect on international student numbers (and conflates with moocs)

Social listening was a new one for me - finding things to engage with.