worldatways

The SUSO Project aims to "...bring creative and determined people together to create something amazing. People with unlimited imaginations and skills who come from everywhere, making the project's collective thinking uniquely global. Basically, we want to create a social network for thinkers and doers. The dream is to grow The SUSO Project into a creative network where the user’s imagination, creativity and knowledge is multiplied through collaboration with others. We want it to be a place where a variety of creative skills and passions can collide to make 'stuff' happen".

Good open content is a vital part of creating a vital open education apparatus… Content is just one piece of the open education mosaic that is worth a lot less on its own than in concert with practices, context, artifacts.

Creating and sharing content is certainly not the sexiest part of the open education movement. But the open education movement is going nowhere fast without open content. And while infrastructure / content work generally doesn’t excite anyone, the results of innovation in the infrastructure space do excite people. What would you say if I told you that “fiber to the curb” internet service was going to be available at your house/apt in January!”? Probably the same thing you would say if I told you that “content complete, interactive courses - including assessments with feedback - will be available from BYU’s Open Learning pilot in January!”

If we want to improve learning ~today~, we have to meet learners where they are ~today~. And today and for the foreseeable future the overwhelming majority of learners will be going to schools and universities where their teachers will adopt textbooks based on things like the name recognition of the author(s), the quality of the textbook, supporting instructional materials like test item banks and PPT notes, and the availability (and marketing!) of review copies.

having said that, there are some additional, very practical benefits of an open textbook for the faculty member who has to make the adoption decision. For example, when the license and the technology allow the faculty member to remove chapters from the book, change the order of chapters in the book, or even edit chapters in the book directly (e.g., adding locally relevant examples) BEFORE her/his students ever see the books online or in print, this gives the faculty member much greater control over the instructional experience. Most faculty members couldn’t care less about “open” for openness sake, but give them greater control over the instructional experience, and suddenly openness is translated into a concrete benefit - a difference beyond “openness for openness sake.”

The Plus in our CC By-NC-SA Plus will indeed be More Permissions - it will grant blanket permissions for anyone and everyone to make Commercial Use of FWK-published textbook materials in the context of the FWK Marketplace. The Marketplace will be an area of the FWK site where people can post and sell their own study guides, audio chapters, flash cards, videos, case studies, and other study materials related to FWK textbooks at whatever price they set (of course, they can alternately choose to openly license the things they put in the Marketplace, too). The Marketplace will be an “eBay for study materials,” and like eBay when somone sells material through the Marketplace, a small portion of the sale will come back to FWK and be shared with the textbook author whose work has been derived from or augmented by the new material.

With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?

These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting

At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following: