Once upon a time, David wrote a js calculator and realized that digital resources were magic. They are different than than a physical asset because millions of people can use them at the same time. On top of this, the GPL “freedom” movement was picking up because of Richard (Stallman?) Freedom scares people away though, so they started to call it “open source”
He thought, “we should do this for educational materials,” and the term open content was born. So in 1999, they started thinking of educators as publishers. A couple conversations revieavled that publishers wanted to:
- Not be undercut
- Be given credit
The open publication license created an IP around this and was picked up by a number of books, such as all of red hat’s tech documents. It had problems, but “God sent us Larry” and Creative Commons which cleared up all the legal problems and misunderstandings.
So how much CC exists after these 10 years?
- 75m flikr images
- 7 million wikipedia articles
- 430k audio files at sound flick
- 8k soungs on magnatune
- 400k vids in rever
- 6.4k open course consortium universities
- 16k curriki k-12 resources
- 1600 capetown declaration institutions
So how about the next 10 years?
Flatworld Knowledge – making textbooks available though open source
It is in private beta right now in 25 universities, but makes money by selling different versions.
Open High School of Utah
Public, completely online that can only use open ed resources
New Models in Higher Education For example, Western Governor’s University – No courses, simple assessments and certifications. They don’t care how or where you learned it.
David Gagnon 