Bookmarks 05-April-2010

The Specialists
Steve Kolowich. InsideHigherEd. 05-April-2010.

But Bruce [Peter Bruce, founder and president of statistics.com] says Statistics.com’s educational model is not about minimizing costs as much as maximizing expertise. “Organizations that provide the ‘best’ online education in a given subject area will come to dominate others,” he says. In other words, as technology allows students to pick and choose courses from different institutions, the education providers that thrive will be those that concentrate their resources in particular fields.

gml: Subject areas constitute the normal boundary of academic departments in colleges and universities. The unbundling of subjects/departments from institutions exposes another fissure in the higher education business model. Examples like statistics.com are symptomatic of the broader unbundling of courses, modules, educational resources/objects, and teaching and learning more generally.

 
The grand alliance for the commons: the task of 21 cy. politics
Michel Bauwens. P2P Foundation. 02-April-2010.

Each of these moments has its own related but complementary vision of a world centered around the commons and civil society. For the environmental movement, the earth and its resources are a commons whose sustainability has to be protected; the social justice movements wants to make sure that the fruits of the physical commons are distributed in a fair manner so that no part of humanity is excluded from the basic demands of well-being; and the free culture movements protects the digital commons of education, knowledge, science and innovation.

gml: Yes, indeed, the commons, justice, and learning are entwined.

 
Truly Open Data
Nat Torkington. O’Reilly Radar. 09-March-2010.

I have spent a non-trivial number of hours talking to government departments and scientists about open data, talking up an “open source approach” to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses. … I’m kicking myself because I’ve been taking far too narrow an interpretation of “an open source approach”. I’ve been focused on getting people to release data. That’s the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.

gml: There are a number of good suggestions in this article for better managing, making available, and using open data. What I like best, however, is its feel of reality. Anyone who has spent time living in datasets knows how much effort and thought and iterative work it requires. We’ll get some early success with open data, but I suspect the real benefits will only appear gradually.