wysereeser.com

Wired is running an article today about MIT’s OCW (OpenCourseWare), the article, “All the World’s an MIT Campus“, includes links to the Slashdot discussion on the topic.

The most interesting aspect to me is the statement that:

When MIT first evaluated how to position its e-learning selections, the university considered launching an enterprise, MIT.com, to make money off its offerings. But the faculty quickly denounced the idea.

If true, its significant that faculty were the ones who were uncomfortable with the idea of trying to *sell* their content. How does one define *ownership* of content? If I take a confusing, but accurate, technical document and re-write it so its easier to understand, does anyone really own that document? The information already existed in another form, the technical specification, I just re-wrote it in a different way. I’ll probably think differently about this later on, but the idea still sticks with me.

What this also reminds me of is another thought, from my loosely defined stereotype (feel free to correct), that relates tenure to learning object creation. Tenure, from what little I understand of it, is determined in some cases based on the level of published research a given facutly member has, or, to state it differently, tenure is determined by the amount of information the faculty in question contributes to the community. Similarly I wonder if the same idea could be taken forth with learning object creation. If universities recognized the faculty contribution of ‘X’ number of learning objects to the larger community (i.e. growing body of knowledge) then perhaps they could also use it as a basis for tenure. Faculty churning out materials for a greater societal good in learning would be recognized for their contribution. Something similar to this no doubt already occurs in today’s academic communities, but with the focus on learning object contributions it might have an interesting effect.

I had heard rumors that Blackboard would be releasing a, what they call *Building Block*, add-on to the existing environment. Apparently they finally did release a component, free to download, the end of last month. At initial glance is that it works with:

• Blackboard Learning System release 5.5.1
• Blackboard Learning System release 5.6
• Blackboard Learning System ML

What’s funny is that the component/add-on/building block is only roughly a 650KB download.

A co-worker of mine passed along a printout of an article that contained a collection of different opinions by various individuals either for or opposed to the idea of whether or not now is the time to start running Linux systems in the corporate setting. Many of the comments were about people’s experiences, but this one I found particularly interesting around Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

Its all about TCO
Linux is an amazing OS but for the sake of a desktop (or even servers) I would have to recommend OS X Jaguar. Its like Linux without the learning curve, commercial software support and lower support costs. This way, its open source, and you don’t have to deploy 1 support staffer/30 users who can debug TCP/IP and code in their sleep. That and $100 per computer per annum is all you need expense in support costs. Try getting away with that in Linux. You won’t. As good as it is, what you make up in software cost, you lose in support. Jaguar is the best of both worlds–and its server component is an excellent low cost solution.
Jared Clarke

I’ve enjoyed my experiences with Linux to date. But my experience has been, as for many others I would wager, that the wonderfully alternative GUI environments developed for the distributions can only take you so far. Ultimately, at some point (depending on how extensive your system is used), you have to switch over to a terminal console and type in commands because that’s the most effective/easiest way to accomplish the desired task. But getting to that comfort level, can be no small step. And that’s still where I think there is considerable hesitation for the everyday user to make the *switch*.