(As higher education is priced through the roof; as colleges embrace a technocratic, profit-driven, business model; as the government continues to dumb-down K-12 through meaningless standardized testing and evisceration of humanities/social sciences/arts; etc... It is good to see these efforts--think about how you can work to make information, learning and creativity truly free and available to everyone. This is not just for academics, we are all intellectuals--or have the potential to be--and we all have some special knowledge to teach. This is going to be a major struggle of the future--here and now--where will you stand? Will you seek to control and commodify knowledge for the profits of a chosen few, or, will you seek to open up the world so that we can learn and collaborate together as global citizens? We want to open a free university in Lexington, KY--are you interested in being a part of this project? If so, get a hold of me at mdbento at gmail dot com and put Lexington Free University in the subject line. We are very interested in learning from similar projects/efforts from around the world and gathering more examples to serve as inspiration for us all--leave a comment to this post and/or email me at the same email address. Pura Vida!)
OKI, Academic Earth and Wikiversity
by Randolph Hollingsworth
My Day
More on the democratization of the academy - take a look at what some profs at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford are doing... offering their videotaped lectures to the world - Academic Earth. This site joins the Open Knowledge Initiative that has been challenging how we think of the monopoly known as higher education (see MIT's OpenCourseWare and the proposed P2PU).
But what about an open admissions such as the public lectures once offered by the historic Transylvania University for all of (white) antebellum Lexingtonians to attend (including women, horrors!)? The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning does this now.
Or even more intriguing, a crowd-sourcing and peer-to-peer environment to generate new knowledge such as the newly proposed Wikiversity, an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation. For an inside view, see "Wikiversity; or, Education Meets the Free Culture Movement: An Ethnographic Investigation," First Monday, vol. 13 no.10 (October 6, 2008)
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