Chris Harvey

Visit the link below.
Free Software in Ethics and Society - Richard Stallman - Manchester 1st May.

Another excellent presentation by Richard Stallman. Download this one and share it with others.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Chris has recently signed up for an online course, lasting 10 weeks. This course is targeted at teachers and teacher-students who do not have prior knowledge or skills related to free and open education resources, however anyone with a genuine interest in learning more is welcome.

The course readings and the assignments in this course will familiarize participants with the main concepts related to open education resources and to the historical and philosophical ideas behind them. The participants will also do their own projects where they will learn to create and participate in projects producing free and open educational resources.

Take a look for yourself, happy learning!

Popularity: 4% [?]

The Origins of Linux - Linus Torvalds

Popularity: 2% [?]

I was just about to jump into bed and thought I’d read the network news aka planet talo and saw Leighs post “More progressive action from New Zealand’s South Island“.

Just go read his post and leave a comment.

Otago Daily Times article: “School opts for free software“.

Sweet dreams.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I saw this diagram by Kim Tucker while browsing Wikieducator. Click on it for a closer look. You can also have a look at the full resolution version on Wikieducator.

[singlepic=473,500,366,,center]

Another cool resource is the OER Handbook.

What I like about this diagram is that it shows a process that I use in my own learning and a process that I share with others while assisting them.

Some of you may recall Kim Tuckers from his work on Free Knowledge Communities and FLOSS in Education. Though I can’t seem to find the article I really liked, it used to be on this page, it was the link to “Describing Free Knowledge Communities” , it seems to have disappeared while being moved, a lot of the resources on his site are gone as well. freeknowledge-communities.org used to have a lot more information and resources, I’m happy to have downloaded a lot of it while it was available though I wish I had copied that page from wikibooks, it looked like a well thought out plan. I guess most of his work is being used for other projects. I love his catch phrase:

“Knowledge for all, freedom to learn, towards collective wisdom - Enabling communities to empower themselves with knowledge.”

In my talk to nswlearnscope about the evolution of foss and libre knowledge, I mentioned Kim’s work on free knowledge communities before I discussed wikieducator. I started with Free software and finished up with Open Educational Resources.

Content Rant

One of the issues thats hampering some projects is the introduction of watered down meaningless words like content, basically its a misleading and confusing word that means stuff that goes in something. Most people familiar with the gnu project know about confusing or loaded words and phrases that are worth avoiding. I also think its worth avoiding any intelligent discussion with people who use the word “content”. You could argue in the right context that its ok but it makes fools of people, look at downes and Wayne Macintosh.

Ultimately this reduces to a personal choice regarding who’s rights and freedoms we choose to uphold. Learners, authors, future authors or the freedoms of the content itself. As an advocate of the freedom culture — I have an obligation to respect the freedoms of other to choose accordingly.

OMG the “content” is alive. Downes recently trolled me on the Wikieducator email list with some arguement about NC being more free. I don’t want to go into it but a lot of his argument was just plain wrong, it was obvious he wasn’t aware that all cc licenses have baseline rights that requires licensees do not use technology to restrict other licensees’ lawful uses of the work .e.g the use of a Creative Commons-licensed work on a device which incorporates DRM is a breach of the Baseline Rights asserted by each license.

His terminology was awful jumping back and forth on the meaning of free then free content, open content, “the free culture license” and then saying if there was a license crafted well enough it could be just as good as NC at restricting its use from being restricted. rofl. Dude its ok to use a NC license, most of what he writes is just his opinion and speculation so its likely hes wrong, its not the same as explicit knowledge, I dont see the social benefit in being able to modify most of what he writes so ND would be quite acceptable as well.

Popularity: 5% [?]