Jim Farmer, Coordinator of Georgetown University's new Interoperability Center, has gotten plenty of notice over the last week or so for his report "On the Cost of Selling an Enterprise Learning System." But almost as interesting as reading the report is watching the discussion of Farmer's analysis move through the blogosphere.

The report itself, dated 8 January 2006, exists, as far as I can tell, as a free-floating, unadorned pdf file with the footer "Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc" the only identifier. Michael Feldstein's excellent January 12 e-Literate coverage of Farmer's document offers the most thorough analysis, and in a sense "publishes" Farmer. Stephen Downes (Stephen's Web), picks up Feldstein's story the following day. Several comments evoke response and clarification from Farmer on Stephen's Web. Then a Chronicle Wired Campus blog entry on January 17 summarizes the report, highlights the implications for open source, and, quoting Feldstein, makes it sound like his work. That produces a disclaimer on Feldstein's blog pointing Chronicle readers back to the original report. There's plenty more to report about the circulation, but you get the idea.

It's an important discussion about open-source solutions--and a fascinating glimpse at the evolving nature of academic discussions in the blogosphere.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

The Open Course intitiative started at MIT several years ago has prompted several similar programs, including an interesting one at Carnegie Mellon. Their program features intellectual grounding in "Cognitively-informed Education” and "Data-driven Iteration," and employs cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, and simulations. Assessment and evaluation tools are built into the courses, and it will be especially interesting to see how successful this OLI is in creating the "community of use" they want to build. The first courses developed through OLI are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, and Logic.

OPML Workstation provides OPML creation, editing, hosting and distribution services, free of charge. OPML, for those not in the know, is a free-form, highly versatile markup language aimed at creating hierarchical outlines including multiple kinds of resources (nodes may include text, links, HTML, RSS feeds, rich media, or other XML). Here's my working example. 

Toru Iiyoshi, who directs the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, has written a provocative essay entitled Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door?. Iiyoshi argues that the wide-spread adoption of open educational resources is stymied by three major hurdles. The first is that we don't do a good job of describing how to use educational resources in such a way that someone else can adapt and adopt them. He writes "although the tools and resources are readily available, transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy.... Thus, a crucial task before us is to build intellectual and technical capacity for transforming "tacit knowledge" into "commonly usable knowledge." Second, the academic reward structure has stacked the deck against pedagogical innovation by not rewarding the sharing of information about teaching. He writes "If there are no incentives for faculty to use and enrich open educational goods to transform their teaching and student learning, pedagogical practice will always struggle to advance." Third, the deck is further stacked by virtue of our existing organizational structures and publication schemes. He writes, "...we must look beyond institutional boundaries and connect efforts among many settings and open source entrepreneurs."