Most literary scholars know about the fabulous online editions of Blake, Rossetti, and Whitman, but in my experience many people who use these editions regularly don't yet know about Collex, "an open-source collections- and exhibits-builder designed to aid humanities scholars working in digital collections or within federated research environments like NINES." NINES is an acronym for Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship; it links together many important 19thC digital editions.

One of the laments many faculty express at the migration of course materials from the open Web to course management systems is that it is harder to find  examples of syllabii from colleagues at other institutions, since for the most part, Blackboard courses don't show up via Google. 

The ITS department at University of North Carolina has just released a nifty new tool called bFree that takes the contents of a Blackboard course and creates a free-standing website out of it. While one wonders how it handles the parts of a course that really shouldn't be on the open Web (copyrighted materials, private information for student eyes only, etc.), this seems nonetheless a welcome development. Using bFree can perhaps turn the tide of encroaching invisibility, providing access to the materials presently hidden behind the CMS firewall.

An interesting open source development in the U.K. announced last week; from the press release:

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

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.

In this lecture covering topics from his latest book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and "accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors. This lecture is available through the MIT Open Courseware Project.

For an interesting companion piece to this lecture, have a look at the recent short film Ha Ha Ha America, by Jon Daniel Ligon, available on the Sundance Festival site at:

http://festival.sundance.org/2006/watch/film.aspx?which=402&category=DOC