Open education revolution picks up steam

The conversation about open education picked up some steam yesterday with the official launch of the Cape Town Declaration yesterday. There was lots of good coverage including a nice piece on ZDNet UK and an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jimmy and Rich. I just posted the following to Slashdot:

"ZDNet is running a story on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which is "... designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials." The declaration calls for more educational materials to be open sourced and freely shared (like MIT did), and says that "all taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open". Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Larry Lessig (CC), musician Peter Gabriel and hundreds of teachers have already signed the Declaration."

... to try to build buzz further. If you want to help out, you can click here to vote for this article and get it on the Slashdot editors' radar.

There was some criticism of the Declaration before it launched. Philipp Schmidt did a great job of summarizing and countering the key criticisms in a post yesterday.My guess is that there will be more debate as the buzz builds. Of course, that's partly the point of the Declaration in the first place: to amp up the conversation about open education.

If you want to keep track of the Cape Town Declaration buzz, watch David Wiley's blog and track the 'capetowndeclaration' tag on del.icio.us.

As my friend Maureen says: wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. This is fun.

Comments

[Bogdan Bivolaru]

Hope someone takes gaming and participation to freedom software projects as wonderful tools in education.
I would very much like to hear children all over the globe learn how to be creative while contributing a campaign to Wesnoth.

I had first read about participating in free software projects (especially games) in this blog post:

http://www.dbzer0.com/blog/2008/01/15/to-parents-a-free-as-in-freedom-exercise-for-your-children#comment-4652
An excerpt from the post:
"If you have a sufficiently large family or if you have enough time, you might even make this into a whole family experience. Perhaps you will provide the story that one child will work on coding, while the other will work on creating portraits for the heroes. This has the added benefit of bonding the family and also creating something much more complete."

[sohbet odalari]

very useful