Dear folks,
In the same event (National Conference on ICT in Education, organised by
MHRD and NCERT on 13-14), the MHRD Secretary, Mr Rajeshri Bhattacharya,
declared that all content on NROER would conform to open standards! I
hope this would be minuted in the proceedings and would be implemented
by NCERT.
Apart from 'launching NROER', the conference also discussed the
implementation of the National ICT Policy in Education, which explicitly
favours FOSS though stops short of mandating it. Nagarjuna, Prof Kannan
Moudgalya, Anvar Sadath and myself made several interventions both
during the panel presentations as well as from the floor to require the
use of FOSS in education as well as open standards.
The not so good news is that the DIT presented the MMP (Mission Mode
Project) in education, in which they proposed the formation of 'NIU'
(National Information Utilities) which will be specialised agencies that
will design and run the MMPs and hence will manage/control the ICT
infrastructure as well as the content/data. The MMP document suggest
that these could be formed under "PPPs' which can operate as 'for
profit' entities, with a 51% stake of business.
The danger of privatised entities having control over public data (in
the case of education, apart from information on schools and teachers,
this will also eventually cover student 'performance' etc, since the use
of ICTs for assessment is a key component of the MMP) which all of us,
including governments will need to 'rent out' as needed will be a great
threat to community participation/ownership of public data. The
alogirithms that will govern data processing, created by these entities
will decide the 'information outputs' - these would not be transparent
and likely be influenced by commercial considerations of these vendors
than necessarily the public interest.
While the need for specialised agencies to take up these large projects
in a 'mission mode' is understandable, making public information
(collected from us, about us and belonging to us) proprietary is a very
serious issue. Especially in the light of the Snowden disclosures
clearly pointing to the the dangers that proprietising / (private
access/control) over big data will be to democracy. This is something
the FOSS communities must discuss and take positions on.
regards,
Guru
On 08/14/2013 05:41 PM, Krishnakant Mane wrote:
This is great news,
If such efforts happen more often, then we will soon have educational
resources of all kinds open to every one, irrespective of their
gender, region or religion.
It is a delight to know that educational barriers are breaking in this
way.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
On 08/14/2013 05:39 PM, Narendra Sisodiya wrote:
Excellent news... At ncert, system change as director changes..
On Aug 14, 2013 5:10 PM, "Pranesh Prakash"<[email protected]> wrote:
Dear all,
A new National Repository of Open Education Resources is now online, and
the content is all CC-BY-SA. It is hosted on the Gnosys platform
developed by Nagarjuna & Co.
Congratulations to them and to all others who've made this possible.
Let's see how this can be improved and expanded beyond the school-level.
Cheers,
Pranesh
The text of Shashi Tharoor's speech on this:
http://tharoor.in/speeches/launch-of-national-repository-of-open-education-resources-nroer/
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: NCERT Portal goes CC-BY-SA
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:55:08 +0530
From: Pranav Curumsey<[email protected]>
Hi folks,
Savithri just gave me some wonderful news. The new National Repository
of Open Education Resources has been launched, and Dr. Tharoor, the HRD
Minister announced its licensed under CC-BY-SA! *http://nroer.in/home/*
I had all but given up hopes of this as despite Dr. Tharoor supporting
us on record, the NCERT Director Dr. Sinclair wasn't convinced as of
last week. I do not know what transpired thereafter, but this is a major
fillip for us!
--
Kind Regards,
Pranav Curumsey
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