Just so you know. students in finland may make their own copies of books
legally. Teachers and other may not, but when it's a book you have
permission to copy it as a student.
BR,
Jason
On 09/29/2010 07:34 AM, mdipierro wrote:
There are two things to realize... most of the professors want their
content freely available. The more people see it and use it, better
for us.
The problems are:
1) really technical stuff goes into publications and proceedings. That
is what we get paid for. Many journals do not allow free distribution.
To me this is a major problem. Things got worse over the years. The
only solution is if the governments step in and require that all
publications based on public funded research be freely available
online. Yet I do not think it will happen.
2) Most educators do not see themselves (ourselves) as content
creators but as filters. We provide a prospective but putting things
into a context (which may be local of a community, a organization, a
city, a nation) and filtering things out. We pick a textbook not
because it is the best or the most comprehensive book on a subject but
because we feel the book capture what is important to us.
3) University are subject to restrictions. For example a teacher can
show a movie in class even if it is copyrighted and even if the class
is virtual. This puts them under DMCA restrictions. The vendors tell
them they need a CMS with strict access control and DRM on media
content.
4) Students cheat.
5) Book publishers have standard protocols for distributing digital
content such as quizzes.
The current LMS (good or bad) try to provide support for 2, 3, 4 and 5
but forcing faculty to organize content into learning objectives, link
resources to those objectives, keep the content private, monitor that
students click on what they are supposed click and do not turn in
content that comes from the web and constitute plagiarism or copyright
infringement, create courses from canned content coming from
publishers.
They are not designed to share content, reuse content or be open in
any way.
Things are changing but it takes time.
Massimo
On Sep 28, 10:58 pm, Jason Brower<[email protected]> wrote:
Google just paid 10 million for an idea like this. Make edgucational books free
online.
So we are not alone in this goal.
----- Original message -----
I agree with you.
On Sep 28, 4:39 pm, KK<[email protected]> wrote:
Massimo,
Having developed and deployed one if the early LMS in 1994, LMS
should allow collaborative learning between students, with teacher
acting as a mentor and catalyst. This is different from forums. Also
it should allow crowdsourced content from all teachers worldwide to
replace text books. Testing should be problem solving with open books
and it should not copy Blackboard or WebCT or then Open Source
knockoffs like Sakai. It should scale a talented teacher to reach
thousands of students worldwide rather than some arbitrary limits. It
should allow competence-based learning rather than be time-limited
Such an LMS will over take the current limited ones. My wishlist is
too long.
Nat Kannan
On Sep 28, 10:01 am, mdipierro<[email protected]> wrote:
Once again... who here is interested in a web2py based Learning
Management system?
What features would you like to see?
Massimo
