Hi Steve, greetings Wiki Educator My name is Sam Rose
I am Director of Forward Foundation, partner in Future Forward Institute, creator of open source http://socialmediaclassroom.com, http://localfoodsystems.org and a member of http://p2pfoundation.net a quick response follows: On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 6:34 AM, Steve Foerster <[email protected]> wrote: > > Interesting article in the Guardian about OERs: > > http://tinyurl.com/yhf44oj > > What got me was the part near the end where it's talking about MIT's > OpenCourseWare project and says, "But it costs the university between > $10,000 and $15,000 to put the material from each course online because > the materials have to be properly licensed and formatted." > > I'm sorry, what? I'm racking my brain trying to figure out how they > could possibly spend fifteen grand just getting course materials from a > professor's PC to their web server. I mean, yes, they package things as > zip files and everything, but fifteen grand?! The only thing I can > think of is that they have to buy these materials from their own faculty > members, is that the case? > > (By contrast, imagine what WE could do with thirty million dollars!) Having worked with many Universities, I can tell you that they are generally role-based economies, which means that there is a specialist for everything. And specialization tends to have been in existence for decades or centuries in these institutions. So, this means that MIT likely pays not just the professor, but also multiple IT people, PR people (including copy editors, program directors, etc), and records managers, and archivists to produce this material. So, the number that they publish means that this is their accounting of the parts of the salary for all of the people in their huge bureaucracy that the work is passed around to. I would be willing to bet that the amount represented as being spent is quite accurate, and typical of how a major University would handle this. I agree that the amount of resources expended revlieals an incredible amount of wastefulness. I agree this demonstrates that network-based production ecologies can out-compete traditional industrial ecologies on cost and resource usage. I believe it could currently be argued that network based production ecologies can also out-compete in terms of quality, too. Right now people "trust" the "brand" of MIT, but what if there were one or more ways to "certify" network-based contributions" I think that certification/maintaining of open education packages by smaller service organizations will increase perceived trust. This certification and maintaining could potentially be done by up to thousands of collaborating participant groups, educators, etc. > > -=Steve=- > > > -- > Stephen H. Foerster > http://hiresteve.com > http://hiresteve.com/blog > http://wikieducator.org/steve > > > > -- -- Sam Rose Social Synergy Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email: [email protected] http://socialsynergyweb.com http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing http://flowsbook.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com http://localfoodsystems.org http://notanemployee.net http://communitywiki.org "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
