Open Source Learning
October 12, 2008
This is about a talk given by Richard Baraniuk that you can see on www.ted.org He’s talking about his dream of a “knowledge ecosystem.” Its basically the concept of open source learning. Using the web to share knowledge. Of course thats not a new idea, so let me be more specific. Its more about using and designing open source tools to bring education to the world in the form of textbooks. He speaks about digitizing text, translating it to different languages, and even combining textbooks about certain topics and areas of study into “super textbooks” for specific topics. All of this would then be available for free on an open source site.
I think this is a great idea that can bring knowledge to poorer regions of the world. It could also help out less fortunate schools, with little money for new textbooks, within the U.S. Not to mention it would be pretty nice to have all my colloge textbooks available online for free. Of course this is easy for me to say seeing that I don’t make a living from textbooks.
