Continuing our theme of not having a theme (the news cycle sometimes suffers from great dialogue but poor plot), please find below a smattering of the news of roughly-last-week! As always, if we’ve missed something, let us know! But first, some Shameless Self-Promotion…
The Open Education Conference starts tomorrow, October 16, in Vancouver, BC, and runs through Thursday. The Saylor Foundation on Tuesday will discuss “Making Open Courseware Count“, but we’ll be there for the whole conference, so do say hello! We’ll follow up with a link to our presentation here in the blog and on social media.
“Finding Einstein” (Shai Reshef, TEDx KC)
Shai Reshef, of University of the People, poses once more the compelling question that has echoed for years among the open education community: how many Einsteins and Curies are among those without access to traditional, top-of-the-line, university education? How can we give them a cut of that opportunity?
Nice to see the conversation leaking into the mainstream! This article looks at both online-courses-as-supplement (or replacement) and Thiel’s skip-college-start-innovating ethos. For those on the inside of open education, take a look at the comments to see how the conversation is taking shape among the lay-folk! (Thanks to Casey for the link.)
“MOOCs and the Rest of ‘Online’” (Inside Higher Ed)
The buried lead here is that Sebastian Thrun (Udacity) gave a great nod to those who have gone before (and who are still going), and made sure to remind people that MOOCs have been among us for a few years now.
“A Fair Use Victory for Scholars” (Inside Higher Ed)
In which a federal judge says that HathiTrust‘s digitizing of books is Grade A Fair Use (and legitimately transformative). And in related news, Google has settled (WaPo) with some of the major litigants in its own book digitizing brouhaha. Woohoo!