pieter's blog

On a plane ride from Chicago to Detroit on Tuesday, Garin and I had an hour-long brainstorming session where we came up with some ideas about sustainability for Community Informatics at the School of Information. Garin typed up our notes that night and we polished up a paper the following day. You'll find the working document below - we've sent it to the CiC faculty group (Maurita, Paul, Steve, and Joan) for review, hoping to glean some comments. We wanted to throw it out to the entire CiC student group as well, but could not before sending it off to the faculty in time for a meeting.

A proposal for a DFE with the University of Michigan OpenCourseWare Initiative at the Sakai Project. Public Interest Justification OpenCourseWare is a newly developing platform for online global education. The concept is that major educational institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Notre Dame University, Kyoto University, and others will publish course materials on the Internet and provide free access to that content. Presumably this access would be provided under a creative commons license with a share alike (a.k.a. “copyleft”) understanding. The goal is to take a previously private good: university courseware and reinject it into the online community as a public good: opencourseware. While there are multiple methods to achieving this goal, the University of Michigan is looking into designing a system built on an open source software platform initially developed by The Sakai Project. Opencourseware has tremendous potential to create a new global knowledge-base for developing nations as well as global independent self-learners and educators.

Anne

Texas forums Branch of national issues forums Issue books, get different communities to talk about issues and find common group (devoted to deliberation) Deliberative democracy (As opposed to advocacy) James Fishkin from texas now at stanford ran events that were deliberative polls find a representative sample of the mass through local population brief them on issue, and ask what they think