The French President of Facebook…or not.
This is a wonderful story about how the French press was so easily deluded by things that were said and done on Facebook, believing them to be true. Moral of the story: just because it’s in a book (or newspaper) doesn’t make it true.
Opening education
I’m more than slightly excited by Yale’s recent announcement that it is opening up parts of its curriculum to whoever might stumble upon it online. At the moment there are 7 whole courses whose material is mostly licensed under a Creative Commons license, with course materials and videos of lectures available for download, ranging from the fundamentals of physics to a series of lectures on modern poetry (which I’m currently downloading!).
Obviously there is a difference between the education you’d receive from just reading the course materials and watching the lectures and actually going to Yale; for a start, you don’t get professors marking your own work on the subject, which is a vital part of the learning process. But it is an extraordinary step that the lectures themselves have been opened up. Good lecturers can present material better than a book can, for instance (and books have been freely available in libraries for a few years now). It opens up access to influential ideas and academics in a way a library can’t (and occasionally there’s the odd student crossing the screen having turned up late, for humour value), and gives great pointers to relevant reading material that you won’t be able to find elsewhere - just looking over the Philosophy shelves in a library doesn’t tell you which books, authors or topics are most important, for instance.
On another level, this step broadens the audience of higher education to those who just can’t go to Yale for whatever reason (e.g. distance), and introduces a new business model to higher education. Just like Canonical, for instance, the model is not to provide the end product (here, lectures, there, an OS) for a price, but support services that go along with that (in education, marking essays, answering questions). While there are of course differences (like, no one has to be encouraged to go to Yale, but Canonical have to market Ubuntu), the analogy stands to some extent.
p.s. Of course, to be truly open the videos shouldn’t be in .mov, rather in .ogg. But that’s a topic for another day ;)
