Anto’stuff

I enjoyed this tenth week, dedicated to crossblogging. I’m convinced it was a great idea to insert some reflection between “productive” weeks. Furthermore, I was able to realize what means reading a bunch of posts and eventually comment all of them, each week! David, I further agree that it’s a Mission Impossible!! Maybe a lenght limit for posts may help, in the future editions… It could also be useful for students to improve their synthesis skills

For now, I have choosen to write a short resume of what I read around here on my blog, instead of directly commenting on the others’ blogs. Just now I’m reading about Elisa’s opposite choice. Even if I don’t agree with her consideration on possible discrimination (maybe this could be true for the instructor’s comment, but I don’t think it is a real problem for peers commenting) I too probably will comment each post, next week (just to change… )

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to produce a very coherent post, like Megan (BTW, Megan, excellent work!), so my post is more similar to a random collection of thoughts inspired by some colleagues’ posts. It’s more like a personal brainstorming than an organized resume.

I started my reading from Elisa’s post (what a coincidence!! ) in which I was struck by a phrase that reminded me the discussion about quality:

I understand the reason why foreign language books are so trivial and boring in their contents, they can’t publish for example even an extract of a song or a film or the photo of a famous actor with some useful information about him because of the copyright duties!

Wow! Is she saying we could have better textbooks if we lived in an more open-cultural world? It would be a good point because one of the strongest arguments for copyright reinforcement is exactly the opposite!!

The Karen’s post is a good summary of all the issues that relates with OER. She organizes them in four “realms”, according to Lessig’s Code … For me, it’ a pretty complete list. It could be a very synthesis for the entire course.

Stian covers an interesting point when he talks of APIs. It’s a technical issue but nowadays it’s very important: for example, this week Google OpenSocial started, proposing a set of common APIs for social networking interoperability, while OER repositories are still closed, “walled gardens”…

I was happy to see that Yu-Chun shares my reflections about granularity: the example of cooking book is very clear!

I would like to share the optimistic view of Andreas about mass participation as “vibrant business ecosystems” but I’m still skeptical…

I strongly agree with the (how to call it? appeal?) of Rob on the need of unity for the Open-Free movements and licenses. Why do we struggle with quibbles when the “enemy” has one, clear statement?

Finally, I appreciated the Alessandro’s effort to contextualize the discussion on the Italian situation, which I too well know. I think it’s important to refer to our own local, concrete, problems: Chenyong too refers to Chinese point of view.