As promised in my previous post, below are a few resources that are openly accessible, with no ‘fee’ involved, and in two cases, allow you to contribute to the body of openly accessible knowledge.
A common question is why make such educational and cultural resources openly and freely accessible and modifiable. In essence:
- Faster response time to changing, new knowledge.
- Customizable to local needs that require a different presentation of material.
- Lower cost.
- Wider base of contributors and potentially richer content.
- Faster translation to languages by members of the community.
And as the Wikipedia experience shows, generating and maintaining content by a community base need not necessarily mean inaccurate data because in such systems, problematic content and translations are shallow because given a large enough audience, peers, readers and commentators, almost all problematic content will be quickly noticed highlighted and fixed.
1. Connexions
They state that, “…when people share their knowledge, they can select from the best ideas to create the most effective learning materials. The knowledge in Connexions can be shared and built upon by all because it is reusable. Just as knowledge is interconnected, people don’t live in a vacuum. Connexions promotes communication between content creators and provides various means of collaboration. Collaboration helps knowledge grow more quickly, advancing the possibilities for new ideas from which we all benefit.”
3. MIT OpenCourseWare
Interested yet? And if so, how do we, given our mission, harness these ideas and technologies to get a book in to the hands of the last child in the last village in the furthest corners of India and the world?
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Picture via svenwerk