Re: lug-bg: Eto tova e "Open Source"

[danchev@xxxxxxxxx (George Danchev)]

Dobre 4e gi ima tezi mom4eta ot Universiteti kato Helzinskia , M.I.T. , 
Berkeley i t.n. podobni  renegati :)))  ina4e  losho ...

On Friday 06 April 2001 12:34, you wrote:
> Tova e edna malka iniciativa ot horata v MIT.
>
> ------- Cut -----------------------------
> April 4, 2001
>
> Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free
>
> By CAREY GOLDBERG
>
>     CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 3 - Other
>     universities may be striving to market
>     their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com
>     wealth. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen
>     the opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials on
>     the Web, free to everybody.
>
> M.I.T. plans on Wednesday to announce a 10-year initiative, apparently
> the biggest of its kind, that intends to create public Web sites for
> almost all of its 2,000 courses and to post materials like lecture
> notes, problem sets, syllabuses, exams, simulations, even video
> lectures. Professors' participation will be voluntary, but the
> university is committing itself to post sites for all its courses, at
> a cost of up to $100 million.
>
> Visitors will not earn college credits.
>
> The giveaway idea, President Charles M. Vest of M.I.T. said, came in a
> "traditional Eureka moment" as the institute - like nearly every other
> university - brainstormed and soul-searched about how best to take
> advantage of the Internet.
>
> Called OpenCourseWare, the initiative found broad resonance among the
> faculty members, said Steven Lerman, the faculty chairman.
>
> "Selling content for profit, or trying in some ways to commercialize
> one of the core intellectual activities of the university," Professor
> Lerman said, "seemed less attractive to people at a deep level than
> finding ways to disseminate it as broadly as possible."
>
> Universities have been flocking into "distance learning" - offering
> courses online to off-campus paying students - and commercial ventures
> have been investing tens of millions of dollars in the idea. But those
> ventures tend to pick and choose among courses and professors, rather
> than trying to offer a whole university in one swoop.
>
> At the same time, on campus, universities have begun creating a great
> many course Web sites. The University of California at Los Angeles
> creates a site for every undergraduate course. But those are generally
> only for internal use, and the M.I.T. initiative appears to dwarf even
> those internal programs.
>
> "I think everybody else besides M.I.T. is in the position of being
> more cautious," and watching to see what Internet strategy works best,
> said David Brady, vice provost for learning technologies at Stanford
> University.
>
> A software entrepreneur in Washington, D.C., Michael Saylor, pledged
> $100 million to create an online free university a year ago, but he
> would build it from scratch, and the value of his stock has
> plummeted. M.I.T.'s plan differs from Mr. Saylor's, President Vest
> said: "For one thing, it's going to happen."
>
> Another difference between the M.I.T. plan and other Internet
> initiatives is that it makes no effort to offer full-fledged,
> for-credit courses online. Rather, it will offer course materials as
> ingredients of learning that can then be combined with teacher-student
> interaction somewhere else - or simply explored by, say, professors in
> Chile or precocious high school students in Bangladesh.
>
> Still, is the institute worried that M.I.T. students will balk at
> paying about $26,000 a year in tuition when they can get all their
> materials online?
>
> "Absolutely not," Dr. Vest said. "Our central value is people and the
> human experience of faculty working with students in classrooms and
> laboratories, and students learning from each other, and the kind of
> intensive environment we create in our residential university."
>
> "I don't think we are giving away the direct value, by any means, that
> we give to students," he said. "But I think we will help other
> institutions around the world."
>
> Most of the 940 or so faculty members support the plan, Professor
> Lerman and others said, but some have reservations. Some argued that
> the institute would be giving away a valuable asset that could be used
> to subsidize the residential students. (The question of whether
> university knowledge can be turned into online gold remains a big one,
> however; most firms that are trying it, Dr. Vest said, have
> encountered "much rougher sailing" than expected.)
>
> Other faculty skeptics questioned whether it would be a good use of
> professors' time to labor over Web sites, and still others have
> questioned whether sub-par Web sites might not end up reflecting badly
> on M.I.T.
>
> Then there is the question of intellectual property, already a thorny
> one in academia as the promise of Internet riches exacerbates the
> question of who owns the electronic rights to a professor's lectures
> and research. Some professors, Mr. Lerman said, may end up having two
> Web sites: one for internal use with, say, large portions of a
> soon-to-be- published textbook, and one for external use.
>
> But he and others said that issues of intellectual property had
> surfaced little in the months of faculty discussion of the
> initiative. Rather, they said, a willingness, even an eagerness, to
> share appeared to dominate.
>
> "This is a natural fit to what the Web is really all about," Dr. Vest
> said. "We've learned this lesson over and over again. You can't have
> tight, closed-up systems. We've tried to open up software
> infrastructure in a variety of ways and that's what unleashed the
> creativity of software developers; I think the same thing can happen
> in education."
>
> In fact, M.I.T. is a hotbed of the "open source" software movement;
> and this new Internet initiative is based on a similar idea, said Hal
> Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering who is
> involved in both.
>
> "Fundamentally, they proceed from the same ethic, which has to do with
> sharing," Professor Abelson said. "In the Middle Ages people built
> cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing
> that's greater than any individual person could do and the society
> would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in
> a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral."
>
> The initiative is to begin with a two-year pilot program to put
> materials from more than 500 courses on the Web, work to be done by a
> combination of professional staff and teaching assistants. One of the
> advantages of the initiative, M.I.T. officials said, will be that it
> will unite all the posted courses in one electronic place, allowing
> students to see how they flow into each other, to search the whole
> repository and to jump from one to the next when they cross- reference
> each other.
>
> Professor Abelson and others estimated that at most 20 percent of
> professors already have substantive Web sites for their courses.
>
> University officials said they were not worried that, with extensive
> course materials posted online, students would be less likely to come
> to class. In fact, the university's provost, Robert A. Brown, said,
> when course materials are already posted, "it pushes the faculty in
> the direction of `How do I best use the contact hours so that people
> learn?'  which is clearly critical."
>
> Over all, the vision for 10 years from now, Provost Brown said, was "a
> world in which you'll find students able to search what will be huge
> repositories of content" and "they'll be able to use content from many
> places educationally, and we'll be using other people's as much as
> they'll be using ours."
>
> Dr. Vest said he did not rule out the possibility that M.I.T. might
> seek to develop profit-oriented Web programs in the future. But as for
> this initiative, he said, he suspected its greatest impact might come
> overseas, among institutions that cannot attract world-class faculty.
>
> "I also suspect," he said, "in this country and throughout the world,
> a lot of really bright, precocious high school students will find this
> a great playground." And ultimately, he said, "there will probably be
> a lot of uses that will really surprise us and that we can't really
> predict."
>
>
> --
> _    _ ____  ___    Michael Gottlieb Jensen         E-mail:
> michaelj@xxxxxxxx
>
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