At the end of this month, the truth of what MIT will make available will be revealed.

On September 30 MIT will release first courses on the Internet as part of their OpenCourseWare initiative. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog]

I suspect that there will be a lot of variation in what is available. I doubt that all courses will uniformly provide lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments, knowing what I do about faculty, and having played one before myself. I also believe that providing just these artifacts of a course is rather like receiving source code with few or no valuable comments.

DaveW made the (typically sweeping, since DaveW loves stirring a pot like few others big wink) statement that without the developers, source code is worthless. Ken Hagler, MORE team member, took some umbrage at this, "saying that nobody but the original team could use the source says, something rather bad about the original team."

I believe the truth, whatever that is (I always think of truth as a set of facts, filtered from a particular viewpoint.), is that although you should be able to recreate some version of what the original team had created, not having the comments means that extending or building on the source could prove problematic.

WRT to courses, not having knowledge of the particular design intentions (why was this resource included, while this one was omitted, or this one barely mentioned) that lead to the particular artifacts means that other instructors will not be able to just grab these items and provide an MIT-quality course. A new instructor is likely to drive their own perceived emphasis and predilections into the delivery. The folks at MIT who sold this idea up the food chain knew very well that so much of magic remains locked up in the head of the person who made the decisions that led to the creation of those particular artifacts for a course. That's why providing these artifacts was not viewed as being a threat to enrollments at MIT.

Don't believe me? Go find a set of materials from a good course you took in you major at college. I'll bet you might have all of these artifacts stowed in a notebook or folder somewhere. Now, do you think that you could deliver the same course at the same level of quality as it existed when you took it, using these artifacts, and your vague memory of the course? Honestly? I thought so.

5:33:10 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow ]

The last sentence of SHE's comment about a particular person's pre-NFL game grandstanding. The whole scene played out like this...

Remote used to change channel to where NFL game should appear. Greeted by large head talking most poorly-like about patriotism and football. Severe body shivers all around. Channel changed nearly immediately. "You know how when you see some people talking, even for only one second, you just know they're dumb? ..."

I think I'll keep her. :-)

12:16:59 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this