Friday, March 25, 2005

AP on Ourmedia Ourmedia is getting coverage now by mainstream media. Here's what the Associated Press has to say about the site. ____JH "A new Web site backed by some of the Internet's leading thinkers promises to make it easier--and cheaper--for artists, scholars and other creative people to share their digital works. Ourmedia.org seeks to become a central repository for such items. The site addresses a chief obstacle to posting video and other large files to the Internet: the more popular an item gets, the more the owner has to pay for Web hosting services. Ourmedia will offer hosting services for free, and the site pledges to retain home movies, photos, cartoons, software and any other digital work forever." ________ [Note that BitTorrent also tries (in a very different and clever way, using p2p structuring) to cope with the problem of controlling costs for sharing online resources-- http://www.bittorrent.com/. However, BT has become notorious for file sharing of copyrighted materials. Ourmedia emphasizes that it is hosting materials that are to be freely available and are not copyright protected.] 9:36:49 AM    COMMENT []

Paying for Better Teaching Here's a radical idea--pay big dollars to get better teaching! This article from Inside Higher Ed (March 23, 2005) reports on grant activities at the Hughes Institute: "The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (with an endowment in excess of $12 billion) ... in 2002 it decided to turn 20 professors at research universities into 'million dollar professors,' giving them each $1 million to push for real change in the way students are taught at top universities. In terms of grants for curricular or teaching change, where many professors are thrilled to get $50,000 from a foundation or relief from teaching one course, $1 million is huge." This initiative departs from the usual approach in higher education (and US education K thru X), which is to pay less than auto assembly line wages, and expect to get the workers/teachers to come up with new car designs that their students can drive away in four years. "Three years into the program, evidence is emerging that the Hughes grants are indeed changing many courses. While the efforts of the various professors differ, there is a strong emphasis on making introductory courses more exciting, looking for ways to enhance professor-student interaction even in large lecture courses, and trying new approaches to testing what students learn." These efforts to improve teaching could be multiplied many times if the Hughes grants were also tied into an MIT-style opencourseware commitment. ____JH   8:04:03 AM    COMMENT []