My Thoughts

Students, while you are grouping en masse to prevent the rise in tuition, don’t forget about another massive cost of education – Textbooks and educational resources

 

If students deem striking to prevent tuition increases a worthy cause, then what do they make of the incredibly high cost of educational materials? A full time Quebec students pay about $1,800.00 per semester in tuition. Textbooks can be anywhere from $1000 to $1500 for an academic year. That's nearly 30%!

 

Do not ignore this cost. It is a big chunk of a student’s yearly budget reserved for educational materials that could be, and in many cases already are, freely available. There is a large amount of freely available textbooks that are being created and openly licensed. That means thier creators made them freely available because they believe in free access to high quality educational materials. Many of these organizations are coming together this week to celebrate and spread the word at the first annual Open Education Week.

 

Join in, learn and participate at http://www.openeducationweek.org/

(see original press release at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/community/blog/2012/02/21/press-release-first-annual-open-education-week-march-5-10-2102/)

Perhaps unlimited surveillance of people's online activity would be accepted by the public if the user's identity was made anonymous and only the activity was monitored.
There would be technical problems with creating such a system, as identity is deeply intertwined with activity. How could we make an email with our digital signature and attachments of CVs with tons of personal information completely anonymous? How could we make the hundreds of online photos anonymous?
If companies providing these services could completely mask the identity of the users, and provide authorities with only the actions matched to users anonymous identification numbers, then authorities could identify crimes without undermining people's privacy. As though authorities could look into a random bedroom, see that people are having sex, and what kinds of sex, but never know which bedroom or which people.
Once authorities identify what they perceive to be a crime, that crime should go to trial - courts vs john doe. If the courts find the activity to be a crime, only then should they lay charges and uncover the true identity of the anonymous user.

Here are the first few photos I took in China. It is 7:30 AM on my street.

On my way to work I usually have breakfast on the street and walk by
all sorts of vendors selling magic beans, lettuce, and other
vegetables and fruits.

In November I suggested the Canadian government make grants available to professors and educators creating open educational resources.

 Post Secondary Education Online

WHEREAS the online publication of high quality educational materials would be a valuable asset to educators and post secondary students, particularly in remote areas;

WHEREAS Open Courseware is the online publication of entire university courses – including syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets, examples of tests, and audio/video recordings of lectures – available freely online to anyone with an internet connection.

WHEREAS Many students go into post secondary school and drop out within the first two years of study, spending thousands upon thousands of dollars in the proscess and gaining little benefit from an incomplete degree.

WHEREAS course materials created by professors have little monetary value, but enormous social value, and are by default copyrighted, even when put online for public view;

WHEREAS publication of the top courses offered by Canadian universities would cost little in comparison to the benefits received by educators, students and the self-taught;

BE IT RESOLVED that the Liberal Party of Canada urge the next Liberal government of Canada to establish a programme of grants to be awarded to post-secondary educators who create openly licensed educational materials freely available online;

Westmount–Ville-Marie Liberal Association

181 words

I have just learned that the U.S. federal government has created a $2 billion grant system for the creating of open educational resources.

On January 14th, Ambassador and Mrs. Killion hosted a reception at their residence to announce the creation of the World Library of Science, a joint collaboration between UNESCO and Nature Publishing Group.  The World Library of Science is an open and permanent online learning resource that will offer high quality educational materials in the life and physical sciences to secondary and university level students around the world. It is designed to address a critical global problem the world faces in the 21st Century – the lack of scientific literacy, especially in the developing world.

In addition to articles drawn from Nature Publishing Group’s authoritative publications, The World Library of Science will contain over 2,500 learning modules specifically created for this project in life and physical science subjects such as biology, physics, chemistry, nutrition, environmental science, and much more. Each module will be fully customizable and accessible free-of-charge through a web and mobile-based platform.

wikileaks.org

Now that I'm done school I can start to focus more on personal projects, especially my sci-fi novel.

Yeah, I think I put in my application a little too fast. It is for us residents only.