a touch of frost

In a recent visit with a friend I remarked on a little project that I had undertaken – to walk every street within the city I live. My friend asked, like a flaneur? Unfamiliar with the term, I googled it, and naturally first came upon the wikipedia page.  The basic definition “flâneur— “a person who walks the city in order to experience it” was supplemented by the meaning Baudelaire derived for the term:

“”While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.”

Wikipedia goes on “While Baudelaire’s aesthetic and critical visions helped open up the modern city as a space for investigation, theorists, such as Georg Simmel, began to codify the urban experience in more sociological and psychological terms. In his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Simmel theorizes that the complexities of the modern city create new social bonds and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was transforming humans, giving them a new relationship to time and space, inculcating in them a “blasé attitude”, and altering fundamental notions of freedom and being:”

Now if we replaced the words ‘modern city’ with ‘digital environment’ what parts of Simmel’s thesis ring true?

An inspiring keynote by Catherine Ngugi, Project Director, Open Educational Resources (OER) Africa on the work oer africa is doing in facilitating oer initiatives throughout Africa. She touched on the key issue of the dangers inherent in intellectual imperialism or colonalism, and the resultant marginalization, if oer first world/third world partners do not truly collaborate. With true collaborative partnerships it’s not a matter of making content available to African higher education institutions as a form of philanthropy or paternalism, but of co-identifying needs, co-funding and co-development.

A list of the 100 best open educational resources categorized by topics: schools, museums, lectures, podcasts and videos, media, online networks and insititutes, libraries and archives, international and reference.

http://www.masterdegreeonline.com/blog/2009/the-100-best-open-education-resources-on-the-web/

David Wiley has posted an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on his journey into open education.

“For me, for my students, and for the informal students who looked in on or participated in the course outside my university, this “open teaching” was better than a two-for-one. It was a thousand-for-one. When the costs of “open teaching” (freely allowing people outside the university to view course materials and informally participate in the course) are so low, I ask myself a question. Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so?

I believe the answer is yes.”

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3884/david-wiley-open-teaching-multiplies-the-benefit-but-not-the-effort

Jared Stein has set up a wiki to catalog university-based open educational resources projects. The table includes columns with project name and url, country, license, whether the project’s policy is online, contact info, whether the project has an rss/atom feed, and the extent of the resources reuse/remixability.