That was the idea, anyhow. Gerald’s in Alabama for two weeks, visiting his family. The boys are in camp during the day. (A town-sponsored program at their elementary school. Six weeks, six hours a day. Total cost for the program? $23/kid. Yes, that’s correct. Less than $1 a day. Have I mentioned how much I like living in Rochester?) So I was going to have plenty of uninterrupted work time while Gerald was gone—during the day, and after the kids went to bed.
Ha. Ha ha. Or, as a mailing list friend used to say, bwahahaha. (I am reminded of the old line “Man makes plans, and God laughs.”)
The six-year-old has a stomach bug, so I’m home with him rather than at the office getting grant work done. I suppose I could work here, but it’s hard to concentrate with the constant refrains of “Mom, can I have some more Gatorade,” “Mom, where’s the remote,” and “Mom, I think I’d like some toast after all.”
And the nine-year-old is suffering from insomnia, so he wasn’t asleep until nearly midnight last night.
So much for all the quality private time I was about to get. :)
Gerald…I miss you already!
Larry Lessig points to this Newsweek review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Why? Because it’s not so much a review of the movie as it is a passionate and convincing argument about the importance of the public domain.
I’ll probably add this as a copyright-related reading in my intro to multimedia course (which should probably just be called “intro to the internet”).
Well, that’s a grandiose title. Sorry. I am not going to try to provide a complete courseware critique here. I’m just thinking about one thing that bothers me about the courseware we use at RIT (and which is true of most courseware systems)—it’s closed. Nobody but the students can see it.
Makes sense for grades, of course. But not for anything else. For years, I’ve kept syllabi online for my classes—which has helped not just my students, but also professors and students from other classes and schools, and people not affiliated with schools at all. It was “open source” information.
Now, RIT wants me to put all my course information into the proprietary courseware system that they’ve invested significant funds into. The problem is, it locks it all away. Not only does that not provide any benefits to my students, it has a negative impact on the overall identity of RIT by hiding what we do best—teaching.
MIT has the right idea, I think, with its Open Courseware project. Because it’s not the syllabus that’s the real value in your educational experience. It’s the guidance and support and encouragement and feedback that a good teacher provides. It’s the realization that maybe you don’t know everything already, and that constructive criticism from your professor might be more valuable than angry criticism from your boss or your client. It’s the opportunity to watch how others around you tackle a project, and learn from their successes and failures. It’s the social components, not the information components, that provide the most important lessons. (Which loops right back around to Joi Ito’s recent post about the primacy of context over content.)
So I’m not going to use the courseware this fall for my freshman multimedia class. I’m going back to my old(er) method of standard web-based distribution. (Yes, I know there are some broken queries in there. I’m working on it.) But I’m adding to that a class blog. And maybe…just maybe…a wiki, as well. We’ll see.
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