How free are you to teach and learn?

Soon, the only atom of knowledge that will be shared freely by all educationists in the world, will be that knowledge cannot be shared freely by law.

This, because all curriculum, and even methods of teaching, are not only copyrighted, but also proprietary. Anyone who wishes to teach something will have to pay a license-fee or enter into some agreement, to do so. The burden of this, will of course, be passed on to the student.

The role of the teacher and the professor will pass through its most challenging phase this century. The confusion between the four discrete terms: information, skill, knowledge, and education, will finally come clear, and everyone in academia will be forced to examine what do they impart out of these four.

Fortunately, a few brave and intelligent thinkers are trying to forge an alternative vision, at least in education-curriculum. Among them is WikiEducator, a community for the realization of a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. wikieducator.org/India
They met at a Delhi University college in south Delhi, called Acharya Narendra Dev College,
andcollege.du.ac.in/ for a Learning For Content workshop. Details here: wikieducator.org/India/L4C_India_08.

I was invited to deliver a talk on vision and inspiration, as part of the talk by Dr. Andrew Lynn. The audience came from diverse disciplines in indian academia. Was wonderful to meet so many professors and educationists. Here are some photos from my talk:

Dr. Savithri Singh just emailed me her collection of photos from the event, which prompted me to author this blog. We all had quite an intense and animated discussion during my talk, that was held jointly with Dr Andrew Lynn from JNU. A few colleges also talked about rolling similar talks and initiatives in their campuses. As usual, I am always game. In the meantime, Dr Savithri’s photos:
WikiEd08 pictures
and Even more WikiEd08 pictures.

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Tags: DU, foss, free curriculum, linux, wiki

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 3:13 am and is filed under education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.