by Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond

“ Creative Commons is a companion to the OER initiative and was founded in 2001 to help revive the shrinking public domain as copyright durations were repeatedly extended in large part due to the pressures from the media industry. They use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, their ends are cooperative and community-minded, but the means are voluntary and libertarian. ”

“ The imagination starts to run wild when one thinks about a new kind of simulation and visualization—highly instrumented courseware all living in a spiral of continual improvement through use, augmentation and remix because of Web 2.0 techniques. This becomes a living or dynamic infrastructure—itself a reflective practicum. ”

“ A socio-technical initiative to form an open participatory learning infrastructure is critical to this culture of learning. By open participatory learning infrastructure we mean the institutional practices, technical infrastructure, and social norms that allow a smooth operation of globally distributed, high-quality open learning. We include the word “participatory” to emphasize that the focus is not just on information access, but on the role of technology in supporting the social nature of learning. ”

“ The learning-on-demand scenario has already transformed the need to spend all one’s time memorizing facts. Google becomes a living index and repository for enormous content. We now live in a world of abundance where editing and curating become more crucial than ever.
It is under-appreciated how Google has empowered the geek generation to be fearless in picking up new languages, etc. Why? Because language compilers, integrated debugging environments, and operating systems generate error codes when they get stuck. An error code is meaningless to a human but it does wonders as input to Google. ”

“ Half of the world’s population is under twenty years old. Today, there are over thirty million people who are fully qualified to enter a university, but there is no place available. This number will grow to over 100 million during the next decade. To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week. In most of the world, higher education is mired in a crisis of access, cost, and flexibility. ”

“ Phones are evolving technologically as well, gaining e-mail, web-browsing, video, and Wi-Fi or other broadband Internet access capabilities. Within five years, the typical mobile phone is likely to have the processing power of today’s PC. Thus for the vast majority of people in developing countries, their PC and Internet access device will be a mobile phone, a handheld computer or a hybrid of these devices, such as the new Apple iPhone, whose high-profile marketing efforts and design qualities are likely to spur momentum, competition, and a great deal of attention. ”

“ Just like MP3s, iPods, and the Internet have freed musical talent, we hope that blueprints and fabbers will democratize innovation.
Creating a culture of learning will end up redefining how we think about work, leisure, and entertainment. ”

“ Boundaries between social and technical action can often be shifted in either direction The complications of time, scale, and agency challenge simple notions of infrastructure building as a planned, orderly, and mechanical act. They also suggest that boundaries between technical and social solutions are mobile, in both directions: the path between the technological and the social is not static and there is no one correct mapping. Robust cyberinfrastructure will develop only when social, organizational, and cultural issues are resolved in tandem with creating technology-based services. ”

“ We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem, [110] is targeted at preparing people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world. This world demands creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism from all of us. ”

“ This report includes the following assertion:
"a new age has dawned in scientific and engineering research, pushed by continuing progress in computing, information, and communication technology, and pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today's challenges. The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds that now make possible a comprehensive "cyberinfrastructure" on which to build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and organizations and to pursue research in new ways and with increased efficacy." ”

“ The rapid emergence of the World Wide Web, layered on the Internet and distributed computing architecture, is the mainstay for provisioning and using open educational resources. In its first phase, the web has been used largely to distribute information. It has now emerged as a platform for collaboration and participation in a wide variety of collective activities. It has been used as a platform for what is often generically call social software. ”

“ The involvement of one of the authors in a rural connectivity project in Vietnam means that more detailed information is available for this country, examined here as an in-depth case study. Eighty percent of the population is rural, and 32 percent is under the age of 15, still a very youthful population with high education needs. The economy is accelerating; Vietnam is joining the WTO this year and already has a bilateral trade agreement with the United States; and the government is ranked highly in World Bank Doing Business surveys for reforms of its enabling environment. ”

“ Let’s start by mapping out a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering, and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process. ”

“ More generally we may now be on the verge of having more computing cycles than we know what do with. So much in the past has been constrained by the assumption of scarce bandwidth and cycles that none of our institutions are prepared to think through new ways of teaching, learning, creating content, modes of sharing, instrumenting, and improving served by infinite computing power. ”

“ Thus the potential of open source educational materials along with digitally based, multimedia, and interactive educational approaches to significantly improve educational opportunities—indeed, to leapfrog them from very poor to world class—is very high. Consider, too, the apparent fact that youth in developing regions find digital technology at least as appealing as do youth in developed areas. Against that potential must be set the realities of ICT and electrical infrastructures as well as policy regimes that strongly influence and constrain those infrastructures in developing countries. ”

“ The bottom line is that widely available broadband Internet access does not yet exist in developing countries, and does not exist at all in most rural areas, where over half of the population lives and a significant proportion of schools are located. The supporting electric power infrastructure is also problematic, especially in Africa and South Asia. In many countries, security concerns would require that computers in schools be kept under lock and key when not in use as they are valuable, easily stolen, and can provide significant revenue to people who are desperate. ”

“ All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons attribution license.
Connexions feels more like an ecosystem than a library with rich cross links that can compose new learning objects from old ones. It is thus a start toward an infrastructure that enables one to remix and compose new objects from old ones. It has been especially effective in exploring modularity and granularity: What is the right grain size that enables maximal reuse of the material? ”

“ The capacity of international networks for education and research is growing and reach through the leadership of the U. S. National Science Foundation and their international counterparts. [108] (Significant progress has been made recently in Latin America, and there is some reason for optimism in better networking to sub-Saharan Africa although much remains to be done, especially within countries.) But access to the supporting technology, especially, but not exclusively, in the developing world cannot be taken for granted. ”

“ Infrastructure is not built from a blueprint, nor necessarily a centralized government-dominated activity. Cyberinfrastructure, especially, emerges from highly distributed, complex, multi-actor processes informed by heuristics for linking isolated and local systems. ”

“ The formally defined faculty, staff, and student community of a university generally have access to site licensed digital materials through their library and have access to most of the literature that would be cited in course material. Students purchase access to other materials in textbooks and course packs. But in opening up course material to the world, institutions must invest the time and expense to scrub the material to be sure that materials licensed for use in their formal community are not available to world. ”

“ Commitment by a growing number of U.S. higher education institutions (community colleges through research universities) to an OCW Consortium offering open access to at least some of their courseware. There is a growing sense that there is room in the world for more than MIT courses and a growing diversity in both the topic and level of available open courseware. Commitments by non-U. S. higher education institutions to build new curriculum or transform current curriculum using open courseware resources. ”

“ The e-science activities are directed at meeting grand global challenges through more effective science and engineering, at enhanced innovation, and at maintaining leadership in a global knowledge-based economy. A spin-off of the science-focused cyberinfrastructure activities has been a growing focus on the role of technology in enhanced scholarship and learning in the humanities and social sciences. ”

“ Brazil and Mexico and Russia are tougher calls, because they are 70 percent or more urban and have higher average incomes, but the rural areas (and the urban slums) are still “developing.” Most of the development literature treats all of these countries as developing, even while acknowledging a growing modern urban core. It is the modern urban–rural disparity, in fact, that is the greatest source of potential social instability—and the governments know it. ”