Ken, First off, Here Here!! Well said.
To your question - After we get the economics right. . . how does this impact education?
You will know that you have had an impact, that positive change has occurred when you walk into the lunch room of an Inner City school and hear young people talking about 'The guy who invented the Ipod got a Nobel Prize', this happened to me yesterday. While the facts are a bit wonky and the context is a bit off, what it meant was the kids had being paying attention to a blog posting I had flagged during an outreach session that morning while discussing Nanotechnology.
Out of that exchange, the original seven I had been talking to in the morning, swelled to seventeen and we went further into discovering exactly what he real story was.
We researched the archives and found the original reporting, [1991-94] and the sound of 'Wow' could be heard around the room. Not only was the content relevant to the learners, had a context relating to something in their reality, the process of getting the information show them tools they could use for further exploration.
I have suggested before and, though reticently, will repeat it here. We need to get on with the job of opening up the access so everyone has a chance to learn, and worry about how it gets payed for later. Our 'Pay per Page' concept will likely work for us, even if it heavily subsidized, and it may even work on a broader institutional context, however, I believe that One Size Fits All will not work for Open Access, just as its efficacy has failed in the educational field as a whole.
- 806 reads
