Collaboration, Presentations/Speeches, and Open Source

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. When Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, came out, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig said, "This is -- by far -- the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this." This work examines the ways in which information technology permits extensive forms of collaboration that may have transformative consequences for economy and society. Benkler's presentation outlines the characteristics of the networked information economy and the roles of collaboration and commons-based production of information, knowledge, and culture, and it suggests avenues to apply these broad trends to education and education-related policy.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. In 2006, ECAR distributed three surveys: the first was designed simply to ascertain whether the responding institution collaborated in significant ways; the second asked responding collaborators to describe their experiences, views, outcomes, concerns, and readiness with and for collaborations; and the third asked self-identified non-collaborators in IT to describe the barriers to collaboration they face, the cultural assumptions and beliefs of their institutions, and their views about the possible future for IT collaboration at their institutions. The survey responses offer a rich snapshot of how and when colleges and universities collaborate, the nature of the collaborations themselves, and a sense of the effectiveness of IT collaborations in higher education.

The CIC CourseShare Web application will be overviewed, highlighting its support of the necessary information sharing between collaborating universities. Special considerations for related interinstitutional agreements among deans participating in the experimental shared courses will be discussed. The session will include examples of the Oncourse system's evolutionary transition plan for OKI conversion over the next two years through OKI partnerships and developing and leveraging those partnerships along with methods of cost savings by leveraging existing resources for support—both technically and pedagogically—the evolutionary transition plan for OKI conversion and developing and leveraging those partnerships along the way; and the LearningOnline Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach (LON-CAPA) as a distributed Learning Content Management and Assessment System.