New and Noteworthy: May 30, 2008

Open Education

Another lifetime or two ago, Lisa Spiro and I were partners in coding and editing electronic texts for the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. Now Lisa is the Director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University's Fondren Library, and has her finger on the pulse of digital scholarship in the humanities. In her gracious review of this website, Lisa points out that Imagining Sleep falls into the category of "Open Education." I am pleased to embrace this term. Imagining Sleep is a university-level course without the university. It is open and available to anyone with an internet connection. Will open source culture, interest in transparency, and proliferation of multimedia technology one day revolutionize the way people educate themselves? I certainly hope so.