::fibreculture:: WebCT, Open Source and Beyond

[Ned Rossiter]

hi Andrew -- very good to hear this list hasn't completely bitten the  
dust!  There's a bit of a classic critique of Web-CT (in passing) -  
which I expect you know - by Noble:

Noble, David. F. ‘Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher  
Education’, First Monday 3.1 (1998).  Available from: http:// 
www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_1/noble/

And Helen Merrick and Michele Willson have the other excellent  
critique in the fc reader. (We've got to get that book online -- a  
case of missing pdf's I fear...)

Feenberg is also worth a read:

Feenberg, Andrew. ‘The Factory or the City: Which Model for Online  
Education?’, in Critical Theory of Technology, 2nd ed. (Oxford:  
Oxford University Press, 2001).  Available from: http:// 
commons.somewhere.com/rre/2002/RRE.Critical.Theory.of.T.html

It's amazing to hear that such a crappy software package is still  
being peddled so hard. Aside from the raft of pedagogical/techno- 
cultural issues, that says a lot about the kind of debt economies  
uni's have bought themselves into with licensed software. (ie, it's  
not just a year by year kind of review - does that happen, seriously,  
in uni's anywhere? - but rather a commitment to a package for "x"  
years.)

I get a bit of a similar sense when I hear of various creative  
economy endeavors such as NESTA's Futurelab projects in the UK  
<http://www.nesta.org.uk/insidenesta/hwf_futurelab.html>, which fund  
"partnerships" b/w govt, businesses, schools/unis/techs & teachers/ 
students to develop educational software applications. The point I  
find unclear is where the IP lies.  The nasty scenario easily  
envisaged is a case where the developers of software (students/ 
teachers) end up having to pay license fees for software they  
developed (to say nothing of other educational institutions).

on a positive note, it seems that CC licenses and open source are, in  
many instances, becoming a norm in uni's (forget about any critique  
on that count though).

Ned


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