http://gu.com/p/35tga

Sharing your knowledge and learning resources with the world, for free, is the fundamental building block of learning, freedom, and the web.

Difficulty : Easy.

Time : 5 minutes.

Who : 1 or more.

Materials : Computer with Internet access and a piece of educational content: test, lesson plan, set of learning resources, curriculum.

Steps:

1. Choose a piece of writing, test questions, or other educational content that you want to release for free.

2. Choose a Creative Commons License at : http://creativecommons.org/choose/. Do you want to allow others to alter your work? Restrict commercial use?

3. Choose where you want to publish your content: Connexions.org – http://cnx.org/ – OR – the Open Courseware Consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ – are two good places to start.

via Learning, Freedom and the Web.

Nice.

Below you will find categories and links to woodworking resources across the Internet. If this is your first time visiting, please read About this site

via Why Pay? 24/7 Free Access to Free Woodworking Plans and Projects.

What is essential? You know, what do I really want?”

John’s is just one of many stories of overconsumption present in this room. In fact, attending a Tumbleweed Tiny House Workshop is kind of like being in a support group. No one’s shouting Amen or patting people on the back to urge them to share their painful stories, but the coffee’s just as bad, and if you look around the room, people are nodding their heads, often unable to keep from verbalizing assent with the things they’re hearing. They’ve pored over websites dedicated to the benefits of living small; clicked through pictures of tiny rolling houses, Airstream conversions, hobbit houses, and gypsy wagons; and they’ve probably even decided which small-house architect they feel has the best designs. But there’s also a good chance that this is the first time they’ve been in a room with other people open to these ideas, and it hasn’t happened until this weekend when they’ve come from their homes in many different states to learn how to design and build their own.

via Closer to Home: Tumbleweed Tiny House Building Workshop.

via Why we’re living in a tent – in winter | Life and style | The Guardian.

This scenario suggests a change of emphasis for universities. True teaching and learning are about more than information and its transmission. Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role modeling, guidance, socialization, interaction and group activity. In these processes, physical proximity plays an important role. Thus, the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community; less in wholesale lecture, and more in tutorial; less in Cyber-U and more in Goodbye-Mr.-Chips College. Technology would augment, not substitute, and provide new tools for strengthening community on campus, even beyond graduation. In research, the physical university’s strength lies in establishing on-campus specialized islands of excellence that benefit from the complementarity of physical proximity. This requires the active management of priorities and a significant unbundling of the credentialing, teaching, housekeeping and research functions. In the validation of information, the university will become more important than ever. With the explosive growth in the production of knowledge, society requires credible gatekeepers of information, and has entrusted some of that function to universities and its resident experts, not to information networks. But to safeguard the credibility of this function requires universities to be vigilant against creeping self-commercialization and self-censorship.

via. http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-96/noam.html

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It’s called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained.

MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.

Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. Now MIT has decided to put the two together—free content and sophisticated online pedagogy­—and add a third, crucial ingredient: credentials. Beginning this spring, students will be able to take free, online courses offered through the MITx initiative. If they prove they’ve learned the materi­al, MITx will, for a small fee, give them a credential certifying as much.

via MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one man a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense…

It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the dishonour of manual labour done away with altogether. [We see] the degradation of the operative into a machine…

It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread and therefor look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.

Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves….

For since the architect, whom we will suppose capable of doing all in perfection, cannot execute the whole with his own hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen… and level his work to a slave’s capacities, which is to degrade it; or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength, which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the age can make it.

…Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskillful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art…

…All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy….

But it requires a strong effort of common sense to shake ourselves quit of all that we have been taught for the last two centuries, and wake to the perception of a truth just as simple and certain as it is new: that great art whether expressing itself in words, colors, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining….

via Design in the 20th Century // Art 208.

There’s plenty of advice out there from companies selling wood burning stoves. If you’re considering buying a stove, our experience as users will give you an independent view.We’ve been living with a Wood Burner for two years. The initial novelty has worn off and now we can reflect on the question. “Has it been worth it?”That’s a tough question to answer it depends on how we define worth. Have a read through and see if the wood burning life is the life for you.

via iDoStuff more than DIY.

We’ve relied on a wood burner as our only source of heat for five years now. This guy offers some sound advice.

Does Corporation X act as though I own my on-line life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?

Does Corporation X behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples’ agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Corporation X data stream, or have other people do that for me?

No prize for guessing that “the hacker way” is to give control to the individual, to respect his or her privacy, to create tools for autonomy and liberty, and to encourage creative re-use of software.

via Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Does “Corporation X” follow the hacker way?.

Pye proposed that we build things to effect change. Everything occurs within a system of changes and structures and is not divisible from the system in which it operates. Most designed objects are, in his opinion, purely palliative, and very few objects truly enable new activities and behavior. We can walk instead of taking the car but we cannot fly instead of taking a plane. He also points out that design is limited by economy not technique. Technique far outstrips affordability. Because of this all design is a trade off and to that extent a failure. Where that failure is allowed to enter in is an arbitrary result of the process of designing. He points out that much of design proceeds under the assumption that tools can bring us happiness but in his opinion tools can only avoid unhappiness. In thinking that tools can equate to happiness the tools are seen as separating cause and effect which are inseparable. This belief is held because design is conceived at a certain level of isolation from outside factors which do not or cannot exist in the world.

via David Pye (furniture) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A few years ago, I wrote a post about how you can make a font based on a sample of your own handwriting.

I did it to help Grace, at the time aged three, to make a font of her writing as part of a present for Amy.

Graham suggested doing this every year, and as it turns out, that is what I ended up doing.

It’ll be a nice thing to have when she’s older – a record of what her writing used to be like. And it’s fascinating to see how her handwriting develops year-on-year.

We’ve got a few of them now, so time to share how it looks so far.

We’ve been doing it once a year since then…

via Tracking how my kids’ handwriting changes « dale lane.

When Knut Kloster and Ted Arison invented the idea of modern cruising over forty years ago – at least one of them had a vision that it could help create a new era of world harmony and peace.

As the cruse-world developed and mutated over the next forty odd years it mirrored the changes in modern capitalism – from a naive utopian belief in transforming the world – to a harsh, narrow utilitarian vision of the free market where everyone above and below decks is expected to behave as “rational utility maximizers”

And today the world of the modern cruise liners also mirrors the present structure of our global society. Millions of people live in a world where they expect the luxuries which were previously only offered to the few. At the same time millions of others around the world struggle daily to create the platform that holds that fake luxury world together.

Meanwhile the small elite who are genuinely rich and powerful float off into the distance on their own boat – and kick anyone off who dares to get drunk and call it a cruise.

Our leaders tell us that we are all in the same boat.

But what will happen if our boat sinks? Will those same leaders be among the first to jump in the lifeboat and speed off into the dark telling us they have gone to get help?

via BBC – Adam Curtis Blog: WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME BOAT – AREN’T WE?.

Many people ask us why we think it is important that educational institutions use and teach free software. They wonder: “What does free software have to do with education?” It is important to note that one of the key concepts at the root of the free software movement is that knowledge is a resource to be shared in freedom so that it can be spread for the benefit of all. Similarly, the whole educational process is based on the sharing and dissemination of knowledge; it is not possible to educate where sharing is forbidden. As Richard Stallman explains:

The source code and the methods of free software are part of human knowledge. The mission of every school is to disseminate human knowledge. Proprietary software is not part of human knowledge. It’s secret, restricted knowledge, which schools are not allowed to disseminate. (From a speech at the University of Pavia, Italy, in September 2007, when receiving an honorary degree in Engineering.)

via The GNU Education Project — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software.