Re: Open Content Education (was Quiz robot)

[Rhandeev Singh <rhandeev@comp.nus.edu.sg>]

On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Bruno Vernier wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 31, 1999 at 03:18:37PM +0800, Rhandeev Singh wrote:
> > On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, the next to last of the red-hot fakirs wrote:
> > > >Why does the database have to be open to the students?
> movement in my work as system administrator, I am very ripe for a similar
> movement in my more important work as a teacher.  I am really really tired

Yes, you are right that it will take time to convince the old schoolers. 
About 60% of what I learned during my course was gleaned from the open
source community, the open standards track, and research papers,
electronic publications, etc freely available on the net; I learned only
the most basic stuff from the University curriculum.

But the university does not fund students who want to gain exposure by
attending USENIX conferences, IETF meetings, etc.  Instead, they only fund
the best brains who already are motivated enough to write excellent
research papers that are selected for publication in peer-reviewed
journals and for presentation at like conferences, those who're already up
there, because they give the university recognition, and every university
craves for credibility.  This is going to stay that way.

Therefore, it seems that economics controls the education system, and some
of us have no choice but to look beyond what the education system can
offer us.  And what do we see out there?  (BTW, an interesting resource is
at http://pbs.mcp.com). 

Therein lies the value of putting our resources online, and under an open
content license. 

Another way to put this is: who needs the exposure more?  Those who
already got it anyway, or those who've never been to a USENIX conference
before?  While inspiration does not have immediate rewards, the long term
rewards can be immense.  We should learn to pay students to get inspired
to perform.  After all, beyond the basic facilities, money doesn't help
innovation.

(e.g. you can't pay me two million and expect me to come up with a two
million dollar idea by tomorrow morning.  Many studies of innovation in
the commercial organization find that the best innovators don't care about
the company's monetary rewards in their quality improvement programmes.
The creators of the GIMP claim that their university's costly advanced
computing facility (or whatever it's called) wasn't very helpful.  They
used their own cheap PCs most of the time.)

Therefore, we should be spending money on basic public infrastructure.
Put resources on the Internet so everybody gets to pay just $19.95 a month
for any kind of information, curricula included. 

Do we believe in equal rights or what?

This is possible now for computer science students in a world of cheap
PCs, and it is even enticing for students who can't afford the hundreds of
dollars in books that it would otherwise take, but who must pay the school
fees that entitle them to a connection to the Internet anyway.

Yet information technology is such that it can be applied to any
discipline.  Even literature (see how the WELL is helping member literacy
at www.well.com, or the collection of shakespeare's works at 3Com Palm
support sites; or read the scout reports at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu).

An open test database that becomes too extensive is likely to morph into
an open teaching resource database (as examinations cover the subject
matter more and more completely they become like ... textbooks).

(BTW, for $19.95 a month, we would eventually be contributing to the
literacy of the whole population.) 

Therefore, the issue of whether or not to keep an extensive database
secret corresponds to the issue of whether or not to keep textbooks
secret...

Yes, the PGP certification idea is a good one, but that would take too
much red tape to quickly become accepted.  I was instead referring to the
public key encryption of program data -- in particular, the choice of
questions, from the moment that the educator selects a chunk of material
from the database to be included in the examination script to the time
that the student sees it during the examination.

If we're printing them out, the secrets will be harder to keep since we
can't encrypt paper... but paper is probably what will get the ball
rolling. 

---
Rhandeev Singh                          rhandeev@comp.nus.edu.sg
Linux User Group                        http://linux.comp.nus.edu.sg
School of Computing                     http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg
National University of Singapore