Open Source Curriculum

WIRED -- I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Open Source movement dotted the landscape in the form of Amish barn-raising. I work in Tipperary Institute where Open Source appears in the form of Java, Perl, Apache, Linux and Moodle. I would like to donate my course notes to an Open Source initiative, like the Open Textbook Project (OTP). The OTP is building free textbooks in a range of subjects, using the principles of distributed collaboration and open access. The result will be low-cost, high-quality texts. Both our use of Moodle and our integration of Open Courseware puts us on a collision course with business sponsors. In the short-term, we will need the comforting hand of our host Institute to wade through some higher cost factors that inevitably occur when educational media companies reduce their sponsorship of large events. As we move forward, we need to appreciate the direct cost of our implementations. On our present course, some training exhibitions will cost more in the future as textbook companies and software vendors reduce their sponsorship.

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Thomas Goetz -- "Open Source Everywhere" in Wired, November 2003
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