Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge

ABSTRACT: A grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The "open access movement" is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that textbooks present.

Connexions, a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999, aims to reinvent how we write, edit, publish, and use textbooks (via Google Video).

Web Resources

• Connexions
• The Center for Open Sustainable Learning
• BlendedEdu + OpenCourseWare