Hi Edward, I agree with you.  I'm going to say what I think are similar things with some of what I've seen in my professional work and learned from other Sugar community members and school thrown in. Everyone thinks that educational publishing is headed for a market disruption. I recommend reading "Disrupting Class" by Clay Christensen. The Sugar community should not feel alone in trying to change the economic model of how educational content created and disseminated.  I'm actually going to use the term "Learning Objects" instead of content just to reinforce that I think we are talking about not just words and pictures but activities, programs.  While Sugar Community is not alone it could definitely be a very important player in changing the model. At the college level the California State system is creating the technological infrastructure to allow professors to create course packs with chapter of text books and other copyright materials then the students pay for the course pack, and only the chapters they need, rather then having to buy the hard copy text books.  CA is a big enough player to be able to get the publishers to participate.  The system will be interoperable with Moodle so Sugar should be able to benefit from this system when its built.  There is also work being done on federated search of learning objects through LMS systems including Moodle. I've seen stuff from MIT and the EU at various conferences I've been to. Martin says that in Australia and NZ they are starting to notice that the goverment specifies the content for the text books and is the only one that pays for the text books, but that they don't own the copywrite on the content and are facing restrictions on how they use it.  So, I think there is definitely evidence for Edward is saying, that governements could decide to just pay for learning object creation and release it without restriction.  Walter says there are more school districts in the US then in the rest of the world combined. So I expect to see this model outside the US rather then inside. In the US I do see quite a bit of free content creation.  The US Federal Government does fund the creation quite a bit of cool stuff in the National Science Digitial Library.  PBS Teachers domain has good stuff.  Merlot and Curriki seem like good choices for collaborating with in creating and managing open source content. One of Solution Grove's customers in creating a middle school science curriculum using LAMS and Moodle to organize and deliver a combination of free and paid existing learning objects.  The teacher, now turned fulltime curriculum expert, is drawing from an incredibly wide range of sources and is finding great stuff. For an individual teacher to find and assemble into lesson plans and then usie all this free content, in accordance with thier governmental curriculum, all alone, on a regular basis seems like a herculean task.  A lot of what text books do is make things easy for teachers.  We need to find a way for technology to make finding and using high quality content easy for the teacher.  Christensen's book talks about Facilitated User Networks.  This means creating systems that allow teachers, parents and students to all find, use, contribute and modify learning objects. I do think Sugar has a potentially big role in this, especially in primary education.   I urge the community to not feel alone, but rather a part of a larger movement towards making this happen.  Certainly the OLPC deployments have unique requirements, but in general this is a great area to look for partners and connect with the rest of the educational community. Caroline <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 9:00 PM, Edward Cherlin <<a href="mailto:echerlin@gmail.com">echerlin@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d">On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 5:45 PM, Bert Freudenberg <<a href="mailto:bert@freudenbergs.de">bert@freudenbergs.de</a>> wrote: > Cutting this important part out of another discussion ... > > On 10.11.2008, at 20:49, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: > >> Of course, this all supposes the open source model. If someone gets >> paid >> to do a Python Etoys or a GNU Smalltalk one then I wouldn't be at all >> surprised to see a good quality implementation created from scratch in >> just a couple of months. > > I have been thinking about this for quite a while - how valid is the > assumption that a volunteer community would be able to create software > that they do not intend to use themselves? </div>I think we all have seen that it doesn't work that way. With rare exceptions, programmers either program to scratch their own itches, or because they get paid. I will address this issue in my Sugar Camp talk tomorrow. Earth Treasury intends to work with many others to get governments in the OLPC countries to pay for textbook and software development. I have to talk to Nicholas about this, too, of course. The business case for the countries is that XOs plus electronic textbooks cost less than published textbooks (or soon will, even in the countries with the lowest textbook expenditure), and can teach much better. This is in part because we can integrate XO Activities into the textbooks and lesson plans, topic by topic and lesson by lesson. We can integrate multimedia, simulations, math, puzzles...into every subject, including gym/PE/PT. We can structure lessons around collaborative discovery, guided by the teachers, and not random  In the case of US state education systems, another benefit is that they can use textbooks that are not on the California and Texas lists. So to make that sale to any beyond the Early Adopters, we have to demonstrate all that, and get professional educational researchers to measure the results. Anybody who is interested in volunteering on the code side of this would be welcome. We also need people with knowledge of every elementary school subject, teachers, tech writers, students, and parents. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. <a href="http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai" target="_blank">http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai</a> <div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a></div></div></blockquote></div> -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax