A good idea, but a missed opportunity. If the tutors and students were to form an opensource community, then the value would go up exponentially as the network grew.

It is only through opensource processes that we can establish the first step towards a global education market, the step of having a common set of curricula and syllabi. Humans appear to have an increased ability to migrate, and the educational system is not capable of taking the strain.

From a teacher/lecturer viewpoint, it will also help us achieve the capacity to manage the long tail of demand: currently I believe there are many students (but numbered in ones and twos for a given location) who cannot follow the courses they desire because of a shortage of qualified teachers. I have to believe that this shortage will get resolved if we had a global network. Sometimes it will be resolved only as a result of the demand becoming transparent and aggregated, but resolved it will be.

The quality and consistency of the teaching materials will also improve as a result, on the same all-bugs-are shallow principle. The capacity to airbrush history (or for that matter science) will also be sharply reduced.

Most important of all, students will be able to participate in the design and delivery. Something I have rarely seen.

Since so much of the money spent on education is “state” money, this should theoretically not be difficult to achieve. But for whatever reason, take-up has been infinitesimal.

Clarence, if you hear of or see anything where I can help make this happen, please do let me know.

Perfect :) Sounds like I should introduce a blog post with that.

The same is true for most people I link to. I don’t necessarily agree with everything they say, but certain bits I like a lot. And I like this essay of Paul’s, and a few others as well.

I don’t agree with everything he says. I don’t expect people to agree with everything I say. Every now and then even I don’t agree with something I say, and correct myself.

In fact that’s part of the magic of the blogosphere, that it’s not all black and white, that people discuss things and write provisionally. And learn from each other.

I’m sure I’ve said enough dumb things as well. I’m sure I will say more dumb things. And learn.

I disagree with your point on what appears on SourceForge, that’s a common criticism of opensource and a false one. It’s like saying all blogs are good because they are opensource thoughts. Anybody can post anything, that does not make all blogs good. Or opensource code good.

You have to take it in the all-bugs-are-shallow context. There is a lot of crap out there, but it is not being adopted, used, enriched or extended. Only through that process of Nobody Owns It Everyone Can Use It Anyone Can Improve It does software become opensource.

If commercial code had the same open standards and open community reach and open adaptability and NEA characteristics as opensource code, then it would be as good as opensource code. In fact I wouldn’t know how to differentiate it from opensource, because that’s what makes opensource opensource.

Thanks for the comment. Feel free to catch me for a coffee to discuss further, if your anonymity will let you.

While it may be true that Paul Graham has said some insightful things, but he’s also said some pretty dumb things. For example he insists that “there are no good Java developers”… apparently because no self-respecting programmer would develop in Java*. Also his assertion that open source code is _necessarily_ and _inevitably_ better quality than commercial code seems to ignore the vast quantity of useless rubbish that can be found on SourceForge etc.

* We should all be coding in LISP, apparently. Time to start practising my bracket-counting?