The Cape Town Declaration on Open Education was recently formally released to the public (1, 2) after its initial release for comments to the educational community last fall in the wake of the Cape Town conference.

It is a formal declaration of basic principles for the future conduct of education and organized teaching using standards of open content and sharing of resources, information, and curriculum. In part, it says:

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint…
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Yes, a wonderful Graphic Novel called Bound By Law which teaches Teachers and others without super powers about their rights under Fair Use. And the book is legally sound, as it is a production of Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

You can read the graphic novel online or order it in paper copy. Either way, it is covered by a Creative Commons copyright license.

Flickr isn’t just for family vacation photos anymore.

The Library of Congress has announced that it has put up a collection of over 3,000 of its most popular photos from its collection onto Flickr, the flagship of online photo sharing sites.

These are all marked as “No known copyright restriction” so feel free to use them in class & for projects.

Here’s one of Bugs Raymond to celebrate today, Feb 14, as pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training.

Just found a fascinating new product called Prologue, which is part team project site, and part Twitter-like micro information site. It is made by the creators of Wordpress.com, and based somewhat on the WordPress model. (A first review is on ZDNet.)

Everything in it is taggable and RSS enabled, too.

Sounds like this would be an interesting tool for group and class projects that are highly interactive and require lots of interaction outside of class.

We all know how dull Blackboard discussion boards are: simply assigning them as tasks doesn’t make the quality of discourse much better.

Why not take a fresh approach with a group Twitter-like tool? Here’s a Prologue demo. Hope it is available soon.