MIT Press has released a PDF version of the book “Opening Up Education“, which is a series of articles on open educational content.

I found the most interesting piece was David Wiley’s “the OpenCourseWars” – 2005-2012, some speculative fiction on what will happen with the open content movement over the next few years.

The clash of idealogies is coming to a head in the textbook publishing world.

On one side is the walled-garden experience available on the iPhone and Amazon Kindle, enforced by DRM technology. If you wonder if the iPhone is open, ask Apple when you can run Java applications on it.

On the other side is the open philosophy represented by creative commons, which is very compatible with the academic goal of distributing knowledge. I suspect that the tension between proprietary education material sand open education resources will exist for a while, but the early adopters will realize significant economic benefits for their school systems:

Here are some early open text/open education sites:

• Connexions
• Open Courseware (MIT version)
• CK12 (google video)
• California Open Source Textbook Project
  
• Wikipedia

Other sites:

Global Text books