Open-Source Learning

This morning's TED talk was Richard Baraniuk's 2006 Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning lecture. He wants to take a large number of books, break them down into small chunks, package each chunk in XML to make it easy to combine with other chunks (not necessarily the ones it originally came near) and replace the idea of a textbook with the idea of a collection of such chunks. Okay by me.
Actually, I'd like to see chunks, video or audio or text or all of the above, labeled with pre-requisites and objectives; these labels would also appear on knowledge maps like the Khan Academy's. Then you place yourself (or your teacher/tutor/advisor places you) on the knowledge map, perhaps by taking quizzes, and you identify your final objectives, and we identify lessons which are claimed to get you in the right direction....
Or then again, maybe not. The Connexions website did seem both clunky and underpowered, but maybe that's just me.

Open Textbooks

If I were in charge, there'd be a lot of this going on... Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon

"A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."

Free information-resources for education ought to be something everybody could get behind...
Or then again, maybe not.