Cormac:
Thanks for the note and the leads! I hope we'll be able to talk more about this stuff soon, and I'll try to follow up on the leads (including to your work) ASAP.
Quick comments to a couple of immediate things:
Joe, I'm intrigued by your statement on your slides that PlanetMath might have "the most potential" for gaining academic credit. What do you mean here? Does PlanetMath have any institutional affiliations already set up that would facilitate this?
Well, for one thing I don't mean to say that PlanetMath is the institution with the most potential in this regard, rather, I think that out of all the things we *can* -- and should -- pursue (e.g. partnering with nonprofits; collaborating with developer communities; working on software development; trying to support studying, teaching, and research "on our own"), this option -- working with people who can dispense academic credit -- just might be thing that we could get the most mileage out of pursuing. It's not that we have affiliations set up that would facilitate this -- rather, out of the list I mentioned, it's the one thing we *haven't* tried!
The rationale is pretty simple. We participated in Google Summer of Code 3 years running, out of which we got about 2 successful projects done. If we helped run a PlanetMath "class", I'd expect we could easily get 10 or 15 successful projects done in a year. We turned away at least that many people every year for GSoC, so I know that the student interest is out there.
Looking at it another way, the question I've been asking myself is: where are we going with this project? One of the answers *I* like is: "we will provide a real online mathematics education". For that to work well, it's likely that people would have to get credit for their work (unless we just want to provide "support" materials).
So there are (at least) two vectors pointing in this direction.
I think your OU contacts might be very useful. OU is forward-looking, and of course their OpenLearn initiative is very interested in pushing forward opportunities in the world of OER. I have contacts in OpenLearn if you want me to put you in touch. Also, on your request for CS people that might be interested, I don't know if they'd be interested, but I'm working with some of the people in the CS department in the University of Manchester (where I'm based, school of education) who are pretty open-minded. Anyway, let's keep talking - thanks for the spark. :-)
Yeah man.
Please do send me your OpenLearn contacts -- I find that the OpenLearn social structures a tad hard to navigate, and it always helps to have multiple points of entry.
Since we're both in the UK, I hope we'll be able to find *some* useful ways to collaborate. I'll be working on these things for the next three years so we should have some time :)
Joe