MIT Everyware

TeachingMachines writes "David Diamond has written a very readable article at Wired News titled MIT Everyware that follows up on MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative (previous story). It turns out that one of the most popular courses has been '6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering, Fall 2001.' Diamond notes that '[u]ltimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses.'"

Comments

Open Courseware restricts what was available.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember thinking a few years ago that I should have downloaded and archived all these *GREAT* course notes and lecture materials that the hip profs from Stanford, MIT, UW and other schools had put on line, but I didn't.

And then, just as the idea of "courseware" started getting bandied about, many of those sites started to go offline or require local authentication. Why? Because MIT hyped up "open courseware" as if they had invented it, even though all kinds of course information (and more) had been available on school websites for years. And as always: Once marketing gets a few tentacles around cool geek technology, the squeeze is on... Don't get me wrong, MIT is hip and wonderful, but they forced the golden goose to be an egg donor - and it was painful to watch what happened over the next 18 months.

Some of this stuff had been collections dating back to the mid to early 90's, and built by the kind of guys you WANT to listen to, guys who can compress the kind of experiences and insights you'll only get in 9 or 10 years of doing real work into a handful of lectures.

And it was the whole thing, too, usually the prof's own notes, and materials, and old tests and EVERYTHING just dumped into websites (or ftp directories) to be sorted later. Not to mention collections of usenet posts, and source code, and outlines of old papers... A treasure trove that you could wade into, and find magic even if you didn't know what you were looking for.

But then the schools started these initiatives-
almost all of which were started shortly after MIT did the courseware announcement, and one by one all the campuses took an interest in what their teachers were posting. And then blammo! In a year or so, it became much harder to find these treasure troves, because MIT made the administrations takes note of the value of this information.

Google later helped us to find things - sort of - and now you can find specific topics, but you can no longer find the huge amount of course notes you once could discover by simply popping over to the schools .edu web servers.

feh!