Just added a small set of Oryoki screenshots to Flickr.

Oryoki Screenshots

Just got the official confirmation for Foo Camp 2008 last night. I’ll be heading to Sebastopol in July to hang out with some very cool people doing some cool things in the areas of technology, science, the web and who knows what else. I am honored to be considered for this and can’t wait to get some feedback on Oryoki and meet the people that I have looked up to for so long.

Open courseware and Open Educational Resources started as an idea and a vision and, over the course of a decade, have morphed in to a Worldwide effort to bring free, high-quality educational materials to the masses.

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Great Article over at Wired about how PBS is planning on releasing hundreds of Nova interviews as Creative Commons-licensed content. This is great for news for open courseware content creators who want to include this material in their courses. Essentially, the license allows the creator (PBS) to retain full copyright privileges on the content, but allow the public to freely share, distribute, copy and transmit the work.

FlowingData is a great blog on data visualization written by Nathan Yau, a UCLA PhD candidate in Statistics. He writes on some interesting topics including 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox and my personal favorite, Area Codes in Which Ludacris Claims to Have Hoes. Not to mention, his site is clean, simple and easy to use. Huzzah, FlowingData!

Well, it’s official. I will be defending my Master’s project on May 9th. This marks the end of a 6-year college career and the beginning of a project that will hopefully help others get on board with the open courseware movement.

If you’re in the greater Lansing area on May 9th, stop by:
134 Comm Arts Building, Studio D at 10:00am.

This morning I moved The Oryoki Blog (which is powered by Mephisto) off of Mongrel and on to Passenger (mod_rails)—the new Rails Apache module by the guys over at Phusion. Passenger makes deploying Rails applications as easy as dropping files into a web directory and removes the burden of configuring FastCGI and Mongrel with Apache. What this ultimately means is that Rails applications (like Oryoki) now become much easier to deploy and in tern will now be accessible to a larger audience. And that’s really the ultimate goal, making Oryoki (and free educational material) available to as many people as possible. Sweet.

I just added the Creative Commons 3.0 licensing to the site and the RSS feed (thanks, FeedBurner). All the content here is now officially free (as in beer)—so enjoy, learn and help support Creative Commons.

Oryoki is a simple, open courseware publication system that makes it easy for organizations and individuals to share educational materials online. Oryoki is easy to deploy and maintain, allowing users to concentrate on publishing material not maintaining software. The project is currently in the early stages of development and will be part of my master’s degree thesis before it officially goes public. In addition to the application, I will also be publishing the design research that accompanied the project.

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Education is expensive. Not only is it expensive, but costs at some U.S. universities are skyrocketing at ten to twenty times the current rate of inflation. To give you an example, I’ve been attending Michigan State University since August of 2002 (four years as an undergraduate and two as a grad student). In that six years, tuition for in-state undergraduates has jumped from $179.75 to $277.50 per credit hour. That’s an increase of over 60% in 6 years—obviously our current system is not sustainable.

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