According to MIT President Charles Vest: "The idea... is to make MIT course materials... available on the web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world."
Vest is not trying to cheat you. You are trying to cheat yourself.
Brad DeLong
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Well, I can hardly be cheated out of what I don't have, now can I?
So, you believe it?
The above is a factually rich statement that is both true and correct, and does not fail to disclose any exclusions that would lead to plausible deniability, to the best of your knowledge, so help you God, right? These things have to be nailed down. We are dealing with some very slippery customers here, Brad.
See, the reason I am extremely suspicious of this is that I actually read and went over an MIT proposal to NSF about seven years ago as a reader for my scientist buddy who was on a peer review panel. MIT was trying to get some money out of the feds for a multi-media lab project (probably one of those mentioned on the fact sheet).
>From reading the proposal it was unclear how the resulting AV
materials would be distributed. Would they be for class use only on
closed circuit tv, would they be copyrighted, published, sold as CD's
or tapes? Would they be put up on the web and available through
student accounts?
NSF at the time was funding higher education science projects for low income and special needs populations. Special needs was their name for the disabled. Distribution was a key question because it was unclear just how low income and disabled students would benefit from funding a multi-media science lab at MIT. I think the distribution plan was to pipe the lab through close circuit tv via cable to Galludet in DC. So it was signed off and funded.
Anyway, back then, I didn't quite understand that this apparently benevolent NSF education division guideline had the potential to be exploited as a thorough going privatization of knowledge scheme. It was only about two or three years later that the Novartis deal at UC came out, Microsoft and Sun were nosing around at SFSU, and all kinds of other slimy deals were going on at UCSF with bio-med corps, hospital consortiums and Stanford Inc.
I am still suspicious, since I watched some big business asshole talk up the distance learning sector as a good investment on some business talk show not more than a week ago.
Chuck Grimes