Everything open

Sure, we love the internet for how it makes freely available so many cultural artifacts. And sure, we also love the internet for how it allows us to disseminate our own work.

On Sunday night, 12 Years a Slave was named best picture at the 86th Academy Awards. And John Ridley, the film's screenwriter, won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Ridley's screenplay was based, of course, on Twelve Years a Slave, the 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup.

The Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington have released their entire digitized collection, including hi-resolution images of more than 40,000 objects in the museums' Asian art collections.

The open seas of on-line learning has quite an interesting Eco-system.  MOOCs, without any doubt, are one of the most dominating species, but there are others, often working in the background, keeping the system thriving and sustaining. Open Educational Resources are one of those entities that makes online learning all that rich and vibrant. These educational resources complement and supplement MOOCs on the one hand and, going further, they enable a large body of learners, both traditional school/ college going students as well as self learners and, the teachers as well, by providing open, share-able, often modifiable, mix-able and remix-able (depending upon the licenses), syllabi, contents, books, videos, slides, and other assets.  These resources are mostly open, free, often downloadable as pdf, ePub, or other formats and, are quite valuable in terms of the contents.