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Hey CogDog,
I am going to try to give you some amazing stories
of openness, because I feel terrible that you're making these
requests and people aren't posting some videos and stuff for
you, but here's the deal.
Clearly, I'm in the same boat as you are aware I've been trying
to give things away online since 1995 and doing my own thing,
and it's been hugely successful for me and my career in my life,
and I think that my position here at the University at Penn State
has everything to do with the fact that I blog openly
and share and do what I do, but more than that I want to talk to you about
some of the platforms we've been building here at Penn State.
And they've led to an amazing amount of unintended
or incidental openness.
So, our blogs@ennState platform for example,
10,000 users at the end of the spring semester,
all of them open, all of them.
And what that means is that people all over the state of Pennsylvania,
all of our campuses, 24 of them, are creating
course materials that are open, students are writing essays in
the open, faculty are authoring papers in the open, communities
are forming, and things are happening that would've never happened.
Students are posting pictures, video, you name it,
all in the open.
That's one of our platforms.
Digital Commons, another thing that promotes the notion
of open digital media production.
So, students go in, they produce these great things, and they
share them across the social Web via their blogs
and other things.
So, while I don't have a particular story to tell, and I could,
and I'll tell it when we meet up in Vancouver about lots of open
initiatives specifically, the thing that's most impressive to me
is how our institution in general has just sort of embraced the
notion of openness through the use of digital publishing.
And that to me has been a great story.
And while not specific, it is one that allows for individuals to
make their choice in how they use the tools in an environment to
really change what it means to be an open institution.
As an aside, I'll mention that we have now adopted
Creative Commons as an official way for people to license
their materials at the University, and our blog tool offers
a built-in Creative Commons license generator.
So, more and more people are applying a Creative Commons
share-and-share-alike license, or an attribution,
or noncommercial or a whatever it may be,
so other people can come in and take advantage of it.
And so there is hopefully an amazing story of openness,
mass adoption of a publishing platform at a large northeastern
institution to allow people to think about open,
what it means to be open, and to put their stuff into the Commons.
So, hopefully all goes well,
and I'll check you in Vancouver in a few weeks.
See you, buddy!