Today I finally got a chance to take a look at the video recordings from the Sakai conference in Amsterdam. In particular I watched Hal Abelson's keynote again since I wanted to write about it during the conference and I got caught up in the frenzy of the event.

I hope people find this talk online and find the time to watch it (again). Hal takes us back to 1982 at the start of his talk. He looks forward from that vantage point at the amazing possibilities and at three possibilities given the state of new computing and network technologies:

1. Internet created by a bunch of hackers running on something called open source software becomes the foundation for a whole new economy and changes everything.
2. The worlds most popular encyclopedia reference would be made by a bunch of amatueurs in a chaotic free-for-all collaboratively edited project - Wikipedia.
3. Computers and the Internet would be used to create a common, shared infrastructure for education and sharing education materials all over the world.

Standing in those shoes in 1982 (listening to Pink Floyd, The Wall) it seems clear that #3 is most likely... but here we are...

The bulk of Hal's talk is about open educational resources. He talks about the infrastructure we need to build and puts the work of the Sakai community into the context of a larger framework along with the policy and legal components of a framework. In fact, a good portion of his message is focused on intellectual property rights and related changes needed in policies and practices.

"Imagine" says Hal, "students all over the world cynically and in flagrant disregard for intellectual property law... learning." in response to some of the ridiculous current intellectual property practices at universities (see above) with regard to course content.

There's a short tutorial on copyright and how to use Creative Commons deeds in the talk (though not as entertaining as this one.

Hal also announced (for the first time publicly) a new Creative Commons project called CC Learn with the "goal of making educational materials more interoperable, to speed the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and re-use."

Ultimately his challenge to us, the Sakai community, was to think about the inadequacy of our worldwide education infrastructure to support 30 million young people capable of attending a university today; and 100 million in ten years... and to be active in transforming our thinking from "my course for my students" toward "our courses as open participatory learning environments." ... because that's what it's going to take.

Thanks again to the University of Amsterdam for hosting a great conference and for putting these really valuable resources online.