the month of June

Typically, Friday mornings begin with dissertation writing. Lately I’ve been trying not to get bogged down in all of the materials that I need to read more closely and integrate more carefully and thoroughly into my work (like all of the debates around assessment and accreditation as instigated by the Spellings Commission), and I’ve simply been trying to “slop” words onto the page. But today I got bogged and came to realize how much I need to develop and unpack what I mean by “open source.” And then there are all the groups, movements, and organizations working with open source concepts that are also doing work relevant to my own: the open educational resource (OER) community, the open source initiative (OSI) organization, and the schools like MIT who are working with open courseware, and it goes on and on — website after website, article after article, wikipedia entry after wikipedia entry…. How’s a girl supposed to keep all of this organized both in her head and on “paper”?

So instead of plugging away at creating chapter descriptions for my introduction, I wrote this blog entry — to moan a little and to try to see a bit more clearly the unruly monster of “open source” that I’m dealing with.