So by now it's around the web, though less accurately reported some places than others, that Stanford and edX have reached an agreement whereby the Stanford team-formerly-known-as-Class2Go will adopt the edX platform, becoming core contributors on it, and edX will finally (after long promising to) open source their platform under the AGPL. Formal ( Read more... )

I'm surprised and saddened to realize, with the help of Google, that I've never posted to LJ about my fascination with alternative means of exchange. Economies based not on the US Dollar, but on other systems - systems based on time, or local resources, or whatever. I went through this period a while back when I was reading a lot of Bernard ( Read more... )

A remarkably simple, and exciting, idea:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009242.html

Josh Silver notices that you don't need optometrists to have eyeglasses, and sets out to make vision available to all the world's poorest people by 2020.

Over on WorldChanging, Clay Shirky has just posted a somewhat long (2467 words) essay about how Gin was a necessary component of the Industrial Revolution, and how Sitcoms have played an integral role in the Information Revolution (currently in progress). It's an interesting article, touching on subjects ranging from TV recovery to Warcraft guilds ( Read more... )

I just read Alex Steffen's post on optimism as a political act over at WorldChanging. When I postulated the need for Radical Optimism, I was thinking along these lines. But I was thinking about something broader. Like Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools for positive change. Alex pretty much hit the nail on the head, though. When I read, "Cynicism is ( Read more... )