Slate's Cyrus Farivar looks at the numbers of Negroponte's $100 laptop plan and says they don't add up (http://www.slate.com/id/2131201/).

The price of components is well over a $100, and even if the components could be bought on a volume high enough to bring prices down, the demand isn't there, nor is the seed money to generate.

Still, all is not lost. The article does point to some inexpensive alternatives, and some intriguing possibilities that, while not yet all that inexpensive, are really cool projects, such as Inveneo's "Linux boxes with solar panels, a bike generator for cloudy weather, and a directional WiFi antenna that can get you on the Internet via satellite from almost anywhere," which projects, with volume and funding can also begin to come in cheaply. The Inveneo (http://www.inveneo.org/) rig cost about $1,800, but geez what a cool idea. It'll be interesting to see if they can get enough lift to bring their price down. They need a George Soros type to give them a shot in the arm.

One of the big obstacles in more movement to Open Source Software solutions is the perception that OSS lacks service and support. It's not an easy perception to overcome.

rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com/) seems to be an organization that is trying to step into the support and service gap, in much the way Red Hat helped make it easier for some users to adopt and use Linux.

I don't know much about them, but I did want to draw attention to them here figuring veteran OSS advocates and users might be able to better say something more or might even find rSmart Group the kind of support option they need to help further the use OSS on their campus.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/10252005

Textbook Economics
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the online, user-edited encyclopedia
-explains Wikipedia's new venture, Wikibooks

» Wikibooks
» Wikipedia

There's some naivte here on the part of callers --an adjunct literature professor saying students will get a cheaper book of readings. Not in the short term since so much of literature content revolves around copyrighted works.

And to the extent that Wiki's are text-based, devolved around the word, then for humanities based courses, many students, will want to print. Printing isn't cheap as anyone who's bought toner or used Kinko's will tell you.

Inside Higher Ed has an essay by Tarleton Gillespie -- "Between What’s Right and What’s Easy" (http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/21/gillespie) -- which argues that technologies such as the Copyright Clearance Center's new plugin for Blackboard (and soon, with the merger, WebCT as well most likely) that is designed to ease the ability to seek permission for using materials and content in one's course are a bad idea.

He writes:

Sometimes our tools are our politics, and that’s not always a good thing.
. . .
Even if the Blackboard mechanism allows instructors simply not to send their information to CCC for clearance (and it is unclear if it is, or eventually could become, a compulsory mechanism), the simple fact that clearance is becoming a technical default means that more and more instructors will default to it rather than invoking fair use.

http://news.com.com/Wikibooks+takes+on+textbook+industry/2100-1025_3-5884291.html?tag=sas.email leads to a CNET news article by Daniel Terdiman on the Wikimedia Foundation's projects to create "a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model."

I'm really excited by this. As one who works in publishing, what this is really about isn't replacing publishers, but changing how we use our core skill sets. Textbook publishing has always been about providing pedagogical tools. Wikibooks won't replace entirely the pedagogical tool known as a textbook, but they can offer new ways to think about pedagogical tools.