The “Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance” Web site launches today (9/28/2007) with materials from 105 courses at seven Utah colleges – and with taxpayer monies funding the enterprise. “It’s a way,” [David Wiley, director of Utah State’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning] says, “”to get some direct value back to people who fund higher education."

You can read more at Inside Higher Education: "Open Courseware goes Statewide." It will be interesting to see if this is part of a trend, or simply something of an aberration.

So says the headline at InsideHigherEd.com. The Supreme Court has showed a renewed interest in addressing overly broad patents so maybe, along with the recent Educause letter to Blackboard, this will lead them to back-off a bit on their patent claims. Here's the lead of the InsideHigherEd story and most of a latter paragraph.

A patent dispute pitting open source advocates for online learning technologies against Blackboard, the industry giant, became more bitter Thursday with the announcement that a formal request had been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke 44 of Blackboard’s patent claims.

An enterprising recent Ph.D. from Stanford's Department of French and Italian, Audrey Calefas, assistant to the renowned professor of literature, and member of L'Académie Française, Michel Serres, has set up an interesting spin on the edublog.

http://www.stanford.edu/~acalefas/serres/

They have created a blog that is intended to garner questions in advance of a class, which will be offered this coming Winter Term at Stanford - Topics in French Literature, Philosophy, and Humanities. There are a fixed number of posts, which are in effect a set taxonomy for questions. Anyone can post a comment, however, and in this way ask a question of Michel Serres, which he intends to answer in the class -- and online (for the benefit of those not attending Stanford this winter).The categories are Philosophy, Metaphysics; Religion, Theology, History of Religions; Critical Theory, Linguistics, Stylistics; Culture, Ethnology and Anthropology; Psychology, Human behavior; History, Economics, Law and Civil Rights; Science, history of science; Arts and Aesthetics

Okay, it's not getting that much play, or any play, beyond the local media--two of my colleagues wrote me a note to comment positively on it--but here's the story I was interviewed for and a link to the blog to discuss it as well.

Story: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/tools/story_pf.asp?ID=147981

Blog: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/spot/archive.asp?postID=3922

Go there and see what's up and make me look better than I already made myself look :-)