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Open Courseware: downloadable lectures & the Peer-To-Peer University

From the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog:

YouTube began testing a new feature that lets users download videos posted to the site from partner institutions — including colleges — rather than just watching the videos in a streaming format. That means people can grab lectures from Duke and Stanford Universities and several institutions in the University of California system to watch any time, with or without an Internet connection.

YouTube partners have the option of charging users for such downloads, but all the universities have offered to make their lecture videos free instead, using Creative Commons licenses that restrict usage to non-commercial purposes and prohibit derivative work. more>>

Here's an idea for a Peer-To-Peer University that uses open courseware lectures and similar open content for the curriculum. The "P2PU" adds value by facilitating formation of small student cohorts, lining up tutors with subject knowledge ("sense makers," not necessarily professors) to provide guidance as needed, and assessing student learning based on an e-portfolio. Here's a P2PU video (also from Chronicle).

Question: at what point will someone want to declare use of a campus lecture in the P2PU "commercial" or "derivative?"

A siteless website

Here's the "in for a penny, in for a pound" approach to leveraging social networking tools. Modernista (advertising agency) manages its entire web presence with a blend of free user-driven sites -- Wikipedia, flickr, youtube, facebook, Google News, del.icio.us, etc..

Click the link within this post (http://modernista.com/7/index.php) and see what happens. Then try pasting the link into a new browser window.

Thanks to Kate at Innosight for passing this one along!