[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Stephen,

Agreed -- if education were a perfect economy (in the classic sense of price
equilibrium derived from demand and supply) given the global demand of the
worlds' 4 billion people who are undeserved educationally we should see the
price of education falling drastically with the supply of learning
increasing by an order of magnitude.

That said, In the words of Dylan --- I think the the "*Times* *They Are a-
Changin*" ;-). The open web combined with open licensing is shifting control
of knowledge away from the traditional distributors to the creators of
knowledge. After all -- the marginal cost of reproducing open digital
knowledge is near zero. This must be good for the "economics" of education.

Let the learning begin!

Wayne

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Stephen Downes <stephen at downes.ca> wrote:

>  Hiya,
>
>  We disagree.  Education is an important service, but it's not something
> that's magically immune to the laws of economics.
>
>
> If economics has laws, I don't think we've discovered them yet. Otherwise,
> we'd still have our money, instead of having given it all away and mortgaged
> our future in order to bail out the financial sector.
>
> Just saying.
>
> -- Stephen
> --
>   [image: Signature]  Stephen Downes
>  Research Officer, National Research Council Canada
> 100 rue des Aboiteaux, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada E1A 7R1
> Website: http://www.downes.ca ~ Email: stephen at downes.ca
>
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>


-- 
Wayne Mackintosh <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg>, Ph.D.
Director OER Foundation <http://www.oerfoundation.org/>
Director, International Centre for Open Education,
Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.
Founder and elected Community Council Member,
Wikieducator<http://www.wikieducator.org/>
Mobile +64 21 2436 380
Skype: WGMNZ1
Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg
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