What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?

I read "Free Culture" by L.Lessig :-) Sometimes the book tells funny situations (e.g. Clint Eastwood CD) but, over all, it highlights some paradoxes and incompatibilities between the society needs and the political answers. I generally share the book ideas, but the contents make me think about the general situation of our system. I'm gonna try to explain right there.

The peculiarity of open content looks like every change in our  society. Normally it determines two deployments: people who want and hope innovations, people who don't want them. The second group hide its fears with a series of topics wich talk about loss of values, of traditions an so on. I think the true reason is the loss of economical benefits. The battle is very stong and hard, as well as  history teaches. There are people who fight all life long for new ideas and sometimes they're not in the right place at the right moment. So they spend their life searching changes without seeing them. It's very sad! Now, in the specific field of open content and education, many people all over the world can do something for this idea. It's enought using open content to became an innovation person, in fact it allows the growth of open contents too. I think, and hope so, the sharing of open content  will become larger and will have  right and appropriate lows.

I read also a summery of "The world is flat" by T.Friedman where I found some concept about globalisation. There is an economical globalisation where it is important to recognize the potentialities of people all over the world. The qualities that new generations must look to are strategic skills - right brain skill, or those that cannot be duplicate by a computer - and the sure works of the next years will be the synthesizers, explainers and leveragers. Another globalisation is the cultural one but it is old. People have always travelled (since australopitecus), it doesn't exist a pure culture but it's  important that everyone can express its own potentiality.

The last reading (summary) was "Wikinomics" by D.Tapscott and A.D.Williams, which explain how is (will be) the partecipated economy. It insists on the collaborative work based on competitive principles such as openness, peering,  sharing and acting globally structure in opposite to the hierarchical model. The book has a good site http://www.wikinomics.com/index.php .

Fortunately next week -thanks new syllabus :-)- I'll have the time to read my collegues' blogs, it'll gives me the possibility to reflect about the topics of this week.

Emanuela Zibordi