Connexions Overview

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ConnexionsOverview
Richard Baraniuk Rice University cnx.rice.edu
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Goals

• Goal of Hewlett Foundation Educational Programs
  Technology priority area use technology to
  improve access to exemplary educational content
  for schools, colleges, universities, and
  individuals throughout the world
• Goal of the Connexions Project provide and
  maintain a commons where individuals and
  communities worldwide can create and freely
  share knowledge

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Connexions
Authors
Module
Instructors
Content commons
Students
Courses
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Connexions Objectives

• Provide a content commons of free,
  inter-connected educational materials
• Facilitate access to the commons and foster its
  growth
• Facilitate content re-use
• Foster community participation in the commons
• Ensure sustainability of this resource into the
  future

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Connexions Approach

• Modularity
• Interconnectedness
• Open licensing
• Collaboration
• Open participation

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Connexions Activities 1

• Seed communities
• go deep in a few areas to gain global
  recognition as a quality source of educational
  contentSound Reasoning demo, Tony Brandt
• Design and build a robust, scalable architecture
  and toolkit for sharing knowledge Brent
  Hendricks
• Explore intellectual property (IP) issues Chris
  Kelty
• Track users and usage and provide
  feedbackJanice Bordeaux and Ross Reedstrom

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Connexions Activities 2

• Research and plan for sustainability Paul
  Dholakia and Steve Currall Advisory Council
  includes VCs Robert Maxfield, Burt McMurtry,
  Bill Sick
• Future activities leading to sustainabilityGenev
  a Henry
• 3-phase development
• Proof of concept (1999-2004)
• Build up (2004-2007)
• Sustainability (2007) probable spin-off
  to dot-org

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Commons and Usage Growth

• Modules in the commons
• 1750 modules
• 35 courses (February 2004)
• max your slide is great
• just update the numbers

• Hits on cnx.rice.edu in Q4 2002 6000
  hits/day
• Q1 2004 gt250,000 hits/day

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Prototype Communities

• International in Digital Signal Processing (DSP)
• Rice, Illinois, Ohio State, Georgia Tech,
  Michigan, Polytechnic, Cambridge
• Ecole Polytechnique, ENST, ENS-Lyon, INRIA
  (France), EPFL (Switzerland)
• National Instruments and Texas Instruments Japan
• spontaneous contributions from NTNU (Norway),
  Univ. Verona (Italy)
• Complete Rice Electrical and Computer Engineering
  core undergrad curriculum
• goal of 15 interlinked courses with
  prerequisites is gt1/3 complete
• Bioinformatics (Rice, Baylor, MD Anderson, UH)
• genetics, statistics, computer science,
  bioengineering
• Botany/Biodiversity (BRIT, AMNH)
• Music appreciation and theory (college and K-12)
• UC-Merced

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Open Content Licensing

• Current IP regime discourages sharing
• Creative Commons Licenses
• common legal vocabulary for sharing content
• collaborators since August 2002 (versions 1.0,
  2.0)
• Content licensed on per-module basis
• Publisher collaborators
• Kinkos, Cambridge University Press
• Organizing IP and Fair Use Workshop with U. Penn
  (June 2004)

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Interdisciplinary Team

• Your new slide nice.