Larry Johnson has been the CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC) for nearly a decade, and he has worked in higher education for more than twenty-five years. Before joining NMC, he served in roles that include faculty member, dean, provost, and president. In this interview, he talks about the position of NMC in distance education and the challenges…

Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

In this paper we present a history of the idea of Open Educational Resources, overview the current state of the Open Educational Resources movement, report on critical issues facing the field in the immediate future, and present two new projects to watch in 2009.

This article traces the development of the OpenCourseWare movement, including the origin of the concept at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the implementation of the MIT OpenCourseWare project, and the idea's spread into the global educational community, ultimately resulting in the formation of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The…

Looks back at the innovations/tribulations that went into the making of Merit Network, Inc., Michigan's pioneering Internet provider. Today, Merit is serving as the GigaPoP organization for its two current Internet2 members, Michigan State University and University of Michigan, and will provision a vBNS connection for Wayne State University.…

Internet 2, a project intended to provide member universities with new computer network services and faster connections, is criticized for growing too large and too difficult to administer cooperatively. Its organizers are working closely with the Clinton Administration's Next Generation Internet Initiative, but some lawmakers feel the program is…