[Icommons] Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment

David Berry D.M.Berry at swansea.ac.uk
Wed Jan 23 04:54:50 EST 2008


Dear Commoners

On 23 January the Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment was  
launched. The Declaration aims to encourage open education resources,  
the expansion of the commons in educational materials and the freeing  
of easy to swap content on licenses that allow major American software  
corporations to build huge repositories of the World's freely  
available material. Corporations can then easily wrapper it with  
services, advertising and so on making huge profits.

I think that this is a significant development for the "commons"  
movement, and one which many commoners have worked hard to achieve.

To read or sign the Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, please  
visit: http://www.swanseadeclaration.org.

A press release is below in English



Objectivists, Entrepreneurs, Web Gurus, Corporates and Libertarians  
Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable  
Learning Materials Online

Swansea, January 23rd, 2008—A coalition of edutainers, foundations,  
free-market capitalists, adult-entertainment providers, corporates and  
internet "pioneers" today urged governments and publishers to make  
publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the  
internet so that it could be sucked up into huge corporate-funded  
databases.

The Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, launched today, is part of a  
dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to  
everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location.  
Providing resources for bundling, advertising, service-based income  
and free-market exchange it encourages teachers and students around  
the world to join a growing movement and pay to use the web to share,  
remix and translate classroom materials to make educators' labour  
cheaper more pliable, and more easily replaced if they happen to  
disagree.

"Open edutainment allows every person on earth to access and  
contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web," said rich person  
Jimmy Walls, Objectivist and founder of Wikipodia, and one of the  
auteurs of the Declaration. "Everyone has something to 'teach' and  
everyone has something to 'learn'."

According to the Declaration, corporations, web gurus and internet  
pioneers would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly- 
funded educational materials freely available online. This will give  
entrepreneurs unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving  
course materials, just as Wikipodia has done in the world of reference  
materials.

Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the  
capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing  
materials used in teaching  as well as new private-sector approaches  
to learning where people create and shape "knowledge" together. These  
new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials  
that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the  
growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education.  There  
are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on  
the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get  
first class "traditional" education at expensive private schools and  
Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for  
the plebs who, let's face it can't concentrate for more than five  
seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via  
shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don't  
challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st  
Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny  
and sparkly facebook applications.

The Declaration is the result of a meeting of 1 open edutainment  
leader in Swansea, Wales, organized late last year by the Capitalist  
Society Institute and the Shuttleworthless Foundation. Participants  
identified key strategies for developing privatised education. They  
encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.

"Open sourcing edutainment doesn't just make learning more accessible,  
it makes more money and people do it for free so we don't need to pay  
employees or pesky teachers," said really rich Linux Entrepreneur Mack  
Shuttletree,  "Linux is succeeding and generating huge profits exactly  
because of this sort of adaptability.  The same kind of success is  
possible for open edutainment."

Open edutainment is of particular relevance in developing and emerging  
economies, creating the potential for the swamping them with US  
influenced "affordable" textbooks and learning materials supplied on  
One Laptop per Child (OLPC), expensive gadgets and the Internet. It  
opens the door to a small elite class to use the labour of local  
content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large  
multinational publishing houses. Of course, then the large  
multinational publishing houses are freely able to use it.

The Declaration has already been translated into over one language and  
the growing list of signatories includes:  lots of rich people, some  
people you have never heard of, the usual suspects and, of course, our  
dear leader Lawrence Lessig.

To read or sign the Swansea Open Edutainment Declaration, please  
visit: http://www.swanseadeclaration.org.




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