Three special events in the history of technology for creating,  (Page 10/12)

Connexions is a digital commons of scholarly materials plus an open-source software toolkit to help authorspublish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, and learners explore the links among concepts, courses,and disciplines. The design of Connexions is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics:that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should getcredit and kudos for contributing to research and education; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising waysand not just the simple linear forms that textbooks present.

Connexions creates “modules” of information—smallish documents intended to communicate one concept,one procedure, one set of questions about something. String a bunch of modules together, and you have a course, or weave a curriculumentirely of your choosing. Connexions directly challenges the current notion of a “textbook” by exploding it and asking differentpeople to create its parts in a semi-structured but re-configurable manner, rather than having a single Maestro do it all and take allthe credit.

The hallmarks of Connexions include:

• collaborative workspaces that support collaboration and community building throughout the authoring, course-building, andlearning processes;
• semantic content markup in XML hypertext that provides a common technology framework for sharing and re-usingmaterials;
• Creative Commons licenses that provide a common legal framework for using, modifying, and disseminating thecontent;
• content quality assessment using distributed, post-publication peer review;
• an attribution system to give credit to original authors and to those who add value.

Connexions is an inter-institutional endeavor. For example, a growing global community of electrical engineeringfaculty and researchers in the area of digital signal processing (DSP) from Rice University, University of Illinois, Georgia Tech,the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, Polytechnic University, Cambridge University, Technical University of Norway,and the company National Instruments is collaboratively developing a free, open-access DSP course in Connexions.

Note that the Connexions system can be used in a distance education system, but that is not its main purpose. Itis an information system that can be used instead of or in addition to a traditional book in a traditional class. It can also be usedfor self-study, distance education, continuing studies, home schooling, industrial training, or professional credentialing. Thebasic philosophy is completely independent of level or discipline. It should be ideal for K-12, college, or graduate school. It willfit humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, architecture, music, business, medicine, law, or art history. Itshould interface naturally with the modern digital library. It will certainly be multi-media and allow experiments and demonstrationsto be run and “discovery based learning”, “problem-solving based learning”, and “concept based learning” to take place.