Good LORd

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Good LORd
James Farmer cites D'Arcy Norman: "A bunch of folks (myself included) took up the task of building software to let people easily publish, describe, share, find (and hopefully use) digital assets or learning objects (assets with a bunch of metadata tacked on the side). I think it's fair to say that the experiments failed pretty dramatically." Well yes. Farmer suggests people don't add content to these institutional repositories because it does nothing for them (and we're all pretty selfish, he says). And "you may, actually, shudder, need to employ a genuine human bean of sorts." Yet people have creted millions of blog posts, podcasts and videos without being paid. So what's up? People like to create content, and thy like to help each other - they aren't inherently selfish; there's lots of evidence to show they want to share, even if there's no benefit to themselves. What they don't feel the need to do, though, is to provide institutional-type content to institutional-type repositories. More...