Last week I posted about open and close systems. Ironically I then got into a very interesting conversation with Peter Dickman (Engineering Manager at Google Zürich)
in the Scottish Education – Google+ community. You need to join the community to read it, hence the irony, but anyone can join. (I’ve still not got my head round g+ yet)

This morning I had a bumper breakfast from my RSS reader, mostly about the open web, open education and the like.

Alan Levine:

And so it goes with the lost web. It’s the individual who is finished. Blogging is dead, and our remaining bits of expression are locked into the data churning ad returning machines of GoogleFacebook, a web of two billion million data analyzed, ad-served, status messaging, app infested bots, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as …

from: It’s the Individual That’s Finished – CogDogBlog

Audrey Watters:

When I think of “open learning,” I think about the “open Web.” And for me, it isn’t simply a matter of what’s becoming a rather tired cliché that “you can learn anything you want online.” (You can’t. Lots of great stuff isn’t available there, or it's behind a paywall.) Rather, the open Web has allowed me to write and share and learn and collaborate with others — in public, in open and informal spaces, with openly licensed content, with open-ended and unscripted inquiry.

from: Reclaim Your Domain: A #ReclaimOpen Hackathon Project

Jim Groom:

Reclaim Your Domain has to be about a variety of hosting options, services, resources, and possibilities to manage your identities online across a variety of services, this is not necessarily “give up all social networks, drop offline, and feed the rabbits” —rather it’s about controlling (to the extent you can), backing up, and syndicating the work you do on the web. A home for your data that can be as distributed and decentralized as the platform it’s designed for.

from: Reclaim Open Learning | bavatuesdays

From Alan’s fears, through Audrey Watters’ mapping of what is good to Jim’s action plan.

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

By which I mean I don’t have anything deep to add other but I am enjoying and nodding along.