That said, I would love it if universities embraced Croquet rather than just Second Life, but when I tried Croquet, I just couldn’t figure out how to do much of anything. I jumped around a world or two, but there was no one there. I think it defaults to connecting to other user in your LAN, rather than users around the world.

Let me explain – Open Croquet has been around for many years now, and it has not attracted as much attention as Second Life for various reasons. One of these is that Open Croquet seems to be tailored for serious applications right off the bat, it does not really have the “playful” attitude that brings people to Second Life and it does not show signs of a vibrant community. The appeal of these two applications is worlds away from the start, and the mindset with which people approach each of them makes a huge difference.

That being said, I think Open Croquet, with its multimedia and application compatibility, has a far greater promise as an educational tool for most classes. What it still fails to create is a community or an audience that raises interesting issues through the sheer power of people communicating and collaborating in a new environment (see http://news.findlaw.com/prnewswire/20061006/06oct20061034.html )

So, while Second Life might be a counter-intuitive platform for exhibiting an argument on open access, I think we still need to prove that 1) 3D platforms can be a successful teaching medium and 2) what exactly are the key points to using a 3D platform instead of any other tool? Once we can fully state that and the conditions under which it makes sense to teach a class in a 3D environment, each teacher can choose the world based on the course specifications. It’s much like a video game, in a sense. Each platform offers a particular set of benefits to a particular set of needs.

As open-ended MMOGs appear, we might see this split even better, with various “flavors”: some focusing on facilitating the business aspect, some on education, and some still on entertainment or content creation.

1) One of the hugest travesties inherited from the Reagan years is the notion that risk or cost are appropriately socialized, but profit should be privatized. Of course government funding should mean that a) the taxpayer gets the same cut of any resulting profit as a private investor would, and b) publications or the like should be publicly accessible. Taxpayer-funded means that the taxpayer is part-owner!

2)The lack of interest in MIT’s open classroom: a lot of the subject matter is very narrowly focused and at a level that is usable mainly at places like MIT. There aren’t very many of those. In some ways, it reminds me of the early days of the internet. Usenet, for instance, had vast amounts of excellent information on the finer points of programming, but if you tried looking up a biology topic, you’d find newsgroups for whether apricot seed oil really cured cancer or not. As the user base broadened, the information improved to the point where people hardly know how to use libraries any more. Open courseware will probably follow the same trajectory as more and more varied content becomes widely available.

3) Should Harvard try to emulate MIT? For once, YES. As someone who went to Harvard, Harvard and the world can only gain if the tremendous ferment of knowledge in that place becomes available to everyone. What would a Harvard degree mean in that case? To me, the answer is blindingly obvious. A degree is conferred for work the student does, subject to interaction with other students and faculty. That’s very different from being able to read, or even play with, all the course materials on the web. The input of faculty time, whether it’s online or face to face, and the quality of a student’s work are what earn the degree. Being a registered student is different from auditing regardless of the venue.

That said, I also think there is no real replacement for the mental electricity that you can feel in places like Harvard, when they’re at their best. There’s no way to get all of that online. In my ideal world, there’d be a requirement for a year, or maybe a semester, on location, even for an online degree.

3) Re closed spaces and innovation. There was a fascinating article on this topic somewhere, I almost think it was in the excellent food magazine, Saveur. Someone was trying to figure out the relative strengths of “open source” innovation, where lots of people worked on a problem (I’ve also seen that called “crowdsourced”), versus the “lone thinker in the a room” model. The problem to be solved was the worldchanging issue of inventing a new best-selling cookie. The result, in a nutshell, was that group innovation worked very well to find improvements on existing recipes. However, it was pretty hopeless at coming up with truly new ideas. Their de novo inventions all suffered from the designed-by-a-committee syndrome. The lone thinkers, on the other hand, either came up with total duds, or–in one case–a brilliant idea that worked, after some polishing by the group.

The take-home message seems to be that we need both approaches. If we go wholesale for crowdsourcing, we’re going to lose most of our true innovations. If we go wholesale for the opposite, we’re going to be stuck with a lot of lamebrained ideas that a bit of feedback could have prevented. There’s a need for both closed and open spaces.