About ten years ago I made a discovery and that discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world operated: The discovery was the Linux computer operating system and open source software (OSS) movement through several books most notably Just for Fun (Torvalds and Diamond, 2001) and The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Raymond, 1999). I was convinced that the collective power of connected individuals around the world and the global infrastructure of the Internet had the potential to change the ways the world functioned. Fast forwarding to recent years in the MDE program, I had two déjà vu moments similar to my discovery of OSS movement. The first one occurred when I began reading The Wealth of Networks by Benkler (2006) and the second when I wrote about Connexions in the MDDE 610 second assignment. The former guided me in various coursework and the latter made it clear to me that a critical mass² to sustain a collaborative open textbook writing exist in the Connexions community.

MDDE 610 was a very special course because it allowed me to revisit some of the concepts related to ICTs and their positive impact to distance education. I have seen through MDDE 610 as well as other MDE courses that a significant aspect of ICT for me was the synchronous connectivity to course members via Elluminate, the web-conferencing application. I found that these synchronous sessions add a sense of proximity by reducing the level of student’s isolation from one another. I have a special appreciation for Elluminate, which I often expressed on the course forums such as the one entitled “Web-conferencing is a necessity for DE learners”.

Of the many significant educational products of ICT in the most global sense is probably the Moodle learning management system (LMS). As in my experience in the realm of LMSs, I am often impressed by what OSS Moodle offers as compared to proprietary LMSs that I have had experience in the past 8 years. I am therefore encouraged to work with OSS applications and I was certainly excited when Mahara, the e-portfolio platform, was introduced just before I began developing this portfolio.

Artefact 3 was valuable in allowing me to discuss a topic of personal interest. Studying Connexions website through this assignment revealed Connexions' similarities to Linux; both capitalized on the ICTs by connecting a large number of like-minded individuals from around the world and created a network of book authors and software programmers, respectively.

Through this assignment, I also became fully aware of an important limitation of traditional textbooks. The conventional textbooks are distributed in read-only format and unless an electronic copy or companion website is available, they lack interactive features. Books authored with Connexions on the other hand could easily incorporate multimedia items.

By rereading Artefact 3 during the development of this e-portfolio, I also realized that I did not discuss the limitations of Connexions beyond the Challenges section on Page 13. In addition to the lack of quality concerns for the content created in wikipedia-like environments (as indicated by my professor), I think, one major drawback of Connexions is also one of its main strengths. As described in Artefact 3, Connexions is a community made up of loosely connected individuals forming a network. Networks of this kind are generally in a constant state of chaos (Benkler, 2006; Raymond, 1999) and their dynamics are considered to be inherently unstable and unpredictable. Connexions at present does not appear to lack any cohesion and seem well supported (see footer at http://cnx.org/); however, the two limitations of Connexions certainly make for interesting research questions: How effective is the Lenses quality assurance mechanism? What are the individual roles of cohesive forces holding Connexions united?

Before Artefact 3 I thought I had daydreamt openness for education (see Artefact 6). After discovering Connexions though, I recognized the way in which innovation occurs: part daydream, part technology and part discipline. I therefore began to write my own open textbook in Connexions and made this blog posting at Athabasca Landing.

²: The term critical mass is defined as “the point at which enough individuals in a system have adopted an innovation such that the innovation's further rate of adoption becomes self sustaining” (Rogers, 2003, p. 474).