Video presentation by Richard Baraniuk founder of Connexions

As mentioned in previous postings, the video presentations on the TED website are a great resource for ideas and inspiration. The presentations are given by the world’s leading thinkers and doers at the TED conference each year. Richard Baraniuk founder of Connexions gave a presentation titled, “Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open source learning” that is worth watching. In the presentation, Mr. Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions and how through open source learning, ideas from the music industry can be used to reinvent the way books are written, used, and taught from. He explains that in the music industry anyone is free to create new music and use existing music in innovative ways which has created a community where things are kept constantly up-to-date. Connexions is similar to that of the music industry because it will “enable anyone in the world, to be their own educational DJ, creating education materials, sharing them with the world and constantly innovating them.” As we continue to see more interest in open content learning models, it is important to consider the effect that free educational content could have on college stores.