Education: Land of the Free?

Michael Cross, of the Guardian, began a campaign a few months ago to persuade the government and other authorities in the UK to make public data freely available, without licensing restrictions, for any legitimate private or commercial use. The campaign is building a head of steam and is definitely getting noticed where it matters, in the corridors of power. His most recent article looks at the particular case of Manitoba, Canada - Canada proves itself to be genuine land of the free - where all publicly funded data has been free since 2000. Manitoba's case is largely an economic one - "it just did not make good economic sense to try and sell data that the taxpayers already paid for, and it was costing us much more to try to sell data and manage distribution then we were making in revenue," says Harvey Pokrant, director of the information technology services branch in the provincial capital Winnipeg." There is, of course, an equally persuasive case from education for freeing our data. In the current world where social software and social networking sites are proving so useful to innovative educators, and with the power of the mashup being demonstrated in ever more interesting ways, education's ability to use all public date in any way that it chose could have enormous benefits in the classroom. I'd like to think that we in education could offer support to Cross and the Guardian in pursuing this particular cause! I will return to this issue later.

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.