Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and Director of the Connexions Project (cnx.rice.edu). For his research in the area of Digital Signal Processing, he has received national young investigator awards from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, the Rosenbaum Fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University, and the ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001. For his teaching, he has received the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice twice and the C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teaching Award from Eta Kappa Nu. Dr. Baraniuk speaks and consults widely on the current and potential impacts of the open-source software and open-access content movements in the education arena.

Home page: http://dsp.rice.edu/~richb
Connexions Project: http://cnx.rice.edu

Presentation: Open-Access Publishing in Education - Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge

Morning keynote session 9:0am - 10:00am, Performing Arts Center

A grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The "open access movement" is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the simple linear forms that textbooks present. Open access draws inspiration from the open-source software movement (Linux, for example) and is enabled by recent developments in information technology, in particular the Internet and World Wide Web. This talk will overview open access, its promise, and its current and future challenges. As a case study, I will relate a number of lessons learned over the last five years directing the Connexions Project. Translating the open-access consensus into real software and real legal assemblages has been anything but intuitive.

About Connexions by Richard G. Baraniuk (2 page paper)
Adobe Acrobat document: about_connexions.pdf [1.3 Mb PDF]

Open-Access Educational Publishing - Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge by Richard G. Baraniuk (presentation)
Adobe Acrobat document: open-access.pdf [2.3 Mb PDF]

Breakout Session: Connexions-- Hands-on Experience with Free Tools for Open-Access Publishing

Morninng breakout session 10:45am - 11:45am)

Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free open-access educational materials and an open-source software toolkit to help authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, and students explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. By exploiting XML to its fullest, Connexions seamlessly supports mathematics and other symbolic markup as well as number of output formats, including web pages, e-books, and PDF files for printed books.

Connexions is internationally focused, interdisciplinary, and grassroots organized. More than one million people from 157 countries are tapping into over 3000 modules and 80 courses developed by a worldwide community of authors in fields ranging from computer science to music and from mathematics to biodiversity-- see http://cnx.rice.edu/. Materials are also being translated into several languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Thai, and Japanese.

In this presentation and hands-on demo, we will explore the capabilities of Connexions for rapidly creating and sharing teaching materials.