I took a brief vacation from blogging, but still wanted to mention a special issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. The issue is focused on “Openness and the Future of Higher Education.” I was happy to be a guest editor of this issue along with David Wiley. I learned [...]

As the download project at http://deseretbook.com/free is winding down, I’m please to report that over 100,000 books have been downloaded. I expect soon to have more information on the sales of these books so that we can measure whether the free downloads had any impact on sales. In a future study it would be very [...]

An update to this blog post. In the first six weeks of tracking book downloads, 30,000 books have been downloaded from http://deseretbook.com/free. It’s too early to tell much more; however it appears that this number is surprisingly high. More to come.

Deseret Book has released free digital versions of 8 books. Check out http://deseretbook.com/free. Part of what we are trying to study is how “free digital downloads” affect “physical print sales.” I’ll keep you posted.

I’m pleased to link to a First Monday article I wrote that focuses on motivations for creating derivative works. The article grew out of an earlier post I made (or maybe it was vice -versa). Special thanks to David Wiley for his advice and encouragement and to BYU’s department of Instructional Psychology and Technology for [...]

My trip to the Open Education Conference has allowed me to catch up on some blogging that I’ve been neglecting. Something I’ve been thinking about is the law of diminishing returns. As you might remember from Econ 110, this law states that the more one gets of something the less valuable each additional unit may [...]

I really like Chris Anderson’s books Free and The Long Tail. For me there is a small paradox between the two that I have been wanting to write about for some time. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a book publisher. This publisher has read The Long Tail and is aware that there [...]

My advisor David Wiley is a guest blogger at the Chronicle this month and posted today about some of our research.  You can read the article here.

I recently finished the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel (available as a free download at http://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/). (Got to love people willing to share digital versions of their books). The book is about using open source and getting smart people outside of your organization to help do your work. I’m just [...]

I’ve been waiting until I had time to do an in-depth review of Free but I’m seeing that that time isn’t going to happen. So I’ll keep bloggin in bits on it. Two things I wanted to highlight. 1. An interesting experiment in which researchers sold two kinds of treats. Deluxe chocolates for 15 cents [...]