While imitation is truly the form of flattery, mockery is also right up there. So, it was with a huge smile that I read the Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment on the iCommons list. This spoof of the Cape Town Declaration press release includes humdingers like:
Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new private-sector approaches to learning where people create and shape "knowledge" together. These new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education. There are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get first class "traditional" education at expensive private schools and Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for the plebs who, let's face it can't concentrate for more than five seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don't challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny and sparkly facebook applications.
and
"Open sourcing edutainment doesn't just make learning more accessible, it makes more money and people do it for free so we don't need to pay employees or pesky teachers," said really rich Linux Entrepreneur Mack Shuttletree, "Linux is succeeding and generating huge profits exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open edutainment."
Looks like this was written by David Berry at Swansea University. Thanks, David. While I don't agree with your take on the commons (papers and spoofs alike), I love that you made me laugh.