My friend CSU-Pueblo math professor Jonathan Poritz has made appearances on this blog before. You just didn’t know it was him because he was untenured and therefore wanted me to keep his name out of my posts. However, I can tell you he’s been an incredibly important influence on my thinking about technology issues of all kinds.
Now that he’s tenured, he’s speaking for himself in the pages of Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. His subject is technology and academic freedom. Specifically, he’s arguing that professors should embrace open source software not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it will improve pedagogy, increase efficiency, cut costs and support academic freedom.
And here’s the part that just kills me: Jonathan convinced Academe to publish the article under a Creative Commons license so I can link to it in .pdf format on his web site before it even appears in the journal.
I’ll have more to say about all this stuff at the Academe blog once it actually appears in that journal, but for now you should just read a piece which I’m certain will become an instant classic and think hard about how to bring more open source software to your campus.
[...] is not some utopian dream. My friend Jonathan Poritz’s essay about open source technology (now available in Academe) can serve as a road map for creating that kind of world. On the other [...]
[...] newly-tenured CSU-Pueblo math professor Jonathan Poritz, whose work I’ve recommended before. Besides being a most excellent human being, we both share the distinction of being natives of [...]