The conversation about open education picked up some steam yesterday with the official launch of the Cape Town Declaration yesterday. There was lots of good coverage including a nice piece on ZDNet UK and an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jimmy and Rich. I just posted the following to Slashdot:

"ZDNet is running a story on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which is "… designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials." The declaration calls for more educational materials to be open sourced and freely shared (like MIT did), and says that "all taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open". Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Larry Lessig (CC), musician Peter Gabriel and hundreds of teachers have already signed the Declaration."

… to try to build buzz further. If you want to help out, you can click here to vote for this article and get it on the Slashdot editors’ radar.

There was some criticism of the Declaration before it launched. Philipp Schmidt did a great job of summarizing and countering the key criticisms in a post yesterday.My guess is that there will be more debate as the buzz builds. Of course, that’s partly the point of the Declaration in the first place: to amp up the conversation about open education.

If you want to keep track of the Cape Town Declaration buzz, watch David Wiley’s blog and track the ‘capetowndeclaration‘ tag on del.icio.us.

As my friend Maureen says: wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. This is fun.