MIT/Health Canada - Ideas are the Currency of the Future

Finally, we see some movement, right in Canada, that suggests that open access to information really is happening.

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/254701

"The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the federal government's health research granting agency, unveiled a new open access policy for the research that it funds.

The new policy – the first of its kind for Ottawa's three major research granting institutions that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year – will revolutionize access to health research by mandating that thousands of articles published each year be made freely available online to a global audience.

This marks an important step in the "open access" movement in Canada, which had been falling behind peer institutions in the United States, Europe and Australia."

Could we somehow fit this idea into education? MIT Open Courseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm) is a great example. Free course material offered to anyone in the world who can access a computer. Someone in an internet cafe in Nigeria can be learning from the very same materials as a student studying at MIT in the US. So, what's the next step?

What we do with all this information.

With this freedom, of course, comes responsibility. It sounds elementary, but we have a responsibility as global citizens to contribute, to participate, and to change things. That's what will continue to push these movements and truly flatten the world.

After all, "Ideas are the currency of the future", says Kevin Roberts at Saatchi & Saatchi.