In my experience, you can teach any undergraduate student (and probably most high school students) how to start their own online business, or create a nice online presence for an existing business. It has become relatively easy to weave together techs like WordPress, Google Analytics and AdSense, and PayPal to put up content, see what's working, collect revenue or donations, even do simple A/B testing, without having any previous coding experience.

Once this is working, students can dive into the details of HTML/CSS, or even some PHP, and change things on their already working site. But instead of completing a class exercise, students are tweaking something that is already attracting customers. And you can see the effects of your changes in the web analytics. That's been a powerful motivator for my students to want to learn more about tech.

Sometimes, a better strategy for open source adoption is to focus on new, unmet needs, rather than 'ripping out' proprietary software that 'already works'.

Consider the new open source policy in San Francisco city government. The tech department started using open source for projects that had to be done so quickly, or for so little money, that there was literally no other option. For example, they used WordPress to launch their RecoverySF.org site in a few weeks, rather than the usual months or years. Their successes got the attention of city leaders, including the mayor. With enough open source victories on the ground, it makes it much easier to create a level playing field for open source, or maybe even tilt the field in its favor.

If you'd like some poorly-written academic papers addressing these issues, I can send you some of mine.

Thanks, that's a great example. Do people know of any others?

This is a particularly critical time for academics outside of the US. Much of the world seems to be transitioning to an American-like focus on journal pubs. Everyone is busily constructing lists of acceptable journals, complete with the number of points earned for each hit.

On one list I saw recently, Elsevier journals (the publisher rebelled against above) deliberately got more points than others because of their higher reputation. This could lock-in commercial publishers for another generation.

Many academics are rewarded by publishing in journals with top reputations. It takes time to develop alternative, low-cost, online journals that use better copyright regimes AND have a solid reputation. Creating a new journal with a decent rep takes years (best case 2-3, to get indexed and earn a healthy impact factor, and likely much, much longer). Worthwhile goal, but progress will be slow.

Classroom experiences are (should be?) interactive now, not just one-way broadcasts. Our class meetings belong to myself AND my student colleagues.

If it's a 'lecture'--a straight information download--it should be offered for free. Or, even better, insert a DVD and press 'play'.