OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Figure 6—Framework for virtual organizations for distributed participation in science.
3.2.3 Improvement in Performance and Access to the Underlying ICT
The exponential improvement in computation rates, information transfer rates, and storage capacity continues. This is manifest in both increased capacity for fixed dollars and decreased cost for fixed performance. Increased capacity, now approaching the "petascale[1] regime," is critical to e-science. Reduced cost and thus ubiquity of access is critical for an international OPLI initiative. Eventually, however, the increased power of computing that is opening new frontiers for simulation, modeling, and virtual/augmented reality will be highly significant for open participatory learning. Of all these improvements in computation, storage, and networking, the most important is networking—the ability to connect.
Cell phones, particularly as they become "smarter," offer a promising platform for massification of education participation in developing countries. We are recommending that Hewlett place a large emphasis on exploring access to OER and participatory learning through mobile devices. In developing countries, adoption of mobile phones far exceeds adoption of PCs, and the trend is, if anything, accelerating. The reasons are partly economic: phones are less
- ↑ Petascale means computations rates greater than or equal to 1015 operations per second.
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