Open online community of digital storytellers DS106 finances itself through Kickstarter

Last week I attended a Rheingold Youniversity Alumni meeting with Bryan Alexander, who talked about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), and he mentioned DS106, an open online community of digital storytellers. Here is how DS106 describes itself:

DS106 is a digital storytelling course that began as a face-to-face course at the University of Mary Washington. In Spring of 2011, Jim Groom opened the course up to allow open online participants to join and become involved. That semester gave birth to a radio station, a TV station, an assignment bank with over 280 contributions, and an explosion of creativity and fostered community like never before. There are now 7 universities participating in DS106 formally with over 1200 open online participants that have generated over 18,000 posts. What’s more, the community is growing every day.

The world is small, and today I read a post by Stephen Downes, who made me discover the delicious madness of MOOCs way back in 2008:

I’ve been interested to follow the story of Jim Groom and company’s use of Kickstarter to raise money to continue the DS106 experiment. In 24 hours they made their goal of $4200 and will be buying “a grown-up server (in the cloud no less!) which comes with its own grown-up costs to the tune of over $2,800 this year.”

So it seems we have a very interesting situation here. We’ve a project which already has a good reputation and seems to be the kind of MOOC I like (creative, non-hierarchical, meritocratic, fun etc) and which uses a very interesting way to finance itself: Kickstarter, a new way to fund creative projects.

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