I bumped into Professor Christo Doherty at an exhibition called ‘Terminal Extentions’ by the Wits Masters-level Interactive Media Design students last week. Christo runs this exciting, young programme at the Wits School of Arts which aims to ‘develop an analytical understanding of either interactive media or 3D animation as aesthetic and commercial forms of communication’. I was very excited to hear that Christo has set Larry Lessig’s latest book, ‘Free Culture‘ as a setwork for the programme. ‘We use the free PDF version available on the Free Culture website,’ he said, ‘Otherwise it would be too expensive for our students.’

Christo said that he downloads the PDF of the book and copies it onto CDRom for his students since low bandwidth speeds in South Africa make it difficult to download such large files.

It’s really great to see such an excellent example of progressive educators taking the time to think about their students’ ability to pay for high-priced setworks, and really leading the way in the field of open content in South African education. Great going, WSOA!

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