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The numerous high-profile open courseware initiatives from elite universities suggest that content itself is not a sufficient value point on which to build the future of higher education. Indeed, the creators of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative at MIT began with the realization that they were “not going to try to make money” from their content. 1 The actions of institutions like MIT suggest that the true benefit of the academy is the interaction, the access to the debate, to the negotiation of knowledge—not to the stale cataloging of content. We are, in effect, returning to Socratic roots. The change that so worried Socrates was the writing down of knowledge, so that a learner could imitate understanding ideas by being reminded of them, giving the learner the “appearance of wisdom,” not its reality. 2 The technologies available to Plato and Aristotle and eventually to Gutenberg (writing and the book) allowed content to be scaled and to be used as a vehicle for truth. 3 Now, with social/network technologies, negotiation of knowledge itself can be scaled. As communications technologies allow collaboration beyond the classroom space—beyond restrictions set by fire marshals and practical limitations of face-to-face discussions—a new world of possibilities opens up. With each budget line in higher education facing increasing scrutiny, the conditions under which innovation happens are also changing. The field of educational technology has been heavily impacted by this new reality; the promise of open source and the reverberations of open content have forced colleges and universities to reconsider the ways in which they invest in technology for education …