Friends: Here is an excerpt from a recent paper which I reproduce from Peter Suber's blog. Indian universities and institutes of technology will do well to join the Open Course Ware movement and do their bit to democratise knowledge. Arun ----- Openness as a response to globalization Hans van Ginkel, Toward a smarter information superhighway, Asahi Shimbun, February 14, 2006. Van Ginkel is Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Rector of the United Nations University. Excerpt: Universities...are increasingly recognizing that the real expansion today in international knowledge exchange does not relate to physical mobility of individuals, but rather to the mobility of knowledge itself. Openness and sharing knowledge have always been the hallmarks of the most successful universities around the world....MIT offers a rather interesting model of an educational institution responsive to globalizing trends. In particular, I would like to refer to their work with free online learning through the OpenCourseWare program. Many universities use distance and online learning as an important measure to increase student numbers....This represented a revolutionary step forward since up until then the trend had been for universities to restrict access to their knowledge behind password-controlled learning management systems. It is MIT's boldness in promoting this open approach that I believe contributes to its success and high ranking among international educational institutions. This same kind of openness is highly relevant to Japanese universities and would contribute to their climbing up the international university rankings. Hence, I am delighted to see that a number of Japanese universities have decided to work together to promote the idea of OpenCourseWare in Japan. The Japan OCW Alliance includes Keio University, Kyoto University, Osaka University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo University and Waseda University. This alliance was launched in May 2005, so it is relatively young, but has already placed a large amount of educational content online. It represents an important showcase of quality educational materials and, as professor Yuichiro Anzai, president of Keio University, has remarked, the Alliance is indicative of a new leadership role for Japanese universities. This view is echoed by President Kazuo Oike of Kyoto University who views the Japan OCW Alliance as contributing to the accumulation of intellectual capital on the World Wide Web. Moreover, as President Hiroshi Komiyama of the University of Tokyo remarked, "our goal is to give back to society the fruits of our educational activities. We would also like to assist those who are eager to learn by themselves, and those who would like to take part in a dynamic creative activity."...We at UNU share the same vision. At the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, I called for the creation of a Global Learning Space to support science-based education through various projects, including the U.N. Water Virtual Learning Center, the Global Virtual University and the Asia Pacific Initiative. The latter includes close collaboration with Keio University and a network of universities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific to develop and run educational programs in the region on issues of sustainable development. More recently, at the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis in November 2005, I called for an "Information Society Open to All" where the provision of open educational resources would represent a core component....The way forward in this globalizing world, I would argue, is to promote openness within the education system.