Connexions® founder Richard Baraniuk wins Berkman Award

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

Open-education pioneer wins Berkman Award for Internet innovation
Harvard honors Connexions' founder for impact of global education program

May 20, 2008 -- Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has awarded Rice's Richard Baraniuk with one of six inaugural Berkman Awards for founding the Connexions project, one of the world's first open-education Web sites.

The awards, which honor center namesake and communications law pioneer Jack Berkman, were announced at the center's 10th anniversary gala May 16 in Boston. Recipients were chosen for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society over the past decade, and the winners represented nominees from diverse fields, including human rights and global advocacy, academia, communications and media, and law. Each winner received a $10,000 prize.

Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, founded Connexions in 1999. One of the web's first Open Educational Resources (OER), Connexions is both a software platform and a repository that lets people create, share, modify and vet open educational materials that are accessible by anyone, anywhere, anytime for free. With content accessed by more than 850,000 visitors per month, Connexions is one of the world's most popular OER sites.

The complete list of Berkman Award winners is posted at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/4316.