With Great Power Comes Great Responsbility

August 31st, 2005 Filed under English entries, Work

@ 2005-08-31 22:41

In the movie of The Spiderman, Peter Park once said the sentence “with great power comes great responsbility”. This is not only a belief of the superman, but also for the American. In belief of their power they want great responsbility, and so, we are not surprised to see the Americans appear in everything of everywhere on the earth.I’m not going to talking about American culture ’cause sense of history about my own country is little, not to mention that of the US. What I want to talk is about a public benefit program named OOPS shorted for Opensource Opencorseware Prototype System and “开放式课程计划” in Chinese. And after my introduction I want you know why I mentioned the sentence at the beginning.

On the evening of Aug. 8, I attended a press conference hold by OOPS at the roof garden of Peace Hotel. Lucifer (朱学恒), sponsor of the program and translator of The Lord of The Ring, presided the conference and many program volunteers and journalists presented. During the conference, the OOPS was formly introduced to mainland China and a detaid introduction together with a recall for volunteers were presented.

To be brief, we can think OOPS as a project translating on-line courseware of MIT and other burgeoning on-line opensource courseware into Chinese (Simplified & Traditional). But how the idea came out and how’s the program going on is really amazing.

About two years ago, Lucifer came across with the MIT Opencourseware, MITOCW, in a report and he was stuned by the resourceful on-line free courseware. He pondered how the Chinese will benefit if the Chinese professors and students can use these world class educational resources. But one problem is that all of these treasure are in English while most of the university students’ English are still too poor to understand it, at least it will take them too much more time to read English materials. An idea strike on Lucifer, why don’t translate it into Chinese? And so he initialized the OOPS and called for capable to join the volunteer team to work for OOPS. Now, the number of the volunteers has exceeded 1,500 from over 15 countries worldwide and are still increasing. Some of them do translation, some of them do editorial work and some others do program promotion works, but all of them work for nothing. I have met several volunteers and have short talks with them. They are different people with different occupations, there are students, programmers, professionals , even CEOs and so on. But they share a thing in common, passionate and happy. When one of them was asked to answer why she joined the program she said “with great power comes great responsbility”.

You can visit OOPS’s simplified Chinese homepage via this linkage: www.cocw.net for more details and you also can be a volunteer as long as you want to be.

And below are several piz of Lucifer, the volunteers and me : ) Pls do enjoy it.

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