FWK, the open source textbook publishing company, has come out of private beta! Find out what all the excitement is about at http://flatworldknowledge.com/.
As a quick recap, FWK textbooks are much like traditional textbooks in that they are:
- beautiful looking printed books,
- written by world-class authors,
- supported with all the supplementals and teaching aids (like an instructor manual, slides, and assessments) teachers expect, and
- available as review copies (for teachers),
FWK textbooks are UNLIKE traditional textbooks in that they are:
- licensed CC BY-NC-SA,
- always available in full-text online for free,
- offered in a variety of additional, affordable formats (paperback black-and-white ($30), full-color ($60), audio book ($30), individual book chapters as audio ($3), etc.),
- supported by a variety of study aids available at the student’s option (NOT forcibly bundled with the book)
I’m SO excited about FWK because we’re going to show the world that extremely high quality open educational resources can be produced and disseminated in a way that is sustainable over the long term. Jump over to the Catalog page, choose a book with a Feb 2009 publication date, and click “Start Reading” to see what I’m talking about.
I’m currently involved in two special issues about open education, and if you read this blog the odds are you should submit something to at least one of them!
John Hilton and I are guest editing a special issue of IRRODL about Openness and the Future of Higher Education, with a specific emphasis on things like policy, accreditation, and sustainability, including:
- Critical perspectives on open education
- Issues of affordability and openness
- Openness and accreditation
- Open models for awarding credit or degrees
- Open source, open access, or open education policy in higher education
- Open teaching / massively open online courses (“MOOC”)
- Sustainable models of creating and sharing open educational resources
Check out the full IRRODL Call for Papers. Proposals are due this Thursday, but full papers aren’t due until May 1.
Erik Duval and I are guest editing a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technology called Open Educational Resources: Learning Objects for All! This special issue has a much more technical focus, including things like:
- automated extraction and generation of metadata that make it easier to find relevant OER’s;
- ranking of OER’s based on relevancy, including contextual clues, time and place, emotion, etc.
- repurposing of recordings of synchronous learning events (lectures, discussions, etc.);
- technical infrastructures for making OER’s available for reuse;
- tools for remixing OER’s;
- standards and specifications for content, search, harvesting, adaptation, etc.
Check out the full IEEE TLT Call for Papers. Papers are due March 1.
Let’s make the CC By-NC-SA versus First Sale battle more specific.
Jamie Boyle’s new book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
is licensed CC By-NC-SA and is available for purchase from Amazon. If I purchase a copy of the book from Amazon – in other words, if I come to legally own a copy of the book – do I have the right to resell it for any amount of money I can get for it?
The book is also available for download. If I print out and bind this book – in other words, if I come to legally own a copy of the book – do I have the right to resell it for any amount of money I can get for it?
It’s the same book…
How about something else licensed CC By-NC-SA?
