Monthly Archives: June 2009

Coming Dangerously Close

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In my science fiction tale of the future of the open education movement, the OpenCourseWars, I predict a time when the federal government creates a funding pool to support the creation of open courses to which the public would have free access:

In the most unbelievable part of the history of openness in education (for me as a native West Virginian, anyway), West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd announced that his current term in office would be his last. (I think he was like 108 at this point.) His final piece of legislation would be a third Morrill Act that would support the land grant institutions in creating OCW-like projects to provide increased access to educational opportunity to the general public. The so-called “Byrd Bill” passed, creating a small pot of dedicated monies for public schools to draw on in order to support their OCW initiatives.

I suppose thinking that Byrd would introduce the bill was a bit too self-indulgent on my part, but today Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a U.S. Push for Free Online Courses. Byrd didn’t write the language himself, but it does appear to come during Byrd’s last term in office (unfortunately for WV):

Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration. The funds envisioned for open courses — $50 million a year — may be small in comparison to the other ideas being discussed. But in proposing that the federal government pay for (and own) courses that would be free for all… the draft language suggests that the administration is throwing its weight behind the movement to put more courses online — and offer them free.

If my predictions continue to be (largely) correct, we next wait to hear a deafening silence from the online curriculum and textbook publishing industries…

Let’s EXPAND Copyright!

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Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. An article published in the Journal of Legal Studies identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of all time, and the New York Times called him one of the most respected judges in the United States.

In a blog post titled The Future of Newspapers, Posner opines that the best solution to the newspaper industry’s problem may be expanding the scope of copyright law:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Now, I’m certainly not one of the country’s most respected legal scholars, but here’s some advice for the newspapers: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE LINKING TO YOUR CONTENT, DON’T POST IT ON THE WEB. That’ll be $2500 / hour for legal consulting, please.

On the other hand, there may be something useful hidden in this recommendation. Imagine momentarily that the Web had turned into a place where you could only link to pages whose rights holders had given you explicit consent to do so. The best mechanism for giving this kind of consent is, of course, the Creative Commons licenses. This proposal could go a long way toward eliminating links to fully copyrighted content, effectively eliminating it from the network (consider – if a writer posts a story in a forest but literally no one links to it, does it exist? Google and Yahoo can only crawl pages that someone links to) and leaving only a huge interconnected graph of CC-licensed material.

Not to mention the fact that all material is copyrighted, meaning that you wouldn’t be allowed to link to anything without the owner’s previous permission. And if you couldn’t link to it to look at it, how would you know whether you wanted to link to it?

If anything, this blog post shows that Posner understands nothing about the Internet. How embarrassing for him! Perhaps I needed to ask for his permission before linking to and commenting on his post?

OA, All the Way

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Open Education News and Open Access News are running stories about a new OA mandate from the Institute of Education Sciences:

Recipients of awards are expected to publish or otherwise make publicly available the results of the work supported through this program. Institute-funded investigators should submit final, peer-reviewed manuscripts resulting from research supported in whole or in part by the Institute to the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) upon acceptance for publication. An author’s final manuscript is defined as the final version accepted for journal publication, and includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Institute will make the manuscript available to the public through ERIC no later than 12 months after the official date of publication. Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this requirement.

Perhaps even more exciting is news today about the reintroduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) today by U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, R-TX and Joe Lieberman, I-CT (it was originally introduced in 2006). The legislation would “require every federal department and agency with an annual extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make their research available to the public within six months of publication.” Sen. Cornyn’s press release has more details.

This would mean that in addition to the existing NIH and IES mandates, we would have mandates in place for all research funded by NSF, DofEd, DofEnergy, and almost every other federal agency. Things are moving along! First, NIH, then IES, and now FRPAA has been reintroduced… It’s almost as if we’re slowly iterating toward openness.