Whether or not it was a response to my Open Education License draft is unimportant - Creative Commons has announced CC0 - the new CC license aimed at the public domain.
CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.
Preparing for my fall course “Introduction to Open Education” (more about that coming soon in another post), I’ve been thinking hard about licensing and the “pro-freedom” camp. Wikeducator and FreedomDefined.org have several interesting pieces, including WikiEducator’s Free Content Defined and FreedomDefined.org’s The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License. I found myself in complete agreement with statements such as, “Sadly, much of the world’s knowledge is locked behind copyright and consequently access to this knowledge is restricted, especially for the majority of citizens in the developing world… The definition of Free Cultural works is based on the premise that the easier it is to re-use and derive works, the richer our cultures become.” But then I was particularly struck by the section on “Permissible Restrictions” from the Wikieducator tutorial… Continue reading ‘Noncommercial Isn’t the Problem, ShareAlike Is’
A new report out from IMS called Learning Technology Satisfaction & Trends presents data from a survey of US higher education institutions. According to the report, “31% of the respondents were executive administrators. 7% were deans or academic program or department leaders. 50% were information technology or instructional support staff. 11% were faculty.”
Several interesting things in this report:
- First, the two top-rated sources of digital content, including all commercial and other sources, were Google Search and Wikipedia. MIT OCW places fourth. McGraw Hill and all the other proprietary content publishers are “clustered in another tier below the leaders” in terms of user satisfaction (p. 40).
- As a content management platform, Wikipedia beats out WebCT, Blackboard, and DSpace by an average of almost a full point (on a five point scale). “The strong usage and showing of Wikis indicates that the Web 2.0 phenomenon – use of more collaboration and
collaborative authoring – is blazing a path in higher education” (p. 38).
- On the course management side, Moodle beats out WebCT and Blackboard by a full half point with a third place finish. Apparently eCollege and Angel users are extremely loyal. Sakai isn’t even on the map.
- From the Top Findings section (p. 8): “Google Search, Apple iPod, and Wikipedia placed in the top ten list for satisfaction, indicating that non-education specific technologies are being perceived, by those ithat incorporate them, as adding value to the educational experience.” That is, their satisfaction scores were so high as to be in the top ten of all products reviewed across all categories.
Overall an interesting skim…
So by now you’ve heard - Blackboard is buying WebCT, and in 18 months or so there will be one uberproduct. We all saw this coming, but still - wow.
Why am I mad? Because the state of Utah just completed a bid process to license and buy support for an LMS to be used at all state schools. And after phone calls and emails with a company who will remain un-named (why do we protect the guilty?) who assured me they would put in a bid to install / configure / support Sakai for the state, today I heard that they never bothered submitting a bid. I could spit I’m so angry. I could have worked with any of a handful of companies to get this OSS solution in the competition, but I naively believed this vendor’s word that they would put in a bid. And now it’s all said and done, and Sakai wasn’t even in the mix. I actually threw something across the room today when I heard.
Our only hope now is that the whole Bb/WebCT conglomerate madness will force the state to reevaluate its position and open another bid. You can bet I’ll be following up a lot closer with the next vendor I choose to encourage to apply. (And since when do businesses need convincing that a statewide, multimillion dollar contract is a thing they should want???)
I’m seeing double.
Lots of folks responded rather strongly to my suggestion that talking about and focusing on scalability is immoral. As usual, I appear to have done a poor job articulating my feelings. 
The focus on scalability scares me because it only focuses on reaching lots of people, on reaching large numbers of people, on reaching the majority of people.
The amount of commitment necessary to reach all as opposed to many seems qualitatively different to me. I’m afraid that the focus on scaling, and talk about how great and worthy reaching the majority of people is, will allow instructional technologists to feel like they’re off the hook for reaching the few, the small numbers of people, the minority.
So yes, the work we are all doing on scaling is important. It’s foundational. But lately the people I’ve heard talk about scaling are talking about it like its the end goal. It’s not. It gets us to the majority of people. These same methods don’t get us to the minority. Things like eGranery get us to the minority.
We have to go beyond scalability in our thinking. Beyond reaching the majority. We have to think about reaching everyone. And its going to require very different thinking than the scalability thinking going on right now.
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