Novell OCW runs eduCommons, COSL’s open source OCW management software, and is an extremely pleasant partnership between USU COSL and Novell Training Services.

msgid “Course Discussion Summary”
msgstr “Résumé de la discussion du cours”

There are five files altogether, and translating them should take a couple of hours. If you have some time you can contribute to the cause, download the eduCommons localization files, have at it, and then email the results back to me at david/dot/wiley/at/gmail/dot/com. If you’re willing, leave a comment letting me know which language you’re working on!

UPDATE: Richard Miller wrote in to tell me about poEdit, software that makes editing the eduCommons (and other Plone) localization files easier. Thanks, Richard!

While I fully support your goals (as you will see if you look at the website referenced above), I would ask that you please choose a name other than eduCOMMONS as this can only create confusion.

It was bad enough when Sun called and said “we’re thinking about naming our new project Education Commons. It’s really close to your name, and is closely related to what you’re doing, so we thought we’d call and ask if you would mind?” I said yes, I would mind, and of course they did it anyway…

2. It’s also empirically verifiable that applying the NC clause to a bit of content adds steps to the process of reusing that content for commercial purposes. Yes, it is possible to contact the owner and negotiate a contract granting you rights to make commercial uses. But it is critically important to understand that these additional steps significantly increase the transaction costs associated with reusing content.

3. The elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge is that the CC-NC restriction may have no meaning beyond its “common-sense” meaning. In one of the better contributions to the whole debate, Adam Bosworth recounted the following:

My second question was towards the provision in many Creative Commons licenses that indicates content may not be used for ‘Commercial Use’. I asked, what is Commercial Use? Does reposting to a blog that has ads violate the copyright license? Larry Lessig’s answer was basically, “I don’t know”. The reason why is that these things are vague and untested. There are no definitive answers to this question of what is a commercial use. What is an advertisement anyways? Is a link to my resume an advertisement? How about just links to other websites I run? Because these questions cannot even be answered by Lessig, I would never ever re-use content that is tagged ‘NonCommercial’.

Any thoughtful person is forced to arrive at the same conclusion as Adam. If Lessig doesn’t know for sure what the NC clause covers and what it doesn’t, who does? I expect the courts will not. The hardest question of all: Are we being completely honest with faculty when we tell them that the By-NC-SA license prohibits commercial use? True, MIT has had success with cease-and-desist letters…

From 1., it follows that if we want more content to be contributed to the world-wide collection of “open” resources, we should provide NC as an option to faculty. From 2., it follows that even if there is more content in the world licensed “openly,” there will be real, actual costs associated with making certain uses of that content. From 3., it follows that if University of Phoenix ever were to take USU Instructional Technology OCW content and start using it in their classes – and a “cease and desist” request actually went to court – the odds are fair that the NC option would be invalidated.

So what does all this mean? Best case scenario is that we should probably be offering “choice” to our faculty in terms of how their materials are licensed. Let those who want to choose NC choose it (understanding how much protection it really offers), but don’t cram NC down the throats of people who don’t feel they need it. I certainly don’t need it, and yet my material is licensed By-NC-SA, just like all the other OCWs (and yes, we’re talking about internally at USU about “choice” in our OCW). Over time, hopefully faculty will abandon the NC clause. Let them move at their own pace – let’s just not prevent “early adopters” from doing what they want to in terms of adopting more open licensing.

Systems that were designed through observation of the web and/or in adherence to the core principles of the web must be more suitable to the web than those that were not.

This recognition will either make or break the entire open education movement, including eduCommons and the OpenCourseWares.

• Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet).
• The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference
• Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work

I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…

Please remove all links to educommons.org until further notice. As all WHOIS information for the “new owner” is bogus, any tips or help would be appreciated.

In other news, OLS (our social software which wraps around OCW) will be opening in early April. Anyone interested in participating in testing during the next two weeks, please drop me an email (*not* a comment).