If you follow this blog with any regularity you’ll have seen this coming for several weeks now. When I began recommending that people quit using OpenContent licenses (developed in 98 and 99) and begin using the new Creative Commons licenses (in 2003), I said it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. And it was. (More background).
Today I take the lid off the next most difficult thing I’ve done. As I describe below, I hate the idea of license proliferation. However, I feel that there are several convincing arguments that we need a new license at this point in the history of open content, and specifically in the history of open education. After providing the arguments and my thoughts below, you’ll find a draft of the first license issued by OpenContent in eight years - the Open Education License.
Continue reading ‘Open Education License Draft’
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Published in Uncategorized
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Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER soup, the “OER Nebula” is actually being pulled in several directions by several different sources of gravity:
It kind of depressed me thinking the biggest centers of gravity in this space might be licenses. If nothing changes in the space, then billions of internet years from now (in 18 Earth months or so), the space might end up looking like this:
As long as these licenses stay incompatible, interstellar travel between the different worlds will be about the best we can hope for in terms of our remixes. Is this really what we’re doomed to? I think counting on the different licensing bodies to come to harmonization is all but a lost cause (please prove me wrong!). Is it possible to create a stronger center of gravity than the licenses, something that could pull the OERs toward a common place where remixing and sharing the results could be simple and legal?
Derek Keats, who I greatly respect and admire, responded to my earlier post with this reply: Continue reading ‘My final UNESCO IIEP post on free vs open’
You may be somewhat surprised to hear that talk on the UNESCO IIEP list, set up for the discussion of open educational resources, has temporarily turned to the topic of open versus free versus libre again. 
Here is my contribution to the conversation, in which I quote and than “adapt” John Adams… Continue reading ‘Misquoting Adams on the UNESCO IIEP List’
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