Reading Wayne Macintosh’s feature on WikiEducator got me thinking again about some people’s dissatisfaction with those projects that use the NC clause. (I’m not a fan of the NC clause, but I have never projected these negative feelings onto institutions or faculty who adopt the clause.) So I started asking myself - why do universities adopt the NC clause for their OER projects in the first place? And if we wish they wouldn’t use the NC clause, what can we do about it? Continue reading ‘Why Universities Choose NC, and What You Can Do’
Tag Archive for 'ocw'
I’m very pleased to announce the opening of Novell OpenCourseWare today, as part of Novell’s annual BrainShare conference. This is the first foray into open education by a for-profit training services group, so props to Novell for showing that corporations can take the idea of “openness” beyond open source software and into open educational resources.
Novell OCW runs eduCommons, COSL’s open source OCW management software, and is an extremely pleasant partnership between USU COSL and Novell Training Services.
Steve Carson writes about a recent survey of Japanese attitudes toward open education projects at universities (like OCWs). I have to agree with his selection of a favorite bit from the survey:
Q9: What should be the scope of the universities that open up their lecture materials? (Sample size=1,050)
- Just well-known public and private universities 17.2%
- As many public universities as possible 14.2%
- As many private universities as possible 3.4%
- As many public and private universities as possible 64.8%
- Other 0.4%
Two out of three surveyed felt that as many schools as possible should open access to their courses. I agre with them. =)
A few months ago I blogged about a project idea called Send2Wiki, that would let you (via a bookmarklet) send any page you’re viewing in your browser directly into a wiki for instant editing / remixing. Today I’m happy to announce that the first alpha of Send2Wiki is available! You can play with it over at http://send2wiki.com/.
Send2Wiki includes preliminary support for license detection and preservation, automated translation (via Google Language Tools), PDF support, and chrome-stripping for specific sites (some OCWs and wikipedia at this point).
The service is still definitely in alpha, and all the data you put in while you play around is likely to get nuked at some point in the future, but I would love your feedback about the idea generally and about the implementation specifically. What features are missing that we definitely need? Have any logo ideas?
The goal of the project is to make it really, really easy for people to reuse and adapt open content. Does it do that?
Apparently some of the readers of my new OpenCourseWars draft misunderstand. They think that I don’t like MIT OCW, or the opencoursewares in general. Let me set the record straight.
Continue reading ‘Why I Love OCW’
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