Tag Archive for 'open content'

Flat World Knowledge Public Beta!

Published on January 29, 2009 in open content. 4 Comments Tags: , .

FWK, the open source textbook publishing company, has come out of private beta! Find out what all the excitement is about at http://flatworldknowledge.com/.

As a quick recap, FWK textbooks are much like traditional textbooks in that they are:

  • beautiful looking printed books,
  • written by world-class authors,
  • supported with all the supplementals and teaching aids (like an instructor manual, slides, and assessments) teachers expect, and
  • available as review copies (for teachers),

FWK textbooks are UNLIKE traditional textbooks in that they are:

  • licensed CC BY-NC-SA,
  • always available in full-text online for free,
  • offered in a variety of additional, affordable formats (paperback black-and-white ($30), full-color ($60), audio book ($30), individual book chapters as audio ($3), etc.),
  • supported by a variety of study aids available at the student’s option (NOT forcibly bundled with the book)

I’m SO excited about FWK because we’re going to show the world that extremely high quality open educational resources can be produced and disseminated in a way that is sustainable over the long term. Jump over to the Catalog page, choose a book with a Feb 2009 publication date, and click “Start Reading” to see what I’m talking about.

The Instructional Use of Learning Objects in Portuguese

Published on November 13, 2008 in open content. Closed Tags: , , , .

Keynoting a SBIE conference in Fortaleza, Brazil, I met a woman who coordinated the translation of almost half of the Instructional Use of Learning Objects into Portuguese. I love open licenses!

More on the Three Parts of Open Education

Published on September 29, 2008 in open-education. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , .

D’Arcy had a great post tonight about the three parts of open education. It validates something I’ve been wondering to myself about for a while. While I use slightly different language, you can me my take on the three toward the end of my Open Ed 2008 General Session presentation (start at slide 100):

Ten Years of Open Content
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: history content)

I’d love to engage in a bit more of a discussion between what I think of as learning support and what D’Arcy calls open access, just to make sure I understand what he’s saying.

I’m thinking about it from the “future of higher education” perspective, as opposed to the “what constitutes open education” perspective (as D’Arcy is). Still, it’s pretty cool that we pick basically the same three – it just means that the future of higher education is open education! In the presentation I basically argued that we can already see the three core functions of higher education starting to pull slowly apart from one another – the OCWs provide access to all the educational content (and now some research content thanks to MIT’s recent deal with Elsevier), places like Yahoo Answers provide the learning support and question/answer function (and RateMyProfessor carries much of the advising load), and Western Governor’s is a fully accredited university that offers no courses – only assessments (in other words, just credentials). This disaggregation is already happening, and higher education will just pull itself apart faster and faster in the future. Whenever a business function can be separated and specialized in, that business function is destined to be either spun off or outsourced. Wither the university then, huh?

In the video D’Arcy refers to open accreditation as the elephant in the room. Well, the elephant certainly stepped on me last week in Jeff Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, When Professors Print Their Own Diplomas, Who Needs Universities? After saying I was giving out diplomas a few times, Jeff accurately reports about my Introduction to Open Education class last year, “unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with something tangible: a homemade certificate signed by Mr. Wiley.” He even interviewed one of the unofficial students from Italy:

That [homemade certificate] was plenty of recognition for Antonio Fini, a doctoral student at the University of Florence, in Italy. “I include it in my CV,” he says.

I wonder if, somehow, we’ve stumbled into part of the answer for open accreditation. Of course, WGU still charges tuition, but D’Arcy’s right. Let’s talk more about this… Maybe instead of hacking Wordpress, we should be hacking degrees. Anyone up for a completely informal, completely open, homemade certificate-style diploma? A handful of courses offered by all of us – take intro open ed from me, connectivism from George and Stephen, media studies from Brian (you know you’ve always wished he would teach it), and then complete three cumulative edupunk projects under the tutelage of the Reverend, D’Arcy, and Tony. Maybe D’Arcy will also offer an elective in mobile video production? ;) Why not? I want my homemade edupunk diploma!!!

Open licenses depend on copyright

Published on November 3, 2007 in open content. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

The Commonwealth of Learning recently released a chapter on open licenses for an upcoming book. However, there is one statement in the very first paragraph that leapt out at me.

Some, disliking the business practices of commercial software suppliers and publishing houses, want to replace copyright with open licences. Some want to allow anyone to profit from the work of others without even telling them they are doing this. Despite the resistance to copyright by some open licence supporters, open licences are legal tools that use copyright law to achieve their objectives. It follows that for understanding open licences legal analysis is at least as important as ideological commitment.

The implication of the first sentence is that some people who support open licenses want to do away with copyright. I’ve met hundreds of people who support and even evangelize the use of open licenses, but I’ve never met one who thinks that it should be legally impossible for authors to protect their creative works.

It is true that many supporters of open licenses think that there are fundamental problems with copyright law that need to be fixed. Many feel that the Berne Convention requirements for the automatic copyrighting of all creative works the moment they are fixed in ‘tangible’ form should be reversed. When you count ~all~ the “creative works” in the world – including things like children’s crayon drawings – it is clear that the vast majority of creators never intend to protect or commercialize their works. So the majority of creators are burdened for the sake of the minority of creators. If my creative works weren’t automatically, unavoidably “protected,” I would be able to share them as part of the public domain without needing to resort to legal machinations. It says something disappointing about our civilization that hoarding is the assumption and sharing is assumed so rare that a lawyer’s help is needed to do it.

However, the more subtle point that I believe the rest of the paragraph is trying to make is that without copyright protection open licenses are meaningless. Licenses only work in the context of copyright law. Saying that you want to replace copyright law with open licenses is like saying you want to replace a fish tank with a fish. The fish can’t live without the tank, and open licenses don’t function outside the context of copyright law. I wish more people understood this point… Perhaps OER supporters who are serious about these issues will sign up for UOC’s Master in International Copyright law…

OER Recommender

Published on August 21, 2007 in open content. 3 Comments Tags: .

No time for a long post today, just a quick announcement that the first info about our OER Recommender (funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation) went online today:
http://www.oerrecommender.org/. The underlying technology, Suggestr, will be open sourced as soon as we have a minute to breathe.