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.

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!!!

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…

We’re pleased to announce that the conference registration for Open Education 2007 is now open.

The early registration deadline is Friday, September 7 — after that date all of the rates will go up. So please register early! To register online, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/registration.

To view the preliminary program online (subject to change), please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/program.

To view details about how to travel to Utah State University, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/travel.

If you have any questions, please post them to the OpenEd 2007 Forums.

We’re looking forward to seeing you September 26-28, 2007 in Logan, UT!

However, it seems that – deep down – some people don’t really value the public domain. When given the option of placing works in the public domain early (ahead of when their copyright would expire), they will instead say:

The public domain lets people make and commercialize derivative works which aren’t placed back in the public domain. This is bad. Therefore, we should instead be glad of long copyrights and copyleft our works for the full term of copyright instead of placing them in the public domain. We need to protect our works from commercialization by others by keeping them out of the public domain as long as possible.

The copyleft mentality exemplified in the snippet above is already showing up in responses to the Open Education License draft. I never thought I would say this, but: The best thing about copyright expiring may be that copyleft will expire, too. I’m reminded of Lessig’s comments:

We are where we are because most people don’t believe in the public domain. Most people don’t even understand it. We live in a time when the public domain is more than 75 years old. Yet for most of our history, the public domain was no more than 30 years old. If ordinary people could see the creativity that would be inspired if the 1960s were in the public domain, they would understand again the importance of limiting the regulation that copyright law has become.

Because left and right are opposites, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that copyleft is the opposite of copyright. It is not. Copyleft is a kind of copyright that prevents people from exercising certain rights with regard to content. The public domain is the opposite of copyright. If you have any question about how valuable the public domain is, please read Pollock’s excellent The Value of the Public Domain.

The critical importance of the public domain is one reason for the new Open Education License draft. Why not simply create a mechanism for putting works in the public domain? Again, quoting Lessig:

We have no direct license that you can link to so as to place your material in the public domain. This is not because we wouldn’t like to offer such a license. It is instead because the law does not make such simplicity possible. While for most of our history, there were a thousand ways to move creative material into the public domain, most lawyers today are puzzled about whether there is any way to move work into the public domain. We have tried to build a way, but it is not automatic. If you follow this link, there are a number of steps you can take to put material into the public domain. We believe that if you follow these steps, then your work is in the public domain. Again, there’s no way to be certain about this. But this is our best guess, given the murky state of the law.

The first draft of the OEL granted licensees all the rights they would enjoy if the copyright on a work had expired – it was a license that operationally put a work in the public domain. However, it turned out that this approach would not work in the EU legal context, and so we arrived at a draft that grants licensees all the rights for which they would need a license under current, applicable law. I think this is as close to the public domain as we can come using a simple, internationally viable licensing mechanism.

Others will continue to think that noncommercial and copyleft restrictions are necessary, and I won’t argue with them. Licensing should be a matter of personal choice (another reason I don’t like copyleft). I continue to believe, however, that as people become familiar with the idea of openness many will follow a “path of enlightenment” that begins with something like CC By-NC-ND, advances to BY-NC-SA, evolves to BY-SA, then to By, and eventually arrives at the OEL.

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.

The Four Rs of Open Content

When I began promoting the idea of open content almost 10 years ago, there were four main types of activity I was interested in promoting (although it took me some time to get to the point where I could articulate them clearly). The four main types of activity enabled by open content can be summarized as “the four Rs”:

• Reuse – Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
• Revise – Alter or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
• Remix – Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
• Redistribute – Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or the remixed work with others

Notice how each of the first three Rs encompasses those that came before it. Reusing involves copying, displaying, performing, and making other uses of a work just as you found it. Reworking involves altering or transforming content, which one would only do if afterward they would be able to reuse the derivative work. Remixing involves creating a mashup of several works – some of which will be reworked as part of the remixing process – which one would only do if afterward they would be able to reuse the remix. (A “remix” in which no reworking is done is an anthology (a collection of simple reuses) and not particularly interesting for the purposes of this discussion.)

In the learning objects literature and elsewhere, endless problems have been caused by the fact that people say “reuse” when they actually mean “rework” or “remix,” or some combination of the first three Rs. This is a classic problem of imprecision; of talking fast and loose. Add to this difficulty the fact that each of these three Rs thrives under different conditions, and you’ve got a recipe for general confusion.

For example, take “rework.” This R deals with creating a derivative by altering or adapting a work. Traditionally licenses have tried to strengthen the rework activity through the “copyleft” mechanism. Copyleft is an idea borrowed directly from the world of free or open source software, requiring that derivative works be licensed using the exact same license as the original. This insures that when derivatives are created from a copylefted open content work, those children and grandchildren works remain open content, licensed using exactly the same license as the original.

However, while copyleft strictly requires that all future generations of derivative works be free and open, copyleft significantly hinders the remix activity. For example, conservative estimates say that there are approximately 40 million creative works that are currently licensed using a Creative Commons license. About half of these use the ShareAlike clause (Creative Commons’ copyleft clause). Of those creative works that use SA, about two thirds (~13 million) use By-NC-SA, while the other third (~7 million) uses By-SA. While statistics on GFDL adoption are harder to come by, because Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects use the GFDL we can safely estimate at least 7 million works are licensed using the GFDL (which contains its own copyleft clause). Since half of all CC licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause and all GFDL licensed materials are licensed using a copyleft clause, this means that over half of the world’s open content is copylefted. And while the CC and GFDL copyleft clauses guarantee that all derivative works will be “open,” they also guarantee that they can never be used in remixes with the majority of other copylefted works. You can’t remix a GFDL work with a By-NC-SA work when the licenses require that the child be licensed exactly as the parent. Each parent had one and only one license – which license would the derivative use? It’s just not possible to legally remix these materials; copyleft prevents this remixing.

While promoting rework at the expense of remix – in other words, taking the copyleft approach – is fine for software, it is problematic for content and extremely problematic for education. As educators, we are always remixing materials for use in our classrooms both in the “real” world and online. Your mileage may vary, but over my last 15 years of teaching I would estimate that my remixing activities outnumber my reworking activities 10:1 or more. If other teachers are like me in this regard, then, copyleft is a huge problem for open education. Like the American football coach who tries to use his successful offensive and defensive strategies with a European football (or soccer) team, the open source advocate who brings the successful idea of copyleft into the world of open content will eventually be disappointed. The primary activity of the open source software developer is reworking; the primary activity of the open educator is remixing. Different activities require different supporting strategies to be successful.

If we are serious about wanting the freedom to legally and frictionlessly remix educational materials, we have one of two choices: either ignore the OpenCourseWares, Wikipedia, and other copylefted open content of the world (i.e., work only with open content that isn’t copylefted), or forcibly constrain ourselves to one subset of the “open” content universe. Do you see the irony?

About the Copyleft and Attribution Restrictions

Some supporters of copyleft licenses like CC By-SA and the GFDL claim that they give users the ability to use and reuse open content with “no restrictions.” Obviously, requirements for attribution and copylefting of derivatives are very real restrictions that should not be overlooked. While supporters claim that “some restrictions are necessary to protect freedom,” and that requirements for attribution and copylefting fall into this category, both these restrictions can be problematic both practically and philosophically. I’ve spent a significant amount of time above describing why this is the case for the copyleft restriction.

When you contemplate the different cultures and cultural values in the world, it isn’t hard to imagine scenarios in which the requirement for attribution would prevent appropriate uses of open content. One need only contemplate any of the areas of enduring unrest in the world to understand that the requirement to attribute a reuse or rework of content to a Sunni or Shia author, for example, will prevent members of the other group from using the content. Sadly, over a dozen other examples of this kind (Israeli / Palestinian, etc.) could be given. It quickly becomes clear that the requirement to attribute the original author can be a subtle but no less real way of discriminating against persons or groups. (If the accusation of being an instrument of discrimination is not convincing enough to some open source advocates, this situation also puts the seemingly innocuous requirement for attribution at odds with one of the basic premises of the open source definition.) I believe it is absolutely crucial that we do everything we can to live up to the ideals of nondiscrimination expressed in the definition, our institutions, and civilization generally.

Why Not a Public Domain Dedication?

If the appropriate goal for a license is, as it appears, to make open content available without any restrictions, why not simply dedicate the works in question to the public domain? There are a number of problems with a public domain dedication (like that offered by Creative Commons). First, dedicating a work to the public domain is a significantly more involved process than licensing a work. While Creative Commons is rightly famous for how easy their license selection technology and little green buttons make licensing your work with a CC license, the public domain dedication is much more complicated and includes a number of steps, including making a request for Creative Commons to send you an email regarding your intent to place a work in the public domain. This rigamarole is not the fault of Creative Commons; they have simplified as much as possible the process of putting a work in the public domain in the US.

But secondly, and more importantly, it may be impossible under the law in some jurisdictions to place a work in the public domain. For example, in the EU authors have certain rights that cannot be contracted or licensed away, making it impossible for an author to legally relinquish all rights to a work (or put it in the public domain). Creative Commons also recognizes this problem with the statement that their public domain dedication “may not be valid outside of the United States.” Hence, a public domain dedication is not an internationally viable mechanism for open content.

About the Four Rs and the Four Freedoms

I hate definitions and taxonomies outside the hard sciences. I hate them particularly because I have been involved in the political contests of creating and perpetuating them – specifically, definitions and taxonomies of “learning objects.” Whose definition of learning object is best? Whose taxonomy is best? These are largely meaningless political battles I left behind many years ago.

It therefore surprises no one more than it surprised me that I felt the need to list and explicate the Four Rs, especially in the context of the existing “Four Freedoms.” While the Four Freedoms have their roots in free or open source software, they have been discussed in the context of open content as well. Wikipedia’s Terry Foote summarized the freedoms at our 2005 Open Education Conference as:

• Freedom to copy
• Freedom to modify
• Freedom to redistribute
• Freedom to redistribute modified versions

Freedom 1 is analogous to the first R, reuse. Freedoms 3 and 4 are analogous to the final R, redistribute. Freedom 2 is either analogous to the second R, rework, or is an amalgamation of the second and third Rs, rework and remix. In either case, the Four Freedoms do not distinguish sufficiently between the rework and remix activities. This leads to the problems described above in which rework is considered and supported at the cost of remix. These are distinct activities that require different environmental conditions.

The Four Freedoms as listed by Freedom Defined also fail to make this distinction:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

While the “father knows best” approach of copyleft places only incentive obstacles in the path of would-be creators of derivative works (by stripping them of the ability to choose how to license their derivative works), copyleft places legal obstacles in the path of would be remixers. This problem is difficult to see through the imprecision of the way the Four Freedoms deals with “modify,” and this is one reason I felt justified in listing and explaining the Four Rs.

Purpose of the New License

The purpose of the new license is to create a way for people to license their works in such a way that:

• applying the license is easy for authors and understanding the license is easy for users,
• engaging in any of the four Rs of open content can occur in a completely frictionless manner,
• the license imposes no restrictions on licensees, decreasing the chances of accidental discrimination against persons or groups, and
• remixing is well supported, so that licensed content is legally remixable with any other content to which the remixer has rights, whether (c), CC, GFDL, or differently licensed, decreasing license incompatibility problems.

The Approach

In the context of historical approaches to using copyright law against itself, the new license takes the approach of granting licensees all the rights for which they would need a license under current, applicable law.

Credit Where Credit is Due

The language of this license draft borrows heavily from the Creative Commons licenses, which only seems appropriate. Adopters of the new license will also be able to use Creative Commons’ RDF metadata in their documents to describe to Google, Yahoo!, and others what rights are associated with their works, as follows:

<rdf :RDF xmlns=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”>
<license rdf:about=”http://opencontent.org/licenses/oel/1.0/”>
  <permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Reproduction” />
  <permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Distribution” />
  <permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#DerivativeWorks” />
</license>
</rdf>

Finally, Raquel Xalabarder has been extremely helpful in clarifying the international issues around the license. And now, on to the draft.

Open Education License Draft

Draft 0.9, August 8, 2007. This is a draft document and is not yet intended for use.

Disclaimer

The OpenContent Foundation is not a law firm and does not provide legal services. Distribution of this license does not create an attorney-client relationship. The OpenContent Foundation provides this information on an “as-is” basis. The OpenContent Foundation makes no warranties regarding the information provided, and disclaims liability for damages resulting from its use.

License

Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to exercise any and all rights in the Work for which You would require a license under current, applicable law, including (but not limited to) the rights to:

• Reuse the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
• Rework, alter, or transform the work so that it better meets your needs
• Remix and combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works to better meet your needs
• Redistribute the verbatim work, the altered work, or the remixed work

Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer

Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you.

Limitation on Liability

Except to the extent required by applicable law, in no event will licensor be liable to you on any legal theory for any special, incidental, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages arising out of this license or the use of the work, even if licensor has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Termination

Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work).

So… what do you think?

Permissible Restrictions

Apart from these allowed restrictions, the license must not include clauses that limit essential freedoms. Especially, it must not specify any usage restrictions (such as prohibiting commercial use of the work, restricting use depending on political context, etc.).

• Attribution of authors: Attribution protects the integrity of an original work, and provides credit and recognition for authors. A license may therefore require attribution of the author or authors, provided such attribution does not impede normal use of the work. For example, it would not be acceptable for the license to require a significantly more cumbersome method of attribution when a modified version of the licensed text is distributed.
• Transmission of freedoms: The license may include a clause, often called copyleft or share-alike, which ensures that derivative works themselves remain free works. To this effect, it can for example require that all derivative works are made available under the same free license as the original.
• Protection of freedoms: The license may include clauses that strive to further ensure that the work is a free work, notably by enforcing some of the conditions specified in the paragraphs below: for example, access to source code, or prohibition of technical measures restricting essential freedoms.

This paradox has been rolling around in the back of my head / subconscious for months now, but something about reading this section in this context crystalized the problem in my tiny brain: how can a community so focused on freedom approve of any restrictions? Specifically, when expressing concern about restrictions making it difficult to reuse works, how can this community approve of the copyleft or share-alike concept?

Legal Hatfields and McCoys

The biggest legal problem facing the open educational movement is license incompatibility, as I discussed recently. For example, the millions of articles in Wikipedia and the 1.6 million media files in the Wikimedia Commons cannot be remixed with the thousands of courses and tens of thousands of media files coming from university OCW projects around the world. Why not? Because the “copyleft” scheme of the GFDL says that all derivative works must be licensed with the GFDL, and the “copyleft” scheme of the CC By-NC-SA license says that all derivative works must be licensed with the CC By-NC-SA. Hence, these materials cannot be remixed. It should be quite obvious that the sole culprit preventing this reuse and remixing is the copyleft restriction that is so happily permitted under the FreedomDefined definition of “free” (as well as the Free Software and many other definitions).

Although I am a huge fan of the open source definition and the free software definition, from first principles of freedom and openness I can see no reason to approve of any restrictions. In the free software definition, Stallman writes:

For example, copyleft (very simply stated) is the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms.

If copyleft were implemented in this manner, then the Creative Commons licenses and GFDL would be compatible with one another. But copyleft is not implemented in this manner. The text of Stallman’s own GFDL reads:

You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License.

Creative Commons similarly talks the right talk in the their human-readble definition of ShareAlike, “If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.” But in the Legal Code version of the document we read:

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under: (i) the terms of this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US) (“Applicable License”).

So, in both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons contexts, copyleft or share-alike means “if you’re creating a derivative work, you have to use our license – and only our license.”

Why, when we are so worried about preserving freedoms, do we prohibit choice on the part of downstream users as to how they can license derivatives works they make? Why don’t we want to protect that user’s freedom to choose how to license his derivative work, into which he put substantial effort? The copyleft approach of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons makes creators of derivative works second-class citizens. And these are the people we claim to be primarily interested in empowering. I can’t stress this point enough: the ShareAlike clause of the CC licenses and the CopyLeft tack of the GFDL rob derivers of the basic freedom to choose which license they will apply to their derived work. ShareAlike and CopyLeft privilege creators while directing derivers to the back of the bus.

CC Infighting

The following image shows which CC licenses are compatible with one another; in other words, it shows what content can be legally remixed with what other content.

You should notice that on this 10×10 grid there are only 33 smiley faces. In other words, only 1/3 of Creative Commons’ own licenses are compatible in terms of cross-license remixing. It’s difficult to believe, but true. This is so difficult to believe, and the detail so confusing that almost all people (and many people in the OER world, for that matter) simply believe that any page sporting a CC logo is compatible with any other in terms of remix-ability. Legally, of course, this is not true in the majority of cases. And, “But they both say Creative Commons at the bottom!” is not a viable legal defense. Do we really believe that “normal users” can navigate this morass? How often have you personally consulted a chart like this when remixing CC-licensed content? How often have you instead just shrugged your shoulders and said, “who cares?”

Public Domain as the PeaceMaker

You should next notice in the CC compatibility graphic that there is only one license that is compatible for cross-license remixing with all Creative Commons licenses (and with the GFDL, although the graphic doesn’t show it): the Public Domain license. Technically, this isn’t a license – it is a dedication of copyrights to the public domain. It is a formal rejection of all restrictions, and a complete freeing and opening of content. It is the ultimate expression of the ideals of openness and freedom. So why do we settle for only four freedoms? Why isn’t our goal to have all OERs eventually exist in the public domain? If we really care about ease of reuse, if we really respect creators of derivative works, and if we really want to see the open education movement succeed, we should have the public domain as our final goal.

Now, DON’T MISUNDERSTAND. I’m not saying that everyone who isn’t using a public domain dedication as of 5:00p tonight is an evil loser. I’m still very much a believer in and respecter of a step-by-step path into full participation in the open education community of practice. However, once upon a time I believed that the end legal goal of the progression was a license of some sort. Now I believe that the real legal end goal for open educational resources should be dedication to the public domain.

So the obvious question, then, is when will Mr. Big Talker’s (my) courses on USU OCW be placed in the public domain? Very soon now. More about that in another post.

Looking for an aggregator for your new iPhone?

iPhone + Aggregator = iGag! iGag has:

• out of the box support for del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, Last.FM, and several other popular services
• support for adding generic RSS or Atom feeds and OPML files (online or uploaded)
• OpenID support for authentication (so most of you won’t even need to create a new account)
• support for grouped feeds for easier browsing (click the screenshot above to see detail) and
• those fancy, slidey user interactions you’ve come to expect from the iPhone.

I liked my iPhone before, but this is the killer iPhone app as far as I’m concerned. Truth in advertising requires me to disclose that this is a classic “scratch your own itch” piece of software by Justin Ball and myself.