I’ve seen a lot of confusion on the interwebz lately about the meaning of the term open - like people linking to copyrighted videos posted illegally in YouTube as examples of OERs. Since I have a keen interest in people understanding the term “open content” the way I originally intended for them to, I will soon be adding a “definition” section to opencontent.org. (I think of the “open” in open educational resources the same way, though I neither have nor claim special authority to clarify its definition.) Here’s a first draft of what will appear there. Your feedback would be appreciated. (You may recognize some of this as material that has appeared on my blog in the past.) ...

A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/). Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool. ...

The new, special issue of IRRODL on Openness and the Future of Higher Education is available now at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/issue/view/38. Here’s the introduction John Hilton and I wrote for the special issue: Once considered to be mostly hype, the idea of open education has spread to hundreds of universities across the globe – including many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Open access to teaching and learning materials significantly empowers individuals who are not affiliated with formal educational programs and levels the playing field across competing institutions. These two occurrences – the empowering and leveling – portend significant changes in the structure and practice of higher education. The purpose of this special issue of IRRODL is to address various specific ways in which openness can affect the future of higher education. ...

I’ve written about this before, but here we go again… In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or ““is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website: ...

Earlier this year I blogged about what I thought should go into an open textbook bill (with clarifications the next day). I’m extremely pleased that Senator Durbin has introduced a bill which closely resembles these recommendations and therefore, to my mind, is on exactly the right track. You can read Durbin’s remarks as he introduced the bill, and then study the full text of S. 1714 on GovTrack (where you can also subscribe to a feed of all bill-related activity). ...

I’ve always been impressed by the idea of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s an unthinkably expensive, large-scale experimental apparatus designed for the sole purpose of generating and collecting data. Why would countries spend so much money on data? Why would so many people dedicate the better part of their lives to a project like the LHC? Because the so-called “hard” sciences - fields like physics and astronomy - have made the remarkable progress they have in understanding the structure of matter and the nature of the universe because they really care about data. They care about data in a way that educators have a difficult time comprehending, let alone understanding. ...

Driving home from a meeting last week I heard a truly atrocious recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, one of my favorite pieces for orchestra. The conductor’s interpretation (or complete lack thereof) had me screaming at the radio and almost putting my head through the steering wheel on a couple of occasions. The best recording of this fabulous piece of music is, in my not so humble opinion, John Mauceri leading the London Symphony Orchestra - (previews available from Amazon at Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade). How does this relate to OCW, you ask? ...

The CBC has posted a great interview with Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge about open textbooks. While an abbreviated version will run on the air, you can listen to (and download) the full, uncut interview online.

George has written a thoughtful post about issues with OCW 1.0 projects titled Utah State OpenCourseWare, lowriders, and system design. A few quotes and then some response: Utah State University has announced the closure of its OpenCourseWare initiative due to budget woes. I call nonsense (or BS). Apparently OCW needed $120,000 per year. Given the size of Utah State University, I’m going to guess they have an annual operating budget somewhere in the range of $300-400 million. This is not a budget shortfall – this is a commitment shortfall. 120K is a fraction of a fraction in light of the larger university budget. ...

Creative Commons may not have set out to authoritatively define Noncommercial Use with their recent study, whose results were announced today, but I wonder how people will to interpret their findings… There appears to be broad agreement among survey respondents in some areas (as I highlight below). Unfortunately, the report also reveals that its respondents have very little understanding of copyright law. So what the report provides us is, in effect, a surprisingly coherent statement by a large group of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Hundreds of thousands of people agree that it’s ok to download mp3s, but a single judge disagrees with them (authoritatively) all the time. Unfortunately, the consensus in this report is not particularly instructive. Rather, the consensus may be misleading if you allow it to convince you that it means something. Perhaps a more productive use of the study’s grant money would have been supporting the argument of cases that would establish real precedent. ...