I recently posted a link to the OER Remix Game, a card game you can play with friends to learn about the license compatibility difficulties involved in remixing. Well, if you’ve had a hard time convincing your friends to play the game with you, you can now try a beta of the online (one player) version of the game! You can find it at OER Remix Game Online. Your thoughts and feedback would be appreciated. Critical and corrective feedback is, of course, the most useful kind.

I love to create stories to teach otherwise difficult to understand concepts. The Polo Parable has proven to be an effective way to help people see the madness involved in trying to “move” classroom teaching practices online and help them understand that different contexts call for different strategies. In the spirit of the Polo Parable, here is the “Trucker Tale.” Once upon a time there was an inventor. She was brilliant. All through the night and all during the day she dreamed, she schemed, she thought, she imagined. Then one day she had a “Eureka!” moment. She sketched out the design of her breakthrough product, and worked and reworked the design by showing it to friends and getting their feedback. ...

Sunnie links to the audio of our recent interview about open education, some of my current projects, and some unsolicited dissertation advice.

Bryan Sudweeks from Brigham Young University’s Marriot School has just released his absolutely incredible collection of Personal Finance courses and resources under a CC By-NC-SA license.

In this response I sample from Stephen’s latest contribution to our conversation about the noncommercial clause of CC licenses, Open Content, Enclosure and Conversion, simply because a complete line-by-line response would take too long. I will rely on Stephen to call me out if I have sampled in a manner that misrepresents him, which I have made an honest effort not to do. I use Stephen’s subheadings throughout to break up my response and help the reader find the corresponding material in Stephen’s original post. ...

I never thought I would title a post in all caps, but I can’t believe I’m reading what I’m reading. H.R. 1464, introduced by Bill Foster of Illinois, is titled: To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the development of freely-available open source educational materials in college-level physics, chemistry, and math, and for other purposes. After quoting a number of findings about how completely out of control the textbook market and textbook prices are, the bill goes on to say: ...

We’ve had plenty of talking and blogging about open certification or open credentialing of learning mediated by open educational resources. One thing I don’t think we’ve talked about yet is the role of openness and open educational resources on program accreditation. When you think about what accreditors want, they want to know exactly what your program is doing, exactly how you’re doing it, how you’re capturing data, how you’re using that data to make your program better, etc. Basically, accreditors are interested in transparency and accountability. Can you think of a better way to create and facilitate transparency and accountability than putting all your department’s courses in OCW and taking pro-open stance on other department output like research publications and policy documents? A few questions: ...

Flat World Knowledge, the company I serve as Chief Openness Officer, is making great progress! We released a lengthy press release today full of good news. I include only the first two paragraphs below, which both give a sense of where we’re headed and include an awesome quote from Hooks Johnston of Valhalla Partners: NYACK, N.Y., March 24 /PRNewswire/ – Flat World Knowledge, the world’s first publisher of commercial open-source college textbooks, today announced that it received $8 million in Series A funding from Valhalla Partners, Greenhill SAVP, and High Peaks Venture Partners, with continued participation from several angel investors. ...

The Call for Papers has been announced for Open Ed 2009! After five years in Logan, UT, the conference moves this year to Vancouver! UBC will be our conference host, and Brian Lamb will be our guide. Additional conference sponsors include the BYU McKay School of Education and BCCampus. This year’s conference will run from August 12-14. Submit to present something today, and check out this year’s awesome keynote speakers as well!

Writing about how folksonomic approaches can combine with semantic web approaches to give us a less-expensive-best-of-both-worlds was some of the more useful stuff I did while at USU working with COSL. As a play on words, I called the resulting applications “folksemantic,” which became an active research line whose work was originally funded by the Mellon Foundation. Thankfully, Director Brett Shelton and the other folks at COSL are keeping the folksemantic dream alive, as well as several of the projects that were funded under that “brand name.” I received this invitation from COSL today: ...