I’m feeling grumpy today. Must be the jet lag. Why do people think that open source licenses are a kind of magic pixie dust? Here’s a little thought…. Let’s call it Wiley’s Anti-openness Thought Experiment (WATE): A major publisher publishes a beginning algebra textbook which is not very effectively designed. Most faculty avoid using it; those who do find that their students perform more poorly than the last few semesters’ students. The word gets out on the street about the poor quality of the book, and sales suffer. ...

The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning has been diligently searching for a Research Fellow to work with us on empirical studies of when, where, and why some of the technologies we associate with web2.0 (like tagging, rating, annotating, and recommendor systems) work or don’t work. I’m am as happy as a clam to announce that thanks to the generous cooperation of UBC’s Michelle Lamberson, Director of Learning Technology, Brian Lamb has joined COSL as a Research Fellow. More details and amazing results to follow… Congrats, Brian! - or condolences, we’ll see which turn out to be most appropriate :)

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? ...

For those of you who have always wanted a chance to play with eduCommons, our OpenCourseWare Management System, there is now a publicly accessible demo available at http://demo.educommons.usu.edu/. Please let me know what you think!

Call for Papers Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University Conference dates are September 26-28, 2007 Submission deadline is May 18, 2007 Conference Themes For the first several years our field focused on content production and content licensing. Today, there are thousands of full university courses and tens of thousands of learning modules available as open educational resources under open licenses like those offered by Creative Commons. However, our work isn’t finished; we’re simply nearing a checkpoint. ...

Hewlett Foundation Annual Grantees Meeting Begins: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 at 7:00 PM Ends: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 at 1:00 PM Location: 6100 Main Houston, TX 77005-1827 USA Annual meeting of Hewlett’s open education grantees and others as invited. Seems like a great group of people again this year! Tags: hewlett, open education

Mellon Foundation Annual Grantees Meeting Begins: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 at 9:00 AM Ends: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 at 1:00 PM Location: 282 Alexander Street Princeton, NJ 08540 USA The annual meeting of the Mellon Foundation RIT grantees and others as invited. Also looks like another great group of people this year! Tags: mellon, open education

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.

It’s a much better name than cc.edu: Creative Commons is seeking an Executive Director for CC Learn, a new division that will focus on education, broadly defined — from kindergarten to graduate school, to lifelong learning. The mission of this new division will be to promote vigorous networks of Open Educational Resources: materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use, modify and re-use for teaching, learning and research. ...

It’s a much better name than cc.edu: Creative Commons is seeking an Executive Director for CC Learn, a new division that will focus on education, broadly defined — from kindergarten to graduate school, to lifelong learning. The mission of this new division will be to promote vigorous networks of Open Educational Resources: materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use, modify and re-use for teaching, learning and research. ...