As most of my readers know, we have been using the name eduCommons for our open source OpenCourseWare software for many years now. (See http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/ for more information). Actually, our first National Science Foundation proposal using this name went in in 2001, I believe. However, today I saw that Creative Commons Canada has launched a small initiative by the same name. I tried to leave a comment on their blog, but was required to login to comment and could not find the register/login link, so here I am forced to use trackback to get my message to them. So here’s the message: ...

UPDATE: This is in response to Stephen’s comments on my last post. If I had a dime for every time I titled an entry like this… :) Stephen, it’s nice to have you back. This article seems to still take the point of view of republishers or educators. Yes, I am an educator, and this article is written from my perspective. In fact, I titled it *My Current View* on the CC-NC Licensing Option Controversy in OCWs. :) I’m not apologetic at all about this. I want to participate in the work of expanding educational opportunity, and I can only do it as an educator. That’s what I am. ...

1. It’s an empirically verifiable fact that the greater number of rights a license reserves, the more people are willing to adopt the license. At the extremes of the continuum, almost everyone takes an “all rights reserved” approach while almost no one takes a “no rights reserved whatsoever” approach. The middle cases can be quickly verified by checking Flickr or any of a number of other sites that show the aggregate behavior of users allowed to choose between CC-licenses. I have done a little writing about this previously. ...

The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences has released the latest version of their report The Condition of Education. Of interest to homeschoolers like myself - who in many communities are looked upon as backward, less-educated, lower-income weirdos - is the section on homeschooling: In 2003, there were no measurable differences in rates of homeschooling among students when considering their household income or the level of their parents’ education. Yes, even better-educated, higher income weirdos do it. And the overall percentage of U.S. students who homeschool jumped 0.5% from 1999 to 2003 - now 2.2% of all U.S. students from Kindergarten to 12th grade are homeschooled. This is movement in the right direction… :)

Everyone, I’m currently working on a literature review of “everything related to learning objects.” The normal sources (Eric, Education Fulltext, Digital Dissertations, etc.) have turned up around 250 articles, but these sources list nothing from many of you. The databases tend to be largely constrained - rather unfortunately - to peer-reviewed works. Having been through much of the material, I know that many of the things written by you on your blogs is of better quality! Problem is, I’m having a hard time finding all your stuff. Would you please take a minute to leave the top 3 - 5 things you’ve written about learning objects in a comment (with url)? This will help insure both that (1) your work makes it into the literature review, and (2) that the “grey literature” published online without formal peer review makes a good showing in the review. ...

Here’s a great idea: reward people for the great work they’re doing on open source projects. From http://rit.mellon.org/awards/: The Program in Research in Information Technology of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invites nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). In support of the Program’s mission to encourage collaborative, open source software development within traditional Mellon constituencies, these awards—to be given for the first time in 2006—will recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. ...

Many of you have come before, and it’s back again! The USU Open Education Conference is coming up September 27-29, 2006 here in Logan, Utah. The Call for Papers is still open - http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/ - come talk about the cool things you’re doing related to Open Education!

Every now and again it’s nice to get a pat on the back. Glyn Moody has given me just that in a new article on LWN about the history of open content licensing. The story actually credits me with coining the term “open content” and creating the first open license for non-software stuff. Of course, I had believed that I had done these things all along - but it’s nice to see that someone agrees. :)

Toru Iiyoshi recently made a great post about the main tenet of open education. Here are a few of my responses: ...

Toru Iiyoshi recently made a great post about the main tenet of open education. Here are a few of my responses: ...