Open-Content

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I have a long standing interest in self-organization in informal online learning communities (e.g., the 2002 paper on Online Self-Organizing Social Systems, the 2003 paper OSOSS - Crisis / Response, the 2004 paper Sociability and Scalability in Online Learning Environments, etc.). This is an area which I continue to watch with interest. So I was extremely interested in this new article, Transport Layer Identification of P2P Super nodes: ...

My colleague and friend Gideon Burton (of silva rhetoricae fame among other things) and I have been discussing badges lately. To date the open education movement has focused almost exclusively on the production and sharing of content. Significant opportunities exist to reform or reinvent other, non-content portions of the education ecosystem with the support of open content. One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process. ...

There is some really excellent OER work going on in Utah. The two year total for our open science textbooks project is almost 4000 students. The Open High School of Utah has all the content online (and in Moodle format) for their complete 9th and 10th grade curriculum. And now a two district collaboration (Jordan-Granite Consortium) has CC licensed the collection of resources they are providing to teachers as they transition to the Common Core State Standards in mathematics: ...

The Open High School of Utah has released a new batch of openly licensed curriculum on the Open High School of Utah Opencourseware site. They now offer 20 fully online courses’ worth of content, constituting a complete 9th and 10th grade curriculum. The catalog now includes: Language Arts English 9 (A) English 9 (B) English 10 (A) English 10 (B) English Composition Mathematics Algebra A (A) Algebra A (B) Algebra B (A) Algebra B (B) Algebra 1 (A) Algebra 1 (B) Geometry (A) Geometry (B) Algebra 2 (A) Algebra 2 (B) Science Earth Systems (A) Earth Systems (B) Biology (A) Biology (B) Social Studies Current Issues Geography World Civilizations (A) World Civilizations (B) Electives Digital Photography Music Appreciation Graphic Design Health Fitness for Life Computer Technology Advanced Computer Technology Some interesting notes about the OHSU collection: ...

Work on OER for Creative Commons, full-time, and with benefits! http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29046 Creative Commons is seeking highly motivated and organized individuals to fill two positions: Senior Project Manager and Senior Project Analyst. Both positions are full-time with full benefits. Both positions will key members of the team supporting Department of Labor TAACCCT grantees. Ideal candidates have contributed to open source, open education, open licensing, and/or other open content projects, are proficient in required technologies, and possess at lease two years of work experience. Joining CC means getting the chance to interact with motivated staff and a brilliant international network of affiliates and community members. ...

As everyone knows by now, BYU has decided to end it’s relationship with Blackboard and is pursuing a course Jon Mott and I characterized as an open learning network - a group of smaller, specialized tools that can be used independently or jointly in a small-pieces-loosely-joined sort of way. One of these tools is Syllabus Builder, which does exactly what you’d expect and then some. In addition to helping faculty get all the required bits into their syllabus (e.g., Honor Code), it also does nifty things like importing the official course learning outcomes from learningoutcomes.byu.edu and adapting last year’s syllabus to this year’s dates, accounting for things like those crazy Tuesdays that are actually Fridays. ...

This took me the better part of an hour to figure out so I thought I’d share. I’ve been trying to get Matt Turner’s GetBook.py working. It’s a Python script to generate epub ebooks from the books made available online by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He wrote it primarily to make ebooks from the available Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (which is how I found it, searching for Nibley’s works in ePub format), but it will work for any of the books on the website. ...

Another full time employment opportunity in the open education space! The OpenCourseWare Consortium seeks to recruit a Community College Outreach Manager for a full time, two-year contract. The Outreach Manager will play a key role in helping the Consortium realize its goal of increasing the participation of community colleges in the open education movement. The Outreach Manager will work as part of a small multi-cultural and international team to promote increased access to and improvements in post-secondary education through the use, production and adaptation of OpenCourseWare and open educational resources. The Outreach Manager will also work closely with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources Advisory Board, comprised of thought leaders from community colleges throughout the US. The position will be based in the United States, with duties conducted primarily online. Exact location is flexible and negotiable. ...

I went to grab a graphic for a presentation from the CC Metrics wiki this morning, and had two problems. First, some overly zealous people have placed a truly “free/libre/open” line in the graph. This is just going to confuse my audience. They are hearing about CC for the first time and don’t care about the arguments zealots or purists are having about what qualifies as a truly “Free Cultural Work.” Why on EARTH did CC ever involve itself in that, anyway? ...

A recent NY Times article describes a new company called OpenEd Solutions. The article describes OpenEd Solutions’ involvement in the failed attempt to launch charter schools in New York and Newark. ...