Open-Content

Last October Doc Searls gave the Ostrom Memorial Lecture for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. In his lecture he carries on what I believe to be an incredibly unfortunate tradition. I’ll call it, “the dance of the not commons.” It’s an incredibly simple dance. Step one (right foot): state that something (e.g., the internet, knowledge, OER) is a commons. Step two (left foot): immediately enumerate the many ways that the thing you just called a commons is totally, completely, orthogonally different from a commons. Here’s the core of the dance, with my color commentary in parentheses. ...

Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. When I use the phrase “reducing friction” in this context, I mean taking things that are needlessly difficult and making them much easier. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridiculously easy for students, faculty, and others to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of OER. In this post, I want to talk about making it ridiculously easy for faculty to adopt OER. ...

I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those points of friction. I’ve been writing about continuous improvement in the context of OER for a few years now. To date, I’ve written about and worked on reducing the friction involved in a relatively centralized model for continuous improvement of OER - a “top down” approach, if you will: ...

Despite my best efforts, I spent much of the recent holiday break thinking about the eviscerated definition of OER in the final version of the UNESCO OER Recommendation. As I fretted about the holes in the final language and the size of the various trucks you could drive through them, I also reflected on the 5Rs. I revisited them with a critical eye and tried to read them adversarially. If I were to try to drive a truck - or roll a matchbox car - through the 5Rs, how would I do that? ...

Last year I created an un-styled, (hopefully) easy-to-reuse slide deck about Creative Commons, the 5Rs, and OER. I’ve been a vocal advocate for CC since the day it launched, and have been answering questions about the licenses for years. I helped design the new Creative Commons Certification course, taught the first two sections offered, and am the Education Fellow at CC. Suffice it to say that I have a pretty good sense of what the most common misconceptions are about the SA, NC, and ND conditions of the CC licenses. One of my main goals in making this presentation was to give people a simple way to accurately understand them. ...

I suppose it’s time for end of year reflections. In many ways my year was dominated by three things - my family’s move from Utah to West Virginia, donating part of my liver to Cable, and closing down the annual Open Education Conference after fifteen years. Each of these took huge amounts of time and energy. Each took an incredibly large toll on me physically and emotionally. But these weren’t the only things I did this year. I also caught up on things others have apparently known about for quite a long time, but that were new to me. I thought I’d share some of these things so that, if you don’t know about them yet, you can find them more quickly than I did. ...

The tl;dr I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. That piece was based on the text of the most recent public draft (which I will call the “public draft” below), which many of us believed to be the document the 40th Congress unanimously approved. However, a number of extraordinarily significant changes were made to the document between the public draft of the document and the version of the document on which members voted (which I will call the “final version” below). For those of you who don’t want to read the full analysis below, here’s the key takeaway: ...

I’m leaving this post online solely for historical / archive purposes. See this updated post instead. There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). I want to highlight some of the parts of the Recommendation that caught my eye, reading both from a personal perspective as well as my Lumen perspective. First, and it will surprise no one that this is the first item on my list, is the definition. Regardless of what other individuals, institutions, or organizations may think or say, UNESCO is the creator of the term “open educational resources” and, as its creator, UNESCO’s definition of OER is the canonical definition. In the Recommendation which has now been unanimously adopted by UNESCO member states around the world, OER continue to be defined solely in terms of copyright status: ...

Preface Here’s a trivia question for you: which American organization has produced the largest number of open textbooks? Here’s a hint: they’ve produced more than double the number of books created by the next largest producer. Here’s another hint: they haven’t created a new open textbook since 2012. You may have thought the answer was the non-profit OpenStax, who have published over 40 open textbooks. But the correct answer is actually commercial publisher Flat World Knowledge, who published over 100 textbooks under Creative Commons licenses. Although they would eventually change their model to focus on traditionally copyrighted textbooks, FWK’s over 100 openly licensed textbooks can still be found archived around the web in places like the Open Textbook Library and on the Saylor Foundation’s website. The open textbooks created by this commercial publisher are still being used and even adapted, providing the foundations for books like Research Methods in Psychology - 2nd Canadian Edition, Introductory Chemistry - 1st Canadian Edition, Fundamentals of Business - Canadian Edition, and Writing for Success - 1st Canadian Edition, among others. ...

I read an article back in June (reference below) that prompted some memories and catalyzed some additional thoughts. In the mid-late aughts and early teens, when I was still serving as chair for doctoral students, I often had conversations like this: Student (bursting into my office): I have an exciting idea for my dissertation research! Me: Let’s hear it! Student: I’ll study whether students learn better with OER than with traditional course materials! ...