Open-Content

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: ...

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: ...

Heard of ThruYou yet? Lessig says, “Watch this, and you’ll understand everything and more than what I try to explain in my book [Remix].” Writing for the Huffington Post, Timothy Karr says, “What ThruYOU tells us is that all bets are off. The DNA of our media system has mutated so completely that it’s only a matter of time before our society changes as well.” Writing for this blog post, David says - Wow. ...

Here is my wrap up from last Friday’s incredible Hacking Education meeting. Books mentioned: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life What Would Google Do? Websites mentioned: http://worldwideworkshop.org/ http://scratch.mit.edu/ http://gamestarmechanic.com/GSM/web/home.html http://www.muzzylane.com/ http://edufire.com/ http://www.gamesforchange.org/ http://betterlesson.org/ http://www.facinghistory.org/ http://schoolofeverything.com/ http://www.teachstreet.com/ http://techshop.ws/ http://openhighschool.org/ And here are my tweets from the meeting. If you prefer them in context, you can see the tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&tag=hackedu&from=opencontent. All the tweets from the meeting are available at #hackedu. ...

The Brigham Young University David O. McKay School of Education’s Open Learning project has joined the OCW Consortium! We’ve only published two courses to date, but more are coming. We’re still in pilot mode, so if you find anything not working or looking out of sorts, please let me know!

I thought I would share my most recent letter to John Conyers re: HR 801. Please consider something similar to john.conyers@mail.house.gov. John, Please let me very briefly explain the two reasons I oppose HR 801. First, as a member of the taxpaying public, if I pay for research to be conducted I don’t expect to pay a second time to gain access to the results of the research. When the public pays for research, the research belongs to the public. In a time when budget shortfalls are at historically high figures, the idea that HR 801 would create or continue a situation in which taxpayers pay TWICE for access to research is appalling. The people’s representatives in government should now be looking for any and every opportunity to be better stewards of the people’s money. To the extent that government represents the people’s interest, our representatives in government should act vigorously to strengthen and uphold the NIH mandate and similar initiatives that insure the public only pays once for research. ...

John said that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. While USU OCW has earned international attention in some of the world’s greatest media outlets, it has only just this week hit USU’s own news service, as they recognize in the story OCW Receiving National, International Recognition. It’s great to see the institution paying some attention to this wonderful program. While the administration may not know it, according to Google USU OCW is the 4th most useful / important / interesting thing happening at USU, only ranking behind the university home page, the athletics page, and the extension page. No USU college or department outranks USU OCW in the eyes of Google. Therefore no USU college or department outranks OCW in the eyes of millions of individuals around the world who depend on Google to help it understand what is useful, interesting, and important. ...