Open-Content

(Note: This is a draft of my upcoming BackBurner column in Tech Trends. I’d appreciate your comments.) In the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, S. R. Hadden teaches Ellie Arroway “the first rule of government spending: why have one when you can have two for twice the price?” If only! When it comes to curriculum materials like textbooks, practice exercises, test item banks, instructional videos, and online simulations, our government and school districts are more than happy to pay for them again, and again, and a hundred thousand times again, year after year. ...

FWK, the open source textbook publishing company, has come out of private beta! Find out what all the excitement is about at http://flatworldknowledge.com/. As a quick recap, FWK textbooks are much like traditional textbooks in that they are: beautiful looking printed books, written by world-class authors, supported with all the supplementals and teaching aids (like an instructor manual, slides, and assessments) teachers expect, and available as review copies (for teachers), FWK textbooks are UNLIKE traditional textbooks in that they are: ...

I’m currently involved in two special issues about open education, and if you read this blog the odds are you should submit something to at least one of them! John Hilton and I are guest editing a special issue of IRRODL about Openness and the Future of Higher Education, with a specific emphasis on things like policy, accreditation, and sustainability, including: Critical perspectives on open education Issues of affordability and openness Openness and accreditation Open models for awarding credit or degrees Open source, open access, or open education policy in higher education Open teaching / massively open online courses (“MOOC”) Sustainable models of creating and sharing open educational resources Check out the full IRRODL Call for Papers. Proposals are due this Thursday, but full papers aren’t due until May 1. ...

Let’s make the CC By-NC-SA versus First Sale battle more specific. Jamie Boyle’s new book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed CC By-NC-SA and is available for purchase from Amazon. If I purchase a copy of the book from Amazon - in other words, if I come to legally own a copy of the book - do I have the right to resell it for any amount of money I can get for it? ...

A short version, a long version, and a surprise. The short version: who has precedence, the CC NC clause or the First Sale doctrine? The long version: First, a little background on the First Sale doctrine from Wikipedia (normal caveats apply): The first-sale doctrine is a limitation on copyright that was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908 and subsequently codified in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 109. The doctrine allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained. That means that copyright holder’s rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy end once that copy is sold, as long as no additional copies are made. This doctrine is also referred to as the “first sale rule” or “exhaustion rule”… In 1909 the codification originally applied to copies that had been sold (hence the “first sale doctrine”), but in the 1976 Act it was made to apply to any “owner” of a lawfully made copy or phonorecord (recorded music) regardless of whether it was first sold. So, for example, if the copyright owner licenses someone to make a copy (such as by downloading), then that copy (meaning the tangible medium of expression onto which it was copied under license, be it a hard drive or removable storage medium) may lawfully be sold, lent, traded, or given away. ...

What do you think about while you stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep? Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about license compatibility issues. Specifically, I’ve been wondering how I can communicate to people the difficulty copyleft causes for would-be remixers. Until you get knee-deep in it, you can’t really understand the pain. And how many people ever really get knee-deep in it? So I wondered… how can I bring that pain to the common man? And in addition to “bringing the pain,” how can I effectively educate them about licensing compatibility issues and instruct them in the art of creating legal remixes? ...

Still waiting for mine to arrive, but Geeks Bearing Gifts looks to be absolutely fabulous. Whether you like him or not, Ted Nelson is probably one of the most visionary people of our age. As I’ve written about in a number of places, his work on primedia, transclusion, and reuse generally is the foundation much of my own thinking is built upon. If only learning objects had been built on Ted’s way of thinking instead of object-oriented programming, we might be doing something useful with learning objects even now… /me looks wistfully into the distance… Hopefully it’s not too late for OERs (which are just learning objects with an open license) to learn the lessons of Ted’s visions. ...

In his commentary on CC’s new report on the state of OER licensing, Stephen finds an opportunity to express his continuing support for the noncommercial clause: In the full report you find their recommendations, including machine readability of license terms, license standardization and license compatibility (which is once again essentially the recommendation that licensors drop the ’non-commercial’ clause (p. 16). This gets tiresome. Proponents can recommend this until they’re blue in the face. They can disguise this ongoing campaign under the heading of ‘research studies’. But the fact remains, especially outside purely capitalist economies, people have an aversion to commercial use…. ...

I finally met Michael Feldstein at the recent The Open Forum 2008. It was a really fun meeting with incredible food (warm cookies and cold milk for the morning break? are you kidding me?!?). However, the most personally rewarding part of the meeting for me came afterward, in Michael’s brain dump about the meeting, in which he writes: David Wiley and Vijay Kumar are my new heroes: I am not an edupunk. That is not a value judgment; it is simply an observation about my personal style when it comes to fomenting revolution. There are many good edupunks in the blogosphere (and elsewhere) who I respect but could never emulate. David and Vijay are different. One the one hand, they are fiercely and relentlessly idealistic. They do not settle for a world that is merely somewhat better. But on the other hand, they have managed to crawl deep into the belly of the machine and begin taking it apart from the inside out. They are equally comfortable, gracious, and fluent whether they are talking to a middle school teacher or a head of state. That is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up. ...

This should be the largest of all indicators that there is a huge problem with CC’s NC clause - Creative Commons is currently hosting a survey asking the community to help them understand what the term means. I mean, they’re only the authors of the license! :) Head on over and let your voice be heard.