Open-Content

For the next two weeks I’ll be pointing to video highlights from last year’s Open Education 2007 conference in order to whet your appetite for this year’s meeting. First up on the hit parade is Brian Lamb’s incredible keynote from last year’s conference. BTW, you can also see the Rick Noblenski “blasting caps are dangerous” video mentioned by Brian in the keynote, which was developed by some of my students at USU. (If you haven’t seen Nixon vs Kennedy debate on blogs vs wikis or open water, also produced by students from the same class, I’d highly recommend them as well.) ...

As reported on Ars Technica, a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision has given some legal teeth to open licenses: The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. ...

A good friend suggested to me yesterday that openly publishing my course materials may not be possible at BYU due to the Brigham Young University Intellectual Property Policy. Curious that such a restriction on my ability to openly share my course materials might exist, I explored the policy in more detail. Here’s what I found. 1. Course materials are Creative Works as defined by the IPP: Intellectual properties are divided into two categories: technical works and creative works. Technical works include intellectual properties that are generally of a scientific, engineering, or technical nature - such as patentable or unpatentable inventions, devices, machines, processes, methods, and compositions; computer software; and university collections. Creative works include all intellectual properties not covered in technical works that are of an artistic, scholarly, instructional, assessment, or entertainment nature. Examples of creative works might include creative productions, such as works of art or design; musical scores; books, poems, and other types of scholarly or creative writings; films; video and audio recordings; and instructional materials, such as textbooks and multimedia programs. All computer software is included in technical works except that which is clearly developed for entertainment or for instructional purposes, e.g., electronic textbooks and textbook supplements, classroom and self-study tutorials. (Section I Para 1) ...

Open Education 2008 Conference registration is now open! This year’s event will be special in a number of ways (more on this soon!), so please come join us for a fabulous event dedicated to open education and - this year - the ten year anniversary of open content!

People love to analogize / equate open education to open source. There are huge problems with this way of thinking… The one that comes first to mind is that many changes to an open source program can be empirically tested to objectively determine whether or not they improve the program (by increasing its speed, decreasing its file size, etc.) at almost no cost (by recompiling the programs and running automated tests), but many changes to an open educational resource cannot be judged objectively (did changing these words really engage learners more? do these new examples communicate the educational content better?) and even when they can be meaningfully tested, this can only happen at rather high costs in time and resources (e.g., setting up and running usability tests or “horse race” research studies involving enough students to produce statistically meaningful results). Of course, this one difference in the community’s ability to judge whether adaptations should be kept or rejected makes a mountain of difference in our ability to collaboratively develop educational resources rationally and objectively. I could go on about the differences, but they aren’t actually the point of the post. ...

I heard this quote at the iSummit today, and it completely sums up what we’re trying to do with the Open High School of Utah: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

I probably would not have named this the ‘Wiley Wiki Design’, but when someone like Leigh names something after you, how do you refuse? =) I’ve been meaning to write a little about this design I’ve been using for the last several years and how it has evolved, but recent proddings by Leigh, Teemu, and Bron have finally gotten me off the virtual starting line. Since Fall 2004 I’ve been running my courses in the open via the wiki at OpenContent (course listing). In the theme of this blog, Iterating Toward Openness, these courses started “basically open” and have become more “completely open” (note more completely open, not actually completely open). What I mean is that the original courses had their syllabus and course content out from behind a password with permissions for people to edit. I was disappointed that, even when you put it in a wiki, students still don’t feel empowered to edit your syllabus. They had little trouble editing the online textbook I wrote for the course, though, which was great. And they all wrote their homework assignments on publicly readable blogs. In one of these early classes Stephen ran one of my student’s assignments in OLDaily, which brought the broader community into the conversation those students were having. Strangely enough, the next week all the students’ writing was longer and more thoughtful. Funny what the pressures of peer review will do… So we might say that these first iterations, the 2004-2006 period, were open in terms of their content and discussions, but only students at USU could really participate in the classes. ...

Everyone involved with a university understands the problems with the textbook industry, but it’s encouraging to see mainstream media continue to cover Flat World Knowledge’s approach to solving these problems in a sustainable manner. Online ‘open textbooks’ save students cash in the USA Today Coming This Fall: Free Textbooks in Time FWK is an example of openness done not for openness’ sake, but because an open approach is actually the best solution to the problem at hand; Pragmatism over zeal.

There’s a really interesting company here in Utah valley called Agilix that’s doing some intriguing work in support of the developing world. From today’s press release: Agilix Labs, Inc. announced the extension of learning solutions to unserved and underserved markets with the introduction of its GoCourse Schoolmate product, a self-contained client-server learning system that supports education initiatives in situations and environments with limited or non-existent Internet connectivity. “This represents an extension of our GoCourse platform to address the needs of the 95% of the Earth’s population that falls outside the reach of broadband access,” said Curt Allen, CEO of Agilix Labs. “Emerging markets will for the first time enjoy an eLearning experience that isn’t limited by the unavailability of Internet access.” ...

For those of you that contacted us about problems submitting by the June 30 deadline, we’ve extended the submission deadline until Friday, July 4th at midnight Mountain Daylight Time. Even if you emailed in an abstract and extended abstract, we still need you to submit your proposal via the website. We’ve re-enabled proposal submission; you’ll need to create an account before you can submit your proposal: http://cosl.usu.edu/ocs/index.php/opened/opened2008/schedConf/cfp We don’t anticipate extending the submission deadline beyond July 4 – so please submit your proposals right away! Many thanks… Looking forward to seeing you all there!