Open-Content

I probably didn’t get everyone following the course, but thanks to the holiday here in the States I was able to read much more than usual. Oh how I love this class! ...

It’s time to share another round of student writing! I asked students in the Proseminar course at USU (in which all faculty take three week turns introducing students to their research interests) to put together a paper about issues related to open education. The twist (there always is one) is that they were to write as little of the paper as possible. You see, wholesale plagiarism is discouraged, but weaving together a coherent piece from ten or fifteen different extant sources is tough and an excellent chance to get some first hand experience with reuse. =) Here are links and some summaries to these re-writing exercises, in which students assembled papers from pre-existing pieces: ...

The 10th anniversary of open content is quickly approaching! The phrase “open content” was born in the late spring of 1998, and the first open content license was unleashed on the world in July of 1998 (yes, I know this first license was pretty awful - but hey, it was my first attempt!). In recognition and celebration of all those who caught the open content vision, including Creative Commons, MIT OCW, Wikipedia, Magnatune, and others, OpenContent.org is declaring 2008 “The Year of Open Content!” What should we do to celebrate? Have any ideas? We should start planning now to maximize both the partying and the potential media impact we can have in sharing the idea of open content! Regardless of whether you call your open content “free knowledge” or “opencourseware” or “open educational resources” or “free culture” or some other name, I hope that for one year we can come together to celebrate the incredible progress we’ve seen this last decade. ...

Some of you will know COSL’s Microlibrary project. For those of you who don’t, the Microlibrary is a public service project inspired by the Internet Archive’s Bookmobile which makes weekly trips to public schools in Utah, teaching kids about the history of writing and printing, getting kids involved in making books, and giving every kid in the class a book of their own choosing to keep. The Microlibrary project began last year, and so far in the 2007-2008 school year over 700 kids have participated in the presentation and received a free book. ...

Week 9 musings! Jennifer comments on The World is Flat this week, and makes a number of observations… ...

The Commonwealth of Learning recently released a chapter on open licenses for an upcoming book. However, there is one statement in the very first paragraph that leapt out at me. Some, disliking the business practices of commercial software suppliers and publishing houses, want to replace copyright with open licences. Some want to allow anyone to profit from the work of others without even telling them they are doing this. Despite the resistance to copyright by some open licence supporters, open licences are legal tools that use copyright law to achieve their objectives. It follows that for understanding open licences legal analysis is at least as important as ideological commitment. ...

Many of you know we’ve been expecting a baby. Number five for our family, in case you were keeping score at home. Well, he arrived today safe and sound! A great blessing to our family. One pic below; more available on my Flickr site. Metadata Name: Lorenzo K Chung-Chien Wiley Arrival Date: Oct 27, 2007 Length: 20 inches Weight: 7 lbs 2 oz

There’s a great (but so far, small) discussion about ways to improve the Intro to Open Ed course going on over on the wiki. There are a lot of fabulous ideas, some of which are difficult to implement in the middle of a course. However, there is one idea that we can and absolutely should implement. Megan suggests: I think it would be an improvement to have one week where we have readings and comments on our own, and the following week where we comment on others work. Gives me a chance to form my own ideas and questions, and then have feedback. ...

So recently I was “berated” (and rightly so) by one of the 50 or so people following my Introduction to Open Education course (not for credit) because a few weeks had passed since I had commented on their blog posts. I admit I have been focusing my reading / responding efforts on the few people signed up for credit, but s/he was right - I need to redouble my efforts and respond to all the stuff everyone is doing. A few weeks ago I changed my first few weeks’ practice of posting highlights here to posting comments directly on people’s blogs. However, there have been several votes for bringing back the highlights here. So, that’s what I’m doing! Here’s some of what I’ve seen and thought recently. ...

Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up. There is really amazing thinking and writing happening “out there,” and I love reading it and engaging with it. As you may guess, though, I’m making sure to give feedback and additional prompts to the students who are registered for credit first, and then reading as much of the rest of your work when I can, and commenting when possible. ...