For those of you who have always wanted a chance to play with eduCommons, our OpenCourseWare Management System, there is now a publicly accessible demo available at http://demo.educommons.usu.edu/. Please let me know what you think!
I’m very pleased to announce the opening of Novell OpenCourseWare today, as part of Novell’s annual BrainShare conference. This is the first foray into open education by a for-profit training services group, so props to Novell for showing that corporations can take the idea of “openness” beyond open source software and into open educational resources. Novell OCW runs eduCommons, COSL’s open source OCW management software, and is an extremely pleasant partnership between USU COSL and Novell Training Services.
Ever wanted to contribute to the eduCommons project, but don’t write code? No worries! It’s easy to contribute to the eduCommons effort with your language skills! The eduCommons translation files contain a list of English phrases followed by a place for you to type the translated phrase in your language. Here’s an example from the French translation of eduCommons: msgid “Course Discussion Summary” msgstr “Résumé de la discussion du cours” ...
As most of my readers know, we have been using the name eduCommons for our open source OpenCourseWare software for many years now. (See http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons/ for more information). Actually, our first National Science Foundation proposal using this name went in in 2001, I believe. However, today I saw that Creative Commons Canada has launched a small initiative by the same name. I tried to leave a comment on their blog, but was required to login to comment and could not find the register/login link, so here I am forced to use trackback to get my message to them. So here’s the message: ...
1. It’s an empirically verifiable fact that the greater number of rights a license reserves, the more people are willing to adopt the license. At the extremes of the continuum, almost everyone takes an “all rights reserved” approach while almost no one takes a “no rights reserved whatsoever” approach. The middle cases can be quickly verified by checking Flickr or any of a number of other sites that show the aggregate behavior of users allowed to choose between CC-licenses. I have done a little writing about this previously. ...
Lots going around late today about Adam Bosworth’s closing keyonte (links to audio) at the MySQL conference. I enjoyed Ryan Tomayko’s writeup most, especially this deceivingly simple line: Systems that were designed through observation of the web and/or in adherence to the core principles of the web must be more suitable to the web than those that were not. This recognition will either make or break the entire open education movement, including eduCommons and the OpenCourseWares.
Our annual conference (which several of you attended last year, thanks!) is back. Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education will take place September 28 - 30, 2005 in beautiful Logan, Utah. I’m *really* excited about the conference this year. A few highlights: Keynote speakers include John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information, etc.) and Yochai Benkler (Coase’s Penguin, etc.) and one other (but we can’t say who yet). The Hewlett Foundation will be holding its annual open education fundees meeting in conjunction with the conference, which will bring several super interesting participants to the conference Finally, the group of universities that recently met at MIT to discuss their OpenCourseWare projects will be meeting again in conjunction with the conference, which will bring even more people doing really excellent open education work I’ll be able to say more later, but this is going to be an absolutely awesome conference. I hope you come! More details are available on the conference website. Registration isn’t open yet, but I’m so excited I just had to share…
A story in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education (paid registration required, ironically enough) discusses the growing momentum behind the OpenCourseWare movement, and the meeting at MIT two weeks ago. As described in the article, at this meeting several universities at varying levels of progress into their OCWs met to talk about best practices, building additional momentum behind the movement, etc. Attendees included reps from MIT, Utah State University, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Tufts, Michigan, the Universia consortium, the China Open Resources for Education consortium, and a new consortium of Japanese schools. Some other “name” schools who are dipping their toes in the pool were there are well. It’s nice to see the mainstream press following what we’re doing, even if they don’t completely “get it” yet.
A kindly phone call alerted me late today that EduCommons.org is now running porn links. “Great,” I thought, “we’ve been compromised.” If only that were the truth. The truth is much more painful. Somehow ownership of the domain educommons.org has mysteriously changed hands. And not only did the thieves steal the domain, they are still running the EduCommons logo at the top and have maintained some of the language from the original site. Effect - to the casual user educommons.org is still educommons.org. “And oh, what’s this!?! David has porn links on his sites now?!?” ...
Here’s another SourceForge for educational materials project – http://opencourse.org/. They’ve beaten us to the punch and actually opened their doors to three projects! Congratulations to the OpenCourse team, who are funded by NSF/NSDL monies. Our EduCommons project (funded by the Hewlett Foundation) won’t be ready for several months yet. It’s good to see good ideas being implemented all around. I know there’s at least one other group planning similar software…. In other news, OLS (our social software which wraps around OCW) will be opening in early April. Anyone interested in participating in testing during the next two weeks, please drop me an email (*not* a comment).