Open-Content

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: ...

Keynoting a SBIE conference in Fortaleza, Brazil, I met a woman who coordinated the translation of almost half of the Instructional Use of Learning Objects into Portuguese. I love open licenses!

D’Arcy had a great post tonight about the three parts of open education. It validates something I’ve been wondering to myself about for a while. While I use slightly different language, you can me my take on the three toward the end of my Open Ed 2008 General Session presentation (start at slide 100): Ten Years of Open Content View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: history content) ...

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. ...

No time for a long post today, just a quick announcement that the first info about our OER Recommender (funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation) went online today: http://www.oerrecommender.org/. The underlying technology, Suggestr, will be open sourced as soon as we have a minute to breathe.

From the Open Education 2007 Conference Committee: We’re pleased to announce that the conference registration for Open Education 2007 is now open. The early registration deadline is Friday, September 7 – after that date all of the rates will go up. So please register early! To register online, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/registration. To view the preliminary program online (subject to change), please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/program. To view details about how to travel to Utah State University, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/travel. ...

Thousands of people complain that the term of copyright is too long. They point out that documents like the US Constitution make it plain that the term of copyright should be finite, and that it is absolutely critical that copyrighted educational content and other cultural artifacts eventually enter the public domain. This was recently demonstrated by the way people rallied around Lessig’s challenge of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act in the US. However, it seems that - deep down - some people don’t really value the public domain. When given the option of placing works in the public domain early (ahead of when their copyright would expire), they will instead say: ...

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