Open-Content

One of the most amazing quotes I’ve seen in a while comes from Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs of the Association of American Publishers, in an article about Open Access to Research. [Mr. Alder] rejected the idea that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying that it was in the national interest for it to be restricted to those who could pay subscription fees. “Remember — you’re talking about free online access to the world,” he said. “You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.” ...

Many of you have come before, and it’s back again! The USU Open Education Conference is coming up September 27-29, 2006 here in Logan, Utah. The Call for Papers is still open - http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/ - come talk about the cool things you’re doing related to Open Education!

Every now and again it’s nice to get a pat on the back. Glyn Moody has given me just that in a new article on LWN about the history of open content licensing. The story actually credits me with coining the term “open content” and creating the first open license for non-software stuff. Of course, I had believed that I had done these things all along - but it’s nice to see that someone agrees. :)

Thanks to Mike Smith who pointed me to this summary of a talk given by Eve Gray at the Creative Commons South Africa launch. Eve is from the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, and: discussed how HSRC’s early experiments with open access publishing paid off. As they made their research papers available for free download, the print revenues went up by 270%. This is exactly the same experience I had with my first learning objects book back in the day. Nice to see more data coming in to support this argument.

I pulled these paragraphs from my Commission testimony in the interest of time and not blurring my central message (higher education needs to stay in step with society). I submitted this recommendation to the Commission separately, and thought you might enjoy it. I would appreciate comments / thoughts: Affordability. Part of the rising cost of higher education for students is the ever-increasing cost of textbooks - textbooks can add as much as $1000 per year to the cost of college. The National Association of College Bookstores says prices of college textbooks have risen nearly 40 percent in the past five years. In a survey of textbooks by the California Student Public Interest Research Group, new editions of textbooks cost 58 percent more than previous versions, with an average cost of over $100 per book. (Crane, 2004; Pressler, 2004). The impact of these costs is especially severe on low-income students. According to the General Accounting Office, the costs of textbooks represents 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees at public four year schools, and almost a full three quarters of the cost of tuition and fees at 2 year public schools where low-income students are more likely to enroll (Bershears, 2005). ...

A couple of quick links to folks covering the Commission meeting where I got to testify last week: http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/02/2006020601n.htm http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/06/commission I think they liked it! I hope there is a positive impact…

So, I’m working on making the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license easier for people to understand as part of my fellowship at CIS. I’d appreciate your thoughts on the following language. Once we get the language right, we’ll be adding visuals. Educators are sharers by nature - the very essence of teaching is sharing what we know with others. And while none of us has the time to work with as many students as we wish we could, the Internet affords us an incredible opportunity to share our educational materials with as many people as are interested. ...

So the Commission meeting is over and my testimony is given. There were three speakers on the panel on “Innovative Teaching and Learning Strategies.” First was Tom Magnanti, Dean of Engineering at MIT. He spoke very clearly about the benefits of MIT OCW and the role of OCW in the future of education. He recommended the creation of a national OCW repository including materials from secondary / high school levels through graduate school. ...

Following up on Steven’s post Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources from a few days ago, here is my paper for the OECD meeting in Sweden next week. I had a length constraint of 2-3 pages, which fortunately Steven didn’t have. ...

One of the risks of writing things is that your readers will, whether through ill-will or simple misunderstanding, completely miss whatever message you’re trying to communicate. Such is the case with my RIP-ping on Learning Objects post. I must have read ten blog posts or emails now thanking me for putting the nail in the learning objects coffin. Are people even reading what I’m writing? Let me quote myself: There have been lots of articles around the blogosphere of late ringing the death bell for learning objects. It’s hard to tell if they’re right or not…. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these declarations since they started appearing, and I’ve come to the somewhat troubling conclusion that I don’t think I care if learning objects are dead or not…. So whether learning objects are dead or not, I couldn’t say. And to some extent, who cares? ...