Policy

Open education seems to be getting some traction here in Utah. In addition to our recently launched Utah Open Textbooks project targeting high school science, I was very pleased to see open education generally, and the Open High School of Utah model specifically, recommended prominently in the Utah Advisory Commission to Optimize State Government’s Report to Governor Herbert issued last week. The Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative gets a mention also, although I don’t believe it has a website yet. ...

I recently received a copy of a letter the US Chamber of Commerce is circulating in opposition to H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act. Since I decided to respond to the letter at length, I thought I would share my response with the community. Below I quote their letter in full with paragraph-by-paragraph responses to their argument. Dear Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than three million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region, opposes H.R. 5037, the “Federal Research Public Access Act,” and urges you not to bring it before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for consideration. ...

As reported by the OA Librarian, Open Education News, and others, the Federal Research Public Access Act has been introduced in the US House. taxpayeraccess.org has more detail and information about how you can get involved. The awesome Govtracker is currently showing H. R. 5037 has having been referred to the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform. Go check and see if you have a congressman on the subcommittee. I do! I sent him this letter this morning. ...

I’ve recently heard some conversation trying to sully or tarnish the idea of openness by associating it with socialism. (Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like in the US today the standard response is to label it “socialist,” despite the fact that many labelers can neither define nor spell the term properly.) However, from my perspective some of the most important forms of openness are simply about obeying one of the standard laws of capitalism: if I pay for a good or service, I am entitled to the good or service. Could the market (or society) survive if we didn’t obey this rule? ...

As pointed out in a post on the Brookings Institution blog, large-scale federally-funded OER won’t be coming this year: Buried beneath the much-deserved hullaballoo over the passage of health care reform were big changes that the reconciliation bill makes to the federal student loan program… Less noticed, however, is a provision that was in the House-passed Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) this fall, but dropped from the final version that passed last night…. [W]ith Pell Grant spending up due to the poor state of the economy, and the pressure to keep the total cost of the bill down while achieving expanded health insurance coverage and deficit reduction, the AGI got left on the cutting-room floor. ...

On Friday Stephen wrote a brief, interesting piece on “playing the religion card” in the realm of public policy. I think I agree with what he wrote, and want to state my view explicitly for the record as a way of . Excerpting from Stephen’s post: [N]o particular religion can or should have the means to impose its particular view on society. This is not to say that people can not or should not live and represent their moral and spiritual values. Nobody has a problem with that, not even the atheists. Rather, it means that if you advocate “policy x” because your religious views compel you to do so, your advocacy of “policy x” will have to be on the basis of its own merits, not because “Canada was founded based on the principles of religion y”…. Play the religion card with great caution. You may be religious; I don’t care. But when you try to cram religion into government, I get very very upset. ...

Last year I began having conversations with Utah public school educators about sharing their educational materials as open educational resources. The conversation generally went like this: Me: Would you be willing to share the lesson plans and other materials you create with others for them to reuse? Teacher: Sure! Me: Great! The best way to do that is by applying this Creative Commons license to your work. Teacher: A copyright license? ...

Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies - both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities. I am giddy with excitement to see some of my own published articles beginning to appear in BYU’s institutional repository - they now have an open, permanent, curated home and I can link to them with confidence. And the whole world can and will be able to access and read them, legally, in perpetuity! This is the way science should work. ...

A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/). Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool. ...

Earlier this year I blogged about what I thought should go into an open textbook bill (with clarifications the next day). I’m extremely pleased that Senator Durbin has introduced a bill which closely resembles these recommendations and therefore, to my mind, is on exactly the right track. You can read Durbin’s remarks as he introduced the bill, and then study the full text of S. 1714 on GovTrack (where you can also subscribe to a feed of all bill-related activity). ...