Jane Park at Creative Commons is reporting that there will be a session on copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009. The meeting will occur next month in Monterrey, Mexico.
The session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations may include current US work exploring issues of Fair Use in OER, but is, naturally, a much larger conversation encompassing many different legal jurisdictions.
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UNESCO has just released historic publications focus on OER experiences and dialogues around the world. First, the fruit of the OER Community collective reflection in the initial IIEP forum held over a 6-week period in late 2005 has been published in print form as Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace. It has been released in print as a contribution to the history of the OER movement, and to make the content available to those who may have difficulty consulting the web site
The publication is available through UNESCO Publishing Significantly. This is the first UNESCO publication released with a Creative Commons license.
Second, the current issue of Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning is a special issue on Open Educational Resources. The issue is intended to provide an introduction to the emerging OER movement and its implications for education systems and institutions, educators and learners. The articles describe a range of initiatives and issues, and articulate the vision of some of the most committed and passionate champions of Open Educational Resources. Routledge, Open Learning’s publisher, has agreed to make this particular issue of the journal freely accessible to all, in recognition of its open theme and the importance of the issues involved
David Wiley notes on his blog that development on the “folksemantic” tools is still ongoing. Wiley discusses an invitation he received to participate in a March 26 online meeting regarding the integration of OCW Finder, OER Recommender and Luvfoo. More about the meeting can be found on the OER Recommender site. From Wiley’s blog post:
If I may say so, the OER Recommender is probably one of the single most valuable pieces of OER technology in existence today. I hope to see you at the online meeting where we can learn where these tools are going next. If I know the COSL folks, they’ll be headed to incredible places…
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Tagged COSL, event, ocw, oer, open content, Open Education
Peter Suber is reporting on Open Access News that MIT has adopted an open access mandate. The move comes as no surprise, given MIT’s historic role in OpenCourseWare. Nonetheless, it is significant move forward for open access. From Suber’s commentary on the announcement:
- This is big. Another of the world’s great research universities has an OA mandate. Unlike Harvard and Stanford, which now have OA mandates for some of their schools, the MIT mandate is university-wide. Moreover, while the votes at Harvard and Stanford have been unanimous, this is the first university-wide unanimous faculty vote.
- Like the Harvard policy, the MIT policy allows faculty to opt-out. Faculty must make separate requests for separate works, and must give a reason.
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Tagged higher education, open access, open content, openness
Osor.Eu is reporting that the Ministry of Education in Valencia is funding an open source tool to teach children geography. More specifically, it will combine “geographic data, thematic maps and games.” From the article:
The application is already being used by school children in Valencia and on the island of La Palma, explains one of the developers Alvaro Anguix, who has been working on the application for the past six months. He says that in Valencia Edusig is being used in all schools that use the local GNU/Linux distribution Lliurex. On La Palma the software will be used in combination with the GNU/Linux distribution Meduxa. “The application is the same, but the games and the thematic maps are different.” Both games and the maps are developed locally.
Virtual Worlds News is reporting that Daden Unlimited is launching PIVOTE, an open-source tool for building virtual worlds for training. The project was part of a JISC funded initiative called PREVIEW. PIVOTE has undergone testing in paramedic training, with more to come. From the article:
“The nice thing is it separates out the in-world skills, which is what we have, from the education and training skills that the universities and tutors have,” he explained. “It’s hard to involve teachers at the moment in the virtual world because of the skills they need. But someone recently sent us the flow chart and we were able to get it into the system within a few hours.”
Diverse, a magazine related to issues in higher education, has published an article on OCW. The first part of the article is largely introductory; mostly relating the history of MIT OCW. However, the last part of the article quotes Gary Matkin as he explains how UC Irvine OCW efforts differs from MIT. From the article:
“MIT’s courses can range from a syllabus with a few resources to a 450-page html-page course with self-tests. At UC Irvine we have a set standard for all OCW that requires it to have a complete set of learning materials, be organized in a coherent way, and a narrative thread throughout.”
Phillipp Schmidt has announced on his blog an upcoming open education course. The course is a collaborative effort between the P2PU, CCLearn and Mozilla. There is room for 20 participants and the course will last six weeks. From the course home page on the MozillaWiki:
Participation is open to anyone with an interest in the open education platform of the future. We are asking participants to tell us a little bit about their backgrounds, and sketch out an idea for the project they’d like to work on during the course.
Jorum has released a new report on OER. The link to the report appeared to be broken this morning. OpenEdBlogger contacted Jorum about fixing the link, and received an e-mail indicating it was fixed. However, after trying the link for a second time, it appears to still be broke. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next day or two. Jorum describes the report as the following:
- definitions of open being used by the various institutions, projects and services
- The development of open learning and teaching materials globally and the current state of play
- Where institutions, projects and services are providing course materials on open access, whether they provide all of their materials or just tasters
- The lessons that we can draw from this generally
Update: As reader Scott Leslie pointed out, the report is dated 2007. Jorum was contacted and informed that the report has been unpublished up until this time, but is still relevant. Thanks to Scott for pointing this out.
West and Daniel relate the development of the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) in the most recent issue of Open Learning. In particular the authors discuss the “Transnational Qualifications Framework,” which is an initiative to help courses and qualifications transfer between countries and institutions. From the article:
The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) is an initiative of the education ministers of the 32 small countries that account for two-thirds of Commonwealth member states. It is not a new tertiary institution but a world-spanning collaborative network for strengthening and developing the existing tertiary institutions in these states (Figure 1). Ministers asked the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to facilitate the project.
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Tagged e-learning, higher education, Open Education, policy
