Dan Colman at Open Culture is asking people to e-mail or comment on how they are using open courses. From the blog post:
Ok, folks, give a hand and let me know your thoughts. Please feel free to write your thoughts in the comments below, or write us at mail [at] openculture.com.
Thanks to Jeff Cobb and Stephen Downes for providing links.
Posted in Open Education
Rutger’s The Daily Targum has a letter to the editor regarding open textbooks from Addie Adebayo, an intern for New Jersey Public Interest Research Groups Student Chapters. From the letter:
Textbookfacts.org asserts that the average cost undergraduates pay is $650 annually — still too high, especially in these economic times of struggling for jobs that may afford people a good higher education.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, higher education, Open Education, open textbooks
Bill Hooker at Open Reading Frame has a blog post on what’s wrong with copyleft. Hooker argues that copyleft is detrimental to future remix, especially when mixing multiple works. From the blog post:
Although copyleft and NC clauses achieve their own immediate goals, widespread license incompatibility1 means that they often (perhaps usually) defeat part of the larger purpose of Open licensing. The use case where this is most prominent is remix2, since reuse and redistribution of individual copylefted or NC-licensed works or their derivatives is usually just a matter of retaining the original license. But multiple works can only be recombined into new works if their respective licenses are compatible — otherwise, there’s no licensing option for the remix that doesn’t violate the licensing terms of at least one of the ingredients. Not only that, but if any of the works in the mix carries a copyleft license, that license takes over the entire remix and everything downstream of it, thus propagating the incompatibility problem.
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Access News.
Posted in Open Education
Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons is announcing the second round of the Noncommercial questionnaire. The first questionnaire was directed to open content creators, and the second will be directed to open content users. The link to the questionnaire appears to be broken, but Linksvayer indicates it takes about 15-25 minutes to complete. From the post:
While to our knowledge this is the first empirical research project to tackle understanding how people define “noncommercial use”, we hope it is only the first of many efforts to explore the many dimensions of the subject. We will release the raw empirical data collected and some early reports from the first (creator) questionnaire next week, and will release a report on the full study and all data this summer. We hope others will be able to mine and build on this data.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, copy right, copyright, creative commons
Michelle Thorne at Creative Commons is reporting that the Creative Commons licenses have now been adapted to Czech law. From the article:
CC Czech has gathered a lot of supporters since its inception last year. Besides the project’s institutional hosts, Iuridicum remedium, the National Library in the Czech Republic, and the Union of Independent Authors, CC Czech has also received endorsement from the Copyright Department of the Ministry of Culture and Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University of Prague.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, copy right, copyright, creative commons
Denise Covey has an article in Portal regarding open access at Carnegie Mellon (reported by Peter Suber at Open Access News). Covey reports that self-archiving at Carnegie Mellon is used prolifically by a small percentage of faculty, leaving room for improvement. Copyright policy was also not followed as rigidly as hoped. Not all the results were negative. From the article:
At least 42% of the faculty has self-archived one or more publications and the practice has penetrated all colleges and all but the History and Music departments. A surprising 40% of the content cited on faculty web pages is available open access, including half of the conference papers and over half of the technical reports.
Sunnie Kim has posted an audio interview with David Wiley on the blog OER360. The interview covers a wide range of topics including the Open High School of Utah, Flat World Knowledge and the financial impact of opencourseware.
Nicole at the JISC Access Management Team blog has a new post about identity management and open educational resources. She also presents a small table that compares OER to scholarly publishing. From the blog post:
I started by asking myself what is different about Open Educational Resources to the Open Access agenda. There are of course lots of answers to this question – but I focused on the medium. OER is very much a part of the social software / social networking / web 2.0 world that encourages people to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and encourages others to comment, annotate, reuse and repurpose that stuff. It is about changing the nature of the way we perceive content. The Open Access agenda does not as a whole look to change the concept of the published article; instead it wishes to change the business model by which the article is made available to its target audience.
Stephen Downes points to Scitable, a website that publishes peer-reviewed science articles for free. The website is supported by Nature Publishing Group. The articles are not openly licensed. From the Scitable’s FAQ:
Scitable is an educational website offered by Nature Education for Biology and Genetics educators and undergraduate students. Scitable provides faculty with instructional articles, primary research literature, and online study tools to share with their students and help them develop a deeper comprehension and appreciation for the science of genetics.
Posted in Open Education
Slashdot is reporting that the Wikipedia community is voting on migrating from the GFDL license to CC-BY-SA. The change has been proposed to increase interoperability between other open content. Slashdot member “bcrowell” expressed his or her support of the initiative with the following:
If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn’t exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they’re both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license…
Also reported by Creative Commons.
