The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) News Service is promoting its OpenCourseWare and OER search capabilities. COL offers two searches, one through Google for OCW and OER material, and the other for OCW material only through Yahoo! Pipes. A small sample of the OCW repositories searched:
- China Open Resources for Education
- John Hopkins School of Public Health
- Michigan State University
- OERCommons
- OpenLearn
- Tufts University
- Utah State University
- Wikieducator
Posted in Open Education
The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) and its network of partners announce the Call-for-Nominations for the 2nd International MAN@eLA Awards for Exemplary Open Education Resources (OER) Practices for Development.
These prestigious awards are presented annually to organizations, individuals, online educational resources and authoring software tools dedicated to advancing development in Africa, and recognize three categories of excellence:
(1) Leadership Award to an individual or group that has made significant advances in the understanding of the issues or innovations surrounding OER and the OER Movement,
(2) Virtual Laboratory Award to exemplary teaching and learning resources that promote inquiry-based/discovery learning, internationalization (such as multi-lingual accessibility) and usability,
(3) Software for OER Content Authoring Award (This may be a free or lower cost/affordable proprietary software.) Entries must be received by Thursday, April 30, 2009.
For more details, Go to the MAN@eLA website to see the award criteria, application information and online nomination forms, and a list of past recipients.
Posted in Open Education
SFGate is reporting that Obama has nominated Martha Kanter to be Undersecretary of Education. Kanter is the Chancellor of Foothill-De Anza Community College District. Of note for OEN readers, Kanter supported open education initiatives at Foothill-De Anza and may continue to do so in her new role. From the article:
She [Kanter] would also like to see colleges share noncopyrighted books and course materials on the Internet, similar to the “community college open textbook project” signed into California law last September.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, Open Education, open textbooks, openness, policy
Peter Suber is reporting on Open Access News that MIT has released a short FAQ on their new open access policy. The FAQ answers questions about scope (only scholarly articles) and effective date (from March 18, 2009 onwards). From the FAQ:
Many of the written products of faculty effort are not encompassed under this notion of scholarly article: books, popular articles, commissioned articles, fiction and poetry, encyclopedia entries, ephemeral writings, lecture notes, lecture videos, or other copyrighted works. The Open Access Policy is not meant to address these kinds of works.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, higher education, library, oer, open access, policy
Peter Suber, in the most recent issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, examines 25 myths surrounding open access. Some of the myths include “OA journals couldn’t possibly pay their bills” and “OA deprives authors of royalties.” From the newsletter:
OA journals can use the same peer review procedures, the same standards, and even the same people as toll access (TA) journals. This isn’t hypothetical, and actually happens whenever established TA journals convert to OA. The key variables in journal quality are the quality of authors, the quality of editors, and the quality of referees, all of which are independent of the journal’s price or medium.
David Wiley has posted a lengthy response to a post written by Stephen Downes in December. Wiley and Downes have had fundamental disagreements about Creative Commons Non-Commercial clause and have exchanged posts for several years on this topic. From the post:
For commercial entities who produce their own content and want to share it, and whose continued existence depends on their ability to protect themselves against being undercut by another commercial entity, I think the NC clause can make sense. I guess to me the very odd beast that is NC only makes sense in the case of the very odd beast that is the commercial content producer who wants to openly license their content.
Downes also covers it on Stephen’s Web.
Sean Eddy has published a critique of the book Opening Up Education and open education in general in PLoS Biology. He critizes the book as being “more manifesto than explanation” and that most OER is “sketchy, incomplete, and unsatisfying.” From the article:
“Remix,” “collective wisdom,” “Web 2.0”—many of these essays ride a bubble of popular digital punditry enthusiastically but too uncritically. Many technologists today are infected with an idea that “community is king,” that high-quality content will rain down freely merely because we connect digital communities openly. This confuses ways of sharing ideas with ways of creating ideas. It is a kind of magical thinking that has much in common with the cargo cults that cut landing strips in the jungle and carved radios from sticks in hope that more sophisticated beings would parachute technological artifacts down upon them.
Thanks to Ezra -ez- Nugroho’s blog and Laurence Moran for providing the chain of links to find this article.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Wired Campus has an article on The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih. Lih is a long-time Wikipedia administrator and relates details about Wikipedia’s evolution from a unique insider perspective. From the article:
Let’s get this out of the way now: The Wikipedia Revolution (subtitled How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia) paints a reasonably rosy view of the open-source encyclopedia. In Mr. Lih’s telling, Wikipedia’s neutral-point-of-view policy “has worked remarkably well,” its “clinical, just-the-facts style” is “endearing,” and the site itself is “a spectacular success.” Skeptics and agnostics, beware.
Posted in Open Education
Gavin Baker at Openstudents.org has a blog post about students and open access. The post highlights a letter to the editor at Georgetown and University of Michigan librarian Molly Kleinman pondering the possible role of undergraduates in advocating open access. From the Kleinman’s post:
The high cost of purchasing scholarly journals contributes to the rising cost of education, and the rising cost of education is a hot topic in these dire economic times. If we can get students riled up about open access – and that’s still a big if – they might have more luck influencing the behavior of their professors than librarians have. While before I thought that targeting students for open access outreach was a waste of time, now I believe it’s worth a shot.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, library, open access, open textbooks
Two pieces of news from Brazil called our attention this week.
First, Brazil is cutting back R$ 25.4 billion of its public budget due to the financial crisis. R$ 1.2 billion just from the Ministry of Education (10.6% of its non-fixed expenses) and 6.6% of the non-fixed budget from the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Also, a geography textbook was found to have wildly incorrect maps (the map of South America showed Paraguay twice, misplaced Uruguay, and had Ecuador’s borders touching Brazilian borders). Professors from the public-network of schools that receive textbooks from the National Program of Textbooks often complain about mistakes in the textbooks, they mentioned for local newspapers that mistakes are common, but the errors in the map were the worst they had seen. Mistakes are more generally grammar mistakes and the educational secretariat of states keeps a website alerting schools of errors later found in the textbooks they distribute.
During the period of 1998-2006, the Brazilian government bought books from 110 publishers, spending R$ 4.5 billion, but, due to the oligopoly in the Brazilian book market, only 6 publishing houses – Abril, Santillana, FTD, Saraiva, IBEP, Ediouro e Editora Brasil – received R$ 3.893,3 million, corresponding to 87%. Could OER represent an alternative for high cost of books and materials quality? The collaborative nature of open educational resources brings the inteligence of the crowd to develop and make materials more accurate. Could OER represent a better alternative for regional necessities of localized educational materials? Countries such as Brazil that have uniformed curriculums could take advantage of the flexibility of OER to provide complementary and localized materials to address regional differences.
