Philipp Schmidt has posted a collection of links and thoughts on assessment in open education. Schmidt cites several sources including Sir John Daniels, Steve Egan and Stephen Downes. From the blog post:
…while assessment and accreditation are two distinct issues, you need good assessment to enable reliable accreditation.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged accreditation, online learning, open accreditation, open content, Open Education
Janelle Jalbert at Examiner.com is reporting that UC Irvine is now making the CSET teacher certification test prepartion materials freely available. UC Irvine is a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and this move is part of ongoing efforts to make content freely available. From the article, quoting Gary Matkin, Director of Continuing Education at UC Irvine:
Given that a significant number of teachers do not pass the CSET on their first attempt due to a lack of familiarity with the content and/or the format of the exams, our new Math CSET preparation courses will help teachers identify areas requiring further study, or serve as a content refresher, in an effort to help them pass the examination on the first attempt.
Jane Park at Creative Commons is announcing the addition of a comic to their Inside OER project. The comic is an experiment using public domain and CC licensed content. This first comic interviews Lisa Brooks about IssueLab, a repository for research. From the blog post:
Hopefully, this will not only grab but sustain short attention spans. IssueLab, in particular, is doing great things for the open education community and Lisa is especially apt at articulating exactly what that is and what they are aiming for.
Jamie at Self Made Scholar has a list of five things people can do to support self-learning initiatives. Suggested methods include supporting open access initiatives at univerisities and proofread free e-books. From the article:
I often take learning-oriented websites for granted. But, every once and a while, it’s important to consider how these resources came to be. Without people taking the time to support no-cost learning opportunities, the web would offer learners little more than skateboarding videos and pictures of baby animals.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, oer, open access, Open Education, open learning
Recently, OEN reported on the addition of Creative Commons searching to Google’s image-editing software, Picasa. Now Techwhack is pointing out that Google image search now has Creative Commons filtering. Unfortunately, the filter is not available through the default google image search interface yet. Instead, people can visit Google Operating System blog for a searchbar and examples of URLs for custom searches. The following are examples from the Google Operating System blog:
public domain images:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_publicdomain
images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_attribute
images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_sharealike
Posted in Open Education
Tagged CC licenses, copyright, creative commons, Internet, openness
Matthew Cockerill at BioMed Central blog has a new post on a benefit of Wikipedia’s migration to CC-BY-SA license. Cockerill points out that the move eliminates license incompatibility between Wikipedia and many OA journals. He hopes that this will lead to wikipedia articles with citations that visitors can follow to the freely available article. From blog post:
What this means in practice is that it is now straightforward, from a licensing perspective, for any organization whether commercial or non-commercial to create derivative works incorporating both open access research articles and Wikipedia content, and to distribute these combined works under the CC-BY-SA license.
Thanks to Gavin Baker at Open Access News for the link.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged CC licenses, license, open access, openness, Wikipedia
Michelle Thorne at Creative Commons is reporting on the latest results of their case studies project. The post highlights several projects, including one at UC Berkeley regarding archaeology in central Turkey. From the blog post:
This innovative project [Remixing Çatalhöyük] interprets archaeological excavations from a 9,000-year-old settlement mound of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, and it employs Creative Commons licensing to encourage academics and students alike to explore and remix their data sets and multimedia.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged CC licenses, copyright, creative commons, higher education, open content
Fred Benenson at Creative Commons is reporting that Nature has released an article about H1N1, commonly known as “Swine flu,” with a BY-NC-SA license. The paper is an advanced copy, and has not been officially published yet. From the blog post:
While this is indeed great news in and of itself, you might have noticed that the license notification didn’t quite make it to the early PDF version of the paper. We’re willing to chalk it up to the fact that the paper isn’t in its final version, but we’ll be looking for the CC license badge when that one comes out.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, commons, copy right, copyright, creative commons, journal
There has been ongoing discussion on the Internet regarding Governor Schwarzenegger’s decision to move to online textbooks (reported on OEN). Two notable articles include The Star, which is skeptical of the move, and the Christian Science Monitor. Both present David Wiley’s perspective on the decision. From the article at The Star:
Wiley is excited by California’s plan to make use of open source, saying it definitely will save money in the long run. But he likens the move to hearing your favourite book is being made into a movie: “Great, but where will they go wrong?
Posted in Open Education
Tagged K-12, open content, Open Education, open textbook, open textbooks, textbooks
Peter Suber at Open Access News links to a blog post at Discover magazine regarding the preprint embargo on submissions to Nature magazine. The frustration stems from entries at arXiv which state “Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo.” From the Suber’s post:
If a publisher won’t consider a paper which has already been published or publicized (that is, if it follows the Ingelfinger Rule), will this hand-waving satisfy it? Either way, why should authors indulge publishers who adopt the rule?
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, Internet, journal, open access, openness
