Monthly Archives: August 2009

Copyright Licensing Policy at Private Foundations

Posted on August 28, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Phil Malone has posted a paper evaluating copyright licensing policy at private foundations. The report found that some foundations are encouraging open licensing, while others are hesitant. From the executive summary:

Private foundations fund and support the creation of a wide range of work products, ranging from books, articles, reports, and research summaries to educational materials and textbooks to photographs, works of visual art, films, videos, and musical compositions and recordings to software code, computer programs and technical systems to many, many others. Foundations seek to achieve the most impact and the greatest good with the money they invest. Doing so often depends on ensuring the broadest dissemination and greatest, most productive and innovative use, reuse and redistribution of the many works they support. …

Thanks to Gavin Baker at Open Access News for the link.

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OER in the East

Posted on August 28, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Leigh Blackall has posted audio of his conversation with Stian Håklev. The conversation centered around Håklev’s research concerning OER in China. Håklev also posted the audio and his commentary on his blog. From Blackall’s blog:

Stian’s work provides us in the English speaking world a rare glimpse and interpretation of the open educational work being done in other countries, which to me is a very valuable opportunity to hear things outside our unavoidable English speaking echo chamber.

Håklev also has a related post on sharing.

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Wiley and Siemens Discuss Change

Posted on August 27, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Last week OEN reported on a post by George Siemens in which he was critical of open textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge. Yesterday Wiley posted a response and Siemens posted a comment in reply. Wiley followed up with an additional post, and then requested that his readers write about why they choose to be “open.” From the Wiley’s first response:

I would argue that using the existing system as infrastructure is the most brilliant part of the FWK strategy (disclosure: I am the Chief Openness Officer of FWK). Because FWK recognizes and works within the existing context, it is actually able to affect real change. Over 400 faculty and 40,000 students will use openly licensed, DRM-free FWK textbooks this fall – enabling extensive, legal faculty localization of materials and saving students and their parents over $3 million.

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Japan’s National Library Plans to Digitize Books

Posted on August 27, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Gavin Baker at Open Access News is reporting that Japan’s National Diet Library is planning to digitize its collections. The effort was made possible by recent changes in Japan’s copyright law. From the article:

But the National Diet Library has to negotiate with copyright holders and publishing houses on the extent to which the digitized titles should be made available. The publishing industry fears that if the titles go online, the industry will suffer. As the Diet library director Mr. Makoto Nagao said, the library and the publishing industry should create a system that will enable their coexistence and co-prosperity, and contribute to enhancing Japan’s cultural level.

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OER Aggregator Announced

Posted on August 27, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The FeedForward Blog is announcing Ensemble, which is an OER aggregator. Ensemble searches feeds based on a specified search term and returns results. The results can be subscribed to as a feed. From the post:

So far I’ve just aggregated the feeds available from a few places, such as Oxford and the Open University, but it shows how the concept works. Next up I’m tweaking the indexing a bit, and putting in place some code to handle creative commons licenses more intelligently.

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OCW Seminar Scheduled for October

Posted on August 27, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Martijn Ouwehand at TU Delft is announcing registration for an OCW seminar on Oct. 9. The seminar is scheduled to take place at TU Delft (in the Netherlands) and registration is free. From the announcement:

The program is interesting to both institutions thinking about joining the OCW initiative or wanting to start but don’t know how and institutions who want to participate in shaping the future of the Dutch OCW initiative at the whole.

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Wikipedia Begins Flagged Revisions

Posted on August 26, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Wired Campus is reporting that Wikipedia has introduced a new policy for entries of living persons. The new policy prevents the entry from being changed until the revisions have been reviewed by an editor. From the article:

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” Michael Snow, chairman of the Wikimedia board

Coverage also available through Slashdot, New York Times, ReadWriteWeb.

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Google Releases Books in EPUB Format

Posted on August 26, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Google Books is releasing public domain books in EPUB format. EPUB is a format used by a variety of eBook readers and related software. The format is DRM-free, though it can be wrapped around it. According to Lardinois, the EPUB format does not work on the Kindle without conversion software. From the article:

It is important to note, however, that these EPUB files were run through an optical character recognition (OCR) system and weren’t edited afterwards.

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OpenCourseWare on Health

Posted on August 26, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Linda at OnlineUltraSoundSchool.com has posted a list of health-related OpenCourseWare. The list includes resources from Tufts and John Hopkins. From the article:

The following twenty-five free open courseware classes are define by categories that cover chronic and infectious disease, public health and mental health and environmental health issues.

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Bon Education Posts a list of OER

Posted on August 26, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Several twitters have pointed out that Bon Education has posted a list of open educational resources. The list is not particularly long, but may be a good reference for people who want a general sense of what is available without being overwhelmed. Thanks to Literarcy is Priceless and Amit Srivastava for the links.

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