Monthly Archives: August 2009

Follow-Up on CC OpenID Plan

Posted on August 8, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Two days ago OEN reported on Creative Commons launching a new OpenID service, CC Network, as part of a premium subscription. As a follow-up for readers, Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons has goes into greater detail in a blog post and Stephen Downes also provides his critique of the service. From Linksvayer’s post:

CC Network also has other features that complement its identity and affiliation stories see our posts from last fall launching the service, explaining our technical approach to CC Network’s OpenID security, and CC Network and web-centric copyright registries.

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Feedback on Open Access Tagging Project

Posted on August 8, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Peter Suber at Open Access News has a new post asking for feedback on the Open Access Tagging Project (OATP). The purpose of OATP is to use the “OATP” tag to mark developments in open access. OATP has been using Connotea to aggregate developments. From the post:

I know that Connotea is flaky these days, and often slow or down. Hence this may not be the best time to ask for feedback on OATP, which depends on Connotea. But I’d rather not wait to think about ways to improve the service. I have long-term plans for OATP and hope to keep them closely tied to user experiences. Thanks.

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Open Access Covered in Ireland

Posted on August 8, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Quinn Norton has a new article at IrishTimes.com on open access. The article gives a history of academic journals and open access. Ireland’s efforts towards open access are also discussed. From the article:

Suber would like to see more countries adopt the Irish model. “Ireland is ahead of the world,” he says.

The Irish model spurs progress beyond its own borders, just as it takes in research from OA journals everywhere.

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Potential Directions for Obama’s OER Initiative

Posted on August 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Last month OEN reported that President Obama proposed $50 million towards OCW/OER. Marc Perry at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new article outlining possible details regarding the plan. The article interviews people OEN readers might be familiar with including: Curt Bonk (Indiana), Steve Carson (MIT OCW), Mike Smith (formerly of the William and Flora Hewlett foundation) and Candace Thille (Carnegie Mellon). From the article:

“Even though we’ve provided access, we haven’t provided access to the same kind of education, because we didn’t really have the tools and technology to scale,” Ms. Thille says. “And I think what the information technology now, finally, is affording us the opportunity to do, is to really provide that kind of personalized instruction—high-quality rigorous instruction—to everybody.”

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Creative Commons Offering OpenID Services

Posted on August 6, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Dana Oshiro at ReadWriteWeb is reporting that Creative Commons will begin to offer OpenID services for a yearly fee. OpenID is a single sign-on service, which means using one site to handle and manage your login information when visiting other web sites that also use OpenID. From the article:

In exchange for buying a $50 annual membership, the organization is offering donors the chance to use their network log-in as their OpenID. In other words, if you’re the type of person who shares their content for the good of education, art and humanity, now you can wear it like a badge across the networks you frequent.

The article is also posted at the New York Times web site. Also, a critique of the plan.

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Open Education Conference 2009 Update

Posted on August 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Brian Lamb has a new post on last minute updates regarding Open Education Conference 2009. Lamb notes a special panel discussion on copyright on Aug. 13, which will be open to the public. He also reminds readers that the day-long discussion between Stephen Downes and David Wiley is still set to take place on Aug. 11. From the post:

…we are pleased to present a special panel on “Expression, appropriation and the law” with screenings of clips from a variety of copyright-conflicted works, as well as a discussion led by Vancouver-based artists and policy experts.

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Students Create Policy Background Documents

Posted on August 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

David Wiley has a new blost post publishing the results of a summer semester course in OER policy. The two documents give background on Open Access and OER to administrators so they can better frame policy decisions. From the post:

These reviews are written specifically for a BYU audience (with lots of references to BYU’s mission, institutional objectives, and appropriate scriptures), but I thought the information in these documents might be of interest to the broader open education community.

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Making Standards Simple

Posted on August 6, 2009 by | Leave a comment

John Wilbanks at ScienceBlogs has a new post on standards. Although the post is not directly related to open education, there are some relevant thoughts. From the article:

In technology, standards propagate like kudzu. Most of them go nowhere, representing an enormous sunk cost of time and money. And that’s because most of them are way too complex. The more powerful they are, the more brittle they are, the more expensive they are to implement, and the more they restrict the re-use of the system.

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Using Creative Commons on Flickr

Posted on August 5, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a new post on ReadWriteWeb asking whether Flickr should do more to promote Creative Commons license usage. Kirkpatrick argues that the option to license a photo with a CC license or to search for similarily licensed photos is too hidden. From the article:

Flickr is much bigger and now includes the perhaps more cautious former users of Yahoo Photos as well. Only about 1% of the photos on Flickr can be used in a commercial setting (like this blog) even with attribution given; otherwise, explicit permission is needed. That’s a real loss.

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Bringing Women into the Open Source Movement

Posted on August 5, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jenna McWilliams has a new blog post on the lack of women in open source development. The post comes as a response to a keynote address at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, which covered the same topic. From the blog post:

While women make up between 10-30% of the tech community in general, they comprise about 5% of Perl developers, about 10% of Drupal developers, and (according to an EU-funded survey of open source usage and development, called FLOSSPOLS) about 1.5% of open source contributors in general.

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