There has been some coverage of the Creative Commons Noncommercial survey results. David Wiley suggests that the survey said very little. Glyn Moody notes the simplicity of the GPL license. Stephen Downes also covers the release in brief. From Wiley’s post:
So what the report provides us is, in effect, a surprisingly coherent statement by a large group of people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, commons, copy right, copyright, creative commons, oer, Open Education
James Grimmelmann has posted a list of court briefings opposed to the Google Book settlement. From the post:
Eight-eight new filings today, and the clerk’s office was still uploading one every few minutes when 5:00 hit. They’re getting a less interesting, though, as there are more and more duplicates in the mix.
Thanks to Open Book Alliance for the link.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged google, Google's Settlement, library, openness, policy, public domain
Ben Terris is reporting that five notable institutions have agreed to support open access journals. The universities include: Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley. From the article:
John M. Saylor, associate university librarian for scholarly resources and special collections at Cornell, says it is a much healthier research environment when the financial burden is taken off the reader and everyone has access to the same research. Mr. Saylor says, however, that the challenge now is to develop a system that pays for the operation of journals that give away the store.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, journal, library, OATP, OATP.new, oer, research
Jacqueline at Laika’s MedLibLog has a new post about the problems with using Wikipedia as a source of medical information. She points out Wikipedia is increasingly used in the medical profession, but suffers from a lack of depth and inaccurate information. From the post:
In the field of medicine, several drug companies have been caught altering Wikipedia entries. The first drug company messing with Wikipedia was AstraZeneca. References claiming that Seroquel allegedly made teenagers “more likely to think about harming or killing themselves” were deleted by a user of a computer registered to the drug company, according to Times.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, oer, online learning, open content, Wikipedia
Glyn Moody points to a new site that combines Flickr and Wikipedia, called Fotopedia. The site is not the first to integrate wikipedia articles with media from other sources, but Fotopedia seems nicely polished. From Fotopedia’s “mission” page:
Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web.
Fred Benenson at Creative Commons is announcing the availability of promotion discounts on CC Network subscriptions. CC Network is an OpenID provider provided by Creative Commons. From the post:
Starting today, when you donate $50 or more to Creative Commons ($25 for students), you’ll be sent an e-mail with a link will let you either renew your current CC Network account, or sign up with a new one.
The Curriki Blog has announced that the winners of their Summer of Content 2009 contest. The purpose of the contest was to fund teachers as they develop content for Curriki. From the post:
To qualify for funding, projects needed to meet the following requirements:
- Provide or develop comprehensive resources for substantial units of study.
- Develop or post open source curriculum in an area of need.
- Deliver all content resources as open source so they may be used and developed further by a broad community.
- Use best practices in pedagogy and instructional design.
From the Creative Commons blog:
“Today, we’re publishing the Defining Noncommercial study report and raw data, released under a CC Attribution license and CC0 public domain waiver respectively — yes, this report on “noncommercial” may unambiguously be used for commercial purposes. Also see today’s press release.”
Check a summary of the report at the CC Blog and the report here.
George Siemens has a new post giving commentary on the shutdown of Utah State University OpenCourseWare (reported by OEN). Siemens argues that USU OCW was flawed because openness was done independent of design. From the post:
As long as openness is separated from the rest of education, it will be seen as a cost-cutting option. Which is really rather silly.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, ocw, oer, open content, Open Education, openness
Gavin Baker at Open Access News is reporting that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has posted a draft document on publishing open government data. The W3C is responsible, in part, for development of HTML, XML and other web standards. From the post:
Although the reasons may vary, the logistics and practicalities of opening government data are the same. To help governments open and share their data, the W3C eGov Interest Group has developed the following guidelines. These straightforward steps emphasize standards and methodologies to encourage publication of government data, allowing the public to use this data in new and innovative ways.
