David Wiley has tweeted that the Obama administration is looking for public comment on open access policies. From the notice:
With this notice, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) within the Executive Office of the President, requests input from the community regarding enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from research funded by Federal science and technology agencies.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged government, journal, library, OATP, OATP.new, policy, research
Ryan T. Normandin has published an article through The Tech on the state of MIT OCW. Normandin reviews common arguments against MIT OCW and puts forth counter-arguments. From the article:
MIT should continue to support OCW because it is the first step to promoting free public education at a higher level than grade 12.
Commentary by David Wiley.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, ocw, oer, online learning, open, open content, Open Education, openness
Melissa Reeder at Creative Commons is announcing that Microsoft has donated $25,000 to Creative Commons. From the post:
The support of Microsoft and other computing industry heavyweights is a key indicator that CC is seen as important infrastructure
Posted in Open Education
Tagged cc, CC licenses, commons, copy right, copyright, creative commons
Jeffrey A. Tucker has a new post on intellectual property, teaching and influencing others. Tucker uses the experiences of Ayn Rand as an example. From the post:
You can try this yourself with a friend. Talk for 15 minutes and then attempt to draw an ownership map of ideas. See if you can come to a consensus. Then see what the attempt does to your friendship.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, higher education, online learning, open learning, openness
David Wiley has posted on a policy change in which teachers are now permitted to license their materials with a Creative Commons license. From the post:
I haven’t done an in-depth review of state policies, but I believe that Utah is one of the first (if not the very first) to formally adopt language (a) saying that teachers are allowed or encouraged to share their educational materials or (b) actually mentioning Creative Commons by name.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged K-12, ocw, oer, open content, Open Education, policy
Steve Wheeler has posted on a new American Society of Cell Biology Annual Meeting policy in which electronic devices are banned. According to Wheeler, the policy was implemented to prevent attendees from disseminating specific data. From the post:
It is highly likely that given the highly scientific nature of this conference, many of the presenters at the conference are presenting new research and wish to protect their intellectual property from their peers until their work has been published. This may sound like a reasonable idea at face value, but I ask you – why do we go to conferences in the first place?
Posted in Open Education
Tagged conference, higher education, journal, library, openness
Gavin Baker has a round-up of articles relating to open access and the climate data controversy.
An interesting technology was developed and is under adoption process in Brazil. The architecture, developed by Rafael de Santiago and André Raabe, is designed to connect educational institutions interested in sharing and use of Learning Objects through a single network, named LOP2P (Learning Object Peer to Peer). As defined in their paper, this technology is:
an interoperability architecture to allow different educational institutions share their learning object repositories for creating courses using Learning Management Systems (LMS). The initiative is in line with a current trend in educational institutions to produce learning objects and make them freely available through web repositories. The proposed mechanism is based on Peer to Peer architecture where each institution is a peer.
Two main components of this architecture are a plug-in for LMS like systems and the Mediation Layer. You can read the paper and a presentation about it lop2p.org site.
“Hecker,” who is apparently affiliated with Mozilla Education, has a new post on the future of Mozilla Education and wonders what kind of projects are appropriate for 2010. From the post:
In my opinion this is not so much a failing of the approach as it is a failing of academia: The schools that have been most open to integrating open source development work into the classroom (like Seneca) are the schools that focus more on practical instruction for job-seeking students.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged online learning, Open Education, open learning, open source, openness
Nigel Benson at Otago Daily Times has published an article on WikiEducator, the OER Foundation, and Otago Polytechnic’s efforts. From the article:
“No learner should be denied access to an education because learning material is locked behind copyright or because people may not have the resources to pay for licensed software,” he [Wayne Mackintosh] says.
Thanks to Sarah Stewart for the link.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, online learning, open content, Open Education, openness, policy
