We’ve got � really nice stream of Connexions/OCWC sessions going out — the slides are legible, the audio is good, and the cutting between speaker and slide is well managed.

Today it’s the Connexions agenda. Friday it’s the OCWC.�

Here’s where to watch it:

http://webcast.rice.edu/webcast.php?action=details&event=1729

And the agenda is here. All presentations listed as being in the McMurtry Auditorium will be streamed.�

Much of this is a repeat of the news on the blog — but for the record here is the newsletter we sent out last week:

Registration for OCWC Global To Open Soon

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We are working out a few last minute kinks in registration for OCWC Global, but wanted let you know the registration will soon be open.

This year the conference will run from April 21-24, and will be held in Monterrey, Mexico, and the theme of the conference is “Content, Infrastructure, and Creativity.” You can read more about the conference themes and track here: http://bit.ly/LyHo.

And for those of you who would like to present, the Call for Papers is still open. To submit a paper proposal, see the wiki: http://bit.ly/LyHo.

We will send out an email as soon as the conference site is up and registration is open. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please mail them to mike@ocwconsortium.com.

New Fair Use in OCW Project Launched (from Garin Fons)

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All of us have been frustrated by problems with third-party rights for open courseware materials. We know that if we could clarify when fair use applies, we could vastly expand the utility of what we do. And we know that in other cases, creative communities have done that. For instance, documentary filmmakers now find that insurers accept their claims of fair use, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. Similarly, media literacy teachers now can teach without fear, because they created a code of best practices in fair use. These codes of best practices were coordinated by Profs. Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide, through the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

We need a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware. A group of representatives at some of the open courseware universities—MIT, Tufts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Creative Commons—have started a project to do this, in coordination with Jaszi and Aufderheide, and with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation and from each of our universities. Each of the eight participating universities’ staff has set aside some part of their workload for this job.

Are you interested in helping to shape a code of best practices in fair use for open courseware? You can participate at several levels. If you would like to become a researcher on the project, just let Lindsey Weeramuni (lweera@mit.edu), the project’s coordinator know. Do you have a story to tell? Write Jaszi and Aufderheide at socialmedia@american.edu and we’ll connect you. Do you think your organization would eventually like to become a signatory? Let Lindsey know and we’ll be in touch when the document has been crafted, for your participation.

We hope to complete this work by September 1, so that the 2009-2010 school year can be a great one for open courseware.

Other questions or comments can also be directed here at open.michigan@umich.edu.

Last Chance for Houston “Americas” Conference

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The OCWC regional conference in Houston will be held February 5-6 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. There’s still time for last minute registration. The registration information and agenda can be found here: http://cnxconference.rice.edu/.

Organizational Effectiveness Meeting

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Due to a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the OCWC Board of Directors was able to gather for a 1.5 day Organizational Effectiveness Meeting prior at which we re-examined our Mission, Goals and Initiatives in light of recent surveys and interviews. � We offer our thanks to all of you who participated in the survey and interview process, and particularly to Catherine Casserley, Susan D’Antoni, Shigeru Miyagawa and Victor Vuchic, who took the time out of very busy schedules to join us for the meeting. � Facilitators Tom Mendelsohn and Julia Gittelman did an excellent job of facilitating our deliberations, and in the coming weeks you will begin to see formal documents emerging from this process.

Case Studies Wanted: OCW and Enrollment Reach

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Have you used OCW to expand your institution’s regional reputation, or to give a particular program a more national reach than it might otherwise have had? We’re putting together some new case studies, and while we have plenty from schools that started out with high national name recognition we have somewhat fewer from schools that used OCW to move into the national spotlight. We are particularly interested in schools that have used OCW to call attention to the excellence of specific programs within their institutions.

You don’t have to write much at all — just shoot us an email at mike@ocwconsortium.org to let us know you have a story to tell. We’ll give you a call, you’ll talk, and we’ll do all the writing. The case study will be featured on the blog, and will likely become a core part of slide decks we use for presentations.

We haven’t really promoted this widely, but we have an OPML file that contains a list of RSS feeds of institutions that publish catalog entries of their OCW courses to RSS.

Gibberish? Read no further. Code jockeys, on the other hand, follow me…

Here’s the link to the OPML:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/feeds/ocwcmemberfeeds.opml

The entries in the OPML file represent institutional course feeds. Here’s a snippet:


<outline type="rss"� title="University of Notre Dame" text="University of Notre Dame" url="http://ocw.nd.edu/courselist/rss"/>
<outline type="rss"� title="United Nations University" text="United Nations University" url="http://ocw.unu.edu/rss_all"/>
<outline type="rss"� title="Keio University" text="Keio University" url="http://ocw.dmc.keio.ac.jp/KeioOCW_rss20.xml"/>


Once you get down to the individual feeds, and pull, say the feed for Notre Dame, the format for items looks like this:


<item rdf:about="http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1">
<title>Nature and the Built Environment</title>
<link>http://ocw.nd.edu/architecture/nature-and-the-built-environment-1</link>
<description>This course explores the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment.� While grounded in scientific evidence, a broad perspective of humanism is emphasized throughout, with discussions of how ideas, beliefs, experience, ideals, and human nature animate individuals and societies and thereby give form to the things they make. </description>
<cc:license rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/”/>
<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
<dc:subject>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Nature and the Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Art</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Nature</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Built Environment</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Ancient Greece</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Architecture</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:subject>
<dc:contributor>
<rdf:bag>
<rdf:li>Norman Crowe</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>Paul Monson</rdf:li>
</rdf:bag>
</dc:contributor>
<dc:date>2008-11-24T18:28:17Z</dc:date>
<dc:type>Course</dc:type>
<dc:format>text/html</dc:format>
</item>

We don’t have entries for every OCW course (because we don’t have feeds for many institutions). Still if you drill down from that OPML into all the individual feeds, there’s something like 3,300 courses represented, complete with subject tags.

Maybe I’m crazy, but it seems like this is ripe for a mashup. Clay’s already written a wonderful OCW search application using these feeds. But I’m sure there are other opportunities. Maybe a bookmarklet, ala Library Lookup? Google home page widget? Heck, I don’t know. Half the point of openness is the people sitting on the data don’t have any idea of some of its potential applications, and you can count me in on that group.

I should note once again this is just the subset of institutions from which we’ve gotten feeds. But more applications means more incentive for people to submit feeds — so if you do something interesting with it, let us know.

The launch of the Taiwan OCW Consortium (TOCWC) is getting some notice, most recently from the Taiwan News:

You can see the OCWC members from Taiwan here. There’s also a neat element to the implementation: it looks like at least some participating universities may treat self-study with TOCW as a sort of Advanced Placement:

Noting that the new service does not require registration, Pai added that as a general rule, no degrees or certifications are awarded and the courses are purely for people who are interested in the subjects and would like to educate themselves.

However, she said NCTU has made it an exception that if high school graduates who apply to enter the school can pass the September exam on the subject they have been self-learning when their freshman semester begins, they will be eligible to apply for advanced credit standing.

A small step toward a credit model — and certainly one that is easy to emulate.

We would like to extend an invitation to all to submit paper and presentation proposals for the OCWC Global 2009 Conference. OCWC Global is one of the OCWC’s premier events, and draws participants from around the globe. It will be held in Monterrey, Mexico from April 21 to April 24, on the Campus Monterrey of the Tecnológico Monterrey, Mexico.

This year the theme of the conference is “Content, Infrastructure, and Creativity”.

From the Call for Papers:

Creativity is often viewed as freedom of the imagination from the restraints imposed by economic necessity, convention, law or any number of other factors. Yet creativity also requires provision for the material and means of production. Establishing a solid foundation for informed creativity is one of the primary goals of the open education movement.

How do we, as educators, designers and developers, present content so as to unleash, inspire and enable creativity on a variety of levels? How do we measure and build upon our successes, the most satisfying of which may be a long time coming to fruition?

Meanwhile, infrastructure has traditionally been seen as the set of lower-level services and physical architectures which make the delivery of higher level services possible — pipes, roads, power grids, and server farms. It’s been suggested that open content itself, and not just its attendant delivery systems, can be seen as infrastructure. It has also been suggested that the role of the OCWC is to provide infrastructure for its members.

What are the consequences of seeing open content as infrastructure? Are there historical precedents are there? How could a concept of “content as infrastructure” inform what we do — or, for that matter, lead us astray? How does this view affect our attitudes toward what flows through the pipe, over the wire, or on the road?

These are the issues we will address together as we gather for the April 2009 meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. We invite you to consider the ways in which these issues inform the way you participate in OpenCourseWare and the larger Open Access Movement.

You can view the full Call for Papers, along with information on tracks and a link to the submission form here.