Archive for the 'creative commons' Category

OCWC Webinar Jan. 2010: What, Why and How of Metadata

Published
by
Meena Hwang
on January 7, 2010
in creative commons, ocwc and opencourseware
. 2 Comments

The monthly OCWC Webinar this month is on metadata. Clay Whipkey, the Technical Director of OCWC, will speak about why we should care about metadata and what we should do with it. This webinar is intended for all administrators of OCW and individuals who are not too technically savvy but would like to hear about metadata in plain English. If you have an advanced technical understanding of things, you can still join in on the conversation after Clay’s presentation. Bring your expertise if you would like to talk about the whys, the whats, and the hows of metadata.

The webinar is usually held on the first Thursday of the month, but we will hold it on the second Thursday this month on the 14th. You can join the webinar at http://breezemeeting.asu.edu/ocwc. The webinar starts at 10AM EST, but the meeting room will be open from the day prior to the meeting. If you need to check your technical specifications, you can come into the meeting room before the scheduled time and check make sure that you can view the browser window properly. See you all then.

OER Copyright Survey

Published
by
Garin Fons
on August 25, 2009
in Fair Use, copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, licensing and open educational resources
. 1 Comment

CCLearn and Open.Michigan are working together to study the ways in which copyright law plays a role in the practices of those who create or help facilitate the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). It is our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the degree to which OER practitioners and users grapple with copyright law issues, and whether those issues pose barriers to the creation, dissemination, and reuse of OER.

We invite you to share your perspectives by taking the OER Copyright Survey and to read more about the study on the Copyright Exceptions and Limitations section of the OpenEd website. The survey should take only 10 - 15 minutes of your time.

If you know of other colleagues - especially individuals outside the U.S., Canada, England, and Australia - who would be interested in participating in this survey, please forward it to them. The survey closes on August 31, so we encourage all to fill it out soon!

Working Session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at OCWC Global 2009

Published
by
Terri Bays
on March 19, 2009
in Fair Use, OCWC Conference, copyright, creative commons, education, educational, intellectual property, licensing, ocw, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware and remix
. 0 Comments

You may have heard rumors that some of the US OCW producers have been working on a project to explore issues of Fair Use in Open Educational Resources.  Fair Use is the US version of a phenomena more generally known as Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, and most OCW projects have started out with the conservative assumption that they don’t get much fair use coverage.  Some lawyers are starting to say otherwise, however, so the Fair Use Working Group is gathering data about how OERs in the US are negotiating Fair Use.  The hope is to publish a Code of Best Practice for OER later in the year.

But the OCWC is a global consortium, so the Fair Use project is only one part of a larger initiative to explore the implications of Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (CELs) for OER’s.  We’ve started a wiki page for this larger initiative entitled Copyright Exceptions and Limitations, where you can see a conceptual map for the larger project as we see it so far.  You’ll also see a link to a draft page for gathering data about CELs in different legal jurisdictions.  Use the comment tabs on either page to share your ideas!  We’ll be hosting a working session on International Copyright Exceptions and Limitations at the OCWC Global Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico next month, with Ahrash Bissell from CC Learn as our facilitator.  At the session we’ll discuss what additional data it would be useful to gather and walk through the data gathering process.

Stanford Engineering launches OCW site

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 17, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, news, ocw and ocw consortium
. 2 Comments

From the Creative Commons site:

Emulating MIT and a host of other OCW institutions, the Stanford School of Engineering has jumped on the OER bandwagon by releasing ten of its courses online in multiple formats. The pilot open courseware portal, known as Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), is Stanford’s first move towards offering full-length course videos and other materials online for free and open use. SEE’s current ten course offerings consist of “instruction videos, reading lists and materials and class assignments” in three subject areas: computer science, artificial intelligence, and linear systems and optimization.

All course materials are open for re-use under CC BY-NC-SA. The general site content on Stanford Engineering Everywhere is licensed CC BY.

Visit the Stanford Engineering Everywhere site.

Not Again!

Published
by
Terri Bays
on September 15, 2008
in copyright, creative commons, education, intellectual property, licensing, mit, ocw, open, opencourseware, press coverage, remix, reuse and sharealike
. 0 Comments

Very nice article by Noam Cohen in Sunday’s NYT about Connexions, an OCWC affiliate member and leader in the open textbook movement. Cohen starts with an account of R. Preston McAfee’s decision to allow free downloads of his economics textbook (or low-cost print-on-demand from Lulu and Flat World Knowledge) rather than with a traditional publishing house. McAfee is protesting both the high price of traditionally-published textbooks and their market-driven content.

The article then justly commends Connexions for its “broader effort” to allow users to “rip burn and mash” course material. I am cheering right along until Cohen uses the remix issue to contrast Connexions’ work with “other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T.“ Okay, so he’s not talking about most of us, and now we’re going to hear about the evils of .pdf, right? No. . . Cohen tells us that the big difference is that “Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited.”

Huh?

It’s admittedly a tough thing to explain in short space. And it’s even a tougher thing to make interesting to the average reader.

But this article gets it wrong, and I’m compelled to set the record straight once again.

What we have here is a mash up of concerns. Connexions does use the Creative Commons Attribution license, which is broader than than that used by MIT and many other OCW’s, on account of its not requiring either a non-commercial use or license compatibility. The Share-Alike clause is the point of concern, because can complicate the mixing of materials originally published under incompatible licenses (and here the non-commercial clause can come into play as well). But complication is not the same as prohibition, and we would do well not to let our internal disagreements over optimal licensing blur that fact, especially when we are addressing our potential users.

The fact is that OpenCourseWare projects, including those under the CC share-alike license, have had a lot of success on the reuse and redistribution front, as attested to the hundreds of courses that have been localized and translated around the world.

I do not want to downplay the legitimate concern that undue complication of the remix process might prevent its happening at all. We should and do engage in lively debate about what licenses will strike the right balance between the desires of producers and the convenience of users.

But it’s important to be clear on the essentials. The average reader of the NYT article surely walked away with an erroneous impression of what we do here. And to the extent that reader was a potential OCW adoptee, everybody loses.

Newcomers’ Breakfast

Published
by
Terri Bays
on April 26, 2008
in creative commons, educational, licensing, ocw, ocw consortium, ocwc, oer, open, open educational resource, open educational resources, opencourseware, presentations, remix and reuse
. 0 Comments

Below is a link to the slides from the Newcomers’ Breakfast we hosted just prior to the OCWC Meeting in Dalian. Please note that much of the detail drops out when you view them online, but it’s really there and can be viewed if you download the slides to your desktop (mental note: work out slideshare-friendly formatting for the future) . Much thanks to Tom Caswell, Meena Hwang and Clay Whipkey for their contributions as co-presenters!

http://www.slideshare.net/tbays/newcomers-breakfast

Terri

Re.creat.ion

Published
by
Laura Dewis
on March 18, 2008
in creative commons, education, intellectual property, ocw, oer, open educational resources, remix, resources, reuse, sharealike and teaching
. 0 Comments

So this week I have been mostly ranting about creativity (or lack of). I’ve been inspired by a few things recently such as the We are what we do approach to friendly, guilt-inducing, but essentially practical advice marketing around environmental awareness - their key message is small actions, lots of people, big change. Then there was the Metro ReCreate competition encouraging people to create something new from their newspaper. Here are some people randomly collaborating to create a house from newspapers.
Newspaper house

It constantly strikes me how fun, simple and beautiful these things are. They appeal to people’s creativity. They join people in a creative mission. They create something tangible (actions in the case of We Are What We Do.) They promote the creations in a way that encourages more contributions (today the top of their homepage declares 1,247,119 actions completed). And they badge their contributors as responsible citizens (wear that organic cotton shopper with pride).

So what is the relevance for Open Educational Resources? Those in the OCWC (and many others) are working hard to publish educational resources freely and openly under a Creative Commons license. Made available as building blocks for new courses, people can amend the resources to create new, possibly richer versions with wider relevance to a global audience - essentially recreating rather than reinventing course materials. There are examples of remixed versions of Open University materials in the LabSpace. In accordance with the 1% rule only a tiny proportion of OER users are being creative in this way. But you can bet your bottom dollar that its not 1% of the global academic community who are making contributions in this way. There are many, many reasons why - which is another day, another blog post. But if one reason is time we should consider that the “small changes x lots of people = big change” message works. We have to enable our contributors to make those changes quickly and easily. Another barrier is awareness of open educational resources.

So how do we communicate the principles in a fun, simple and beautiful way?

We have some ideas for why remixing educational resources are useful, and why open licensing is important for inspiring creativity, but until/unless remixing becomes commonplace we won’t be able to test our assumptions (that sharing resources might reduce costs of course development, increase the time tutors spend interacting with students and increase quality of materials for example). More importantly we won’t be able to find out from users what is the real value to them of having these materials. It sounds obvious, but until you understand the benefits, it’s impossible to communicate them.

So we need to coax the 1% of creative remixers in the educational community to make use of these materials. Taking lessons from We Are What We Do and ReCreate we need to induce guilt (do not waste these intellectual resources), inspire creativity and creation (take our blocks and build), reward and badge our contributors as responsible resource creators (an I’m in the 1% t-shirt?) and give them a creative mission to join (academia is by nature serious and complicated but we all have a fun and simple side we like to indulge. Even pitch the resource creators in a battle with the resource haters).

Creative suggestions on the blog’s equivalent of the back of a postcard - be in the 1% and comment below. I might even get you a t-shirt.

New Websites from United Nations University

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on June 14, 2007
in creative commons, ocw, oer and opencourseware
. 5 Comments

From Brendan Barrett of United Nations University

=========

The UNU Media Studio has recently launched two new web sites that showcase the online educational materials developed by the UNU.

Please take a look at http://www.onlinelearning.unu.edu/

You can see from this site that we produce courses, e-case studies, video documentaries and web applications. The main thematic focus is the environment. We hope to add more and more content in the future.

We also have another site - http://www.mediastudio.unu.edu/

On this website, we will explain how we collaborate with people and institutions to build and share these open educational resources. This includes discussion of the types of tools we use, the challenges we face and the solutions we come up with. We hope that you will subscribe to our RSS feed and comment from time to time.
Continue reading ‘New Websites from United Nations University’

What Creative Commons is All About

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 23, 2007
in copyright, creative commons, oer and open educational resources
. 2 Comments

cc2.jpgThis video explains what Creative Commons is all about, and why it is so important.

It takes some work to really grasp, but it is oh so important.

Creative Commons and CCLearn

Published
by
Clay Whipkey
on May 23, 2007
in creative commons, education, ocw and oer
. 0 Comments

cc.jpgCreative Commons is launching a new initiative called CCLearn “to break down the barriers - whether legal, technical or cultural - between different collections of open educational content.”

For those of us involved in OER/OCW, this is a very important initiative. They are also looking for a new Executive Director, so fire up your resumes!!!

Anyway, check it out when you get chance.