Folksemantic is a project to create tools that increase the impact of open education resources by helping people find, filter, collaborate around, and remix them. As part of the project, work is underway to integrate the OCW Finder, OER Recommender, and Luvfoo. Plans are to improve these tools and add collaboration, personalized recommendation, widgets, and publishing features. COSL is holding an online meeting on March 26 to describe the Folksementic project and solicit input. See http://oerrecommender.org/mtg to learn more.
Archive for the 'ocw' Category
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.
Corona of the Sun During a Solar Eclipse (No known copyright) (from flickr commons: http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2534500722/)
A Note from the Fair Use on Open CourseWare team:
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
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.
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.
Last January, the University of Basque Country (also known as UPV/EHU) joined the Consortium, and they began to solicit OCW course proposals from faculty shortly after. They have already received 82 applications.
They’ve now announced their targets for next year. Twenty-three courses will be published by this December, followed by an additional twenty-two courses in the first quarter of 2009. By the close of 2009 they anticipate having 100 courses online.
Press Release (9/10/2008): Original Spanish version, or Google English Translation
Peru’s National University of Engineering has become the first university in Peru to make its courses available as OpenCourseWare. This project is a collaboration between the National University of Engineering and Universia. The project currently has nine courses up in the areas of economics and engineering.
Read Universia press release in original Spanish, or Google translation into English
I am very excited to announce the selection of Mike Caulfield as the new Director of OCWC Community Outreach. To read more about Mike and his enthusiasm for the position, click here.
You will be hearing more from Mike in the coming weeks and months, but for now, welcome, Mike!!!!
Recently the OCWC Board of Directors met in Cambridge, MA for our 2nd board meeting (photo below - courtesy of Philipp Schmidt).
More on the outcome soon!!!
OCW Community,
I am VERY pleased to announce the opening of a new full time position within the OCWC — the OCWC Director of Marketing and Outreach (listed below). If any of you are interested in this position — or know of a strong candidate — please contact me immediately. We are looking to fill this position within the next 4 weeks.
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The OCWC Director of Marketing and Outreach, in close consultation with the OCWC Director and the OCWC Board of Directors, is generally responsible for the oversight and execution of marketing, public relations and outreach activities within the Consortium. The principal responsibilities of the OpenCourseWare Consortium Director of Marketing and Outreach are: Continue reading ‘OCWC Now Hiring: Director of Marketing and Outreach’
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