Archive for the 'OCWC Conference' Category

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.

And the OCWC Conference tag is… ocwc_logan08

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on September 4, 2008
in OCWC Conference and ocwc_logan08
. 0 Comments

OK, I’ll admit it’s a mouthful. But it was between that and the overly clinical OCWC_908, which sounded sort of like a vitamin supplement.

For those just joining us: in the comments of our last post, Stian pushed us to get together a tag for any writing people wanted to do regarding the OCWC conference. The idea here is that:

  • Presenters can blog on their own blogs about what they plan to do at the conference, and we’ll catch it in aggregation
  • People attending can write before the fact about what they’d want to get out of it, and we’ll catch that
  • People can respond to what they got out of the conference and will be able to get that on the radar as well
That’s just the briefest overview of what we might get out of tag-based aggregation (add to that photos, resources, twitter feeds — this is really open-ended). But the point is if you are talking about anything regarding the upcoming Logan OCWC event, tag it somehow, via Wordpress, del.icio.us, Digg, flickr, whatever.
In the next couple of days we’ll provide someway to track such tagged materials (although don’t let us stop you from tracking it using your own tools), and for the more hieracharchly inclined we will be throwing up information on the wiki about the individual the sessions (watch this space for more info).
But please, tag, tag, tag!

Sharing and the OCWC Conference

Published
by
Mike Caulfield
on August 29, 2008
in OCWC Conference and ocwc_logan08
. 7 Comments

Great post today from OCWC board member Phillip Schmidt on the iSummit event he attended — what went well, what might have gone better. As a communications guy getting ready for our own conference in September, this graf, on how best to share the conference with the larger community, was particularly thought-provoking to me:

The natural response to this would be: “place more emphasis on documentation and share audio/video/text online”. However, having facilitated the documentation efforts at the iSummit 2007 I know how hard it is to collect all the images and notes from participants, and how much (tedious) editing is required to bring it together into a useful resource. Yet, I am not sure how many people actually go back to the notes beyond trying to find email addresses of people they met, or links to projects that were mentioned. In 2007, Mark and I knew we were going to write an article about the event, so having very detailed notes was more important than this year.

So I would suggest, that rather than trying to document everything that is going on during the event, we create a rich list of contact details, URLs, and links to everything that comes up during the discussions. Every time someone mentions a project, it needs to be added to a list of resources on the wiki. That’s relatively easy to do, even if we ad short annotations which makes the list so much more useful, and this could easily live on after the event.

Like most people reading this, I’ve seen sharing efforts at these sorts of things done well and done poorly — and found that there’s not necessarily one right way. It depends on who your conference audience is. I’ve been to academic conferences where almost everything put online was done centrally (and what was put online was not much). On the other hand, I’ve presented at a digital democracy events where people liveblogged your presentation as you spoke.

My sense is our community falls between those two extremes, and in the next couple of weeks we’ll be figuring out how best to assist in documenting the event in a way appropriate to our resources and audience. But we’d love your help. What sort of things have you seen that have really worked — and have not added that much overhead? What have you seen that has failed?

And the big question: what sort of approach to documentation would you like to see us employ in Logan?

[and remember this question is as much directed to those who will not be in Logan as those who will, Consortium members and non-members alike -- share your thoughts!]