Great Teachers

I've been thinking recently about some of the great teachers my children have had. There have been many. There was the kind elementary teacher who would play guitar and sing with the kids and bring her dog in to visit as a reward. There was the history teacher who regularly traveled with the kids to a national history competition or the science teacher who did the same for a large science event. There's the band and orchestra teachers who share their love of music with a new generation of musicians. There is the English teacher who stepped up to make a school musical happen when no one else would. There's the one who runs the birding club.

Then there's our school system that has been traditionally built around core subjects that are not as relevant as might think they would be, given the emphasis placed on them. There is the push for measurements and accountability of teaching, learning, school quality, etc. This push at times results in an educational industrial complex where large centralized assessment companies sell their assessment services to school districts to help them measure student performance and then at the same time they also sell the key in the form of study materials that make it easy for teachers to teach to the test and give students the ability to perform well on the matching assessments.

Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a harder look at what is or isn't important, what can be cancelled, what can be postponed, what should still go on, and so on. The big question is whether we will take advantage of the pandemic to undo the maddening assessment culture we have built and focus on what is really important. Universities need easy ways of measuring who to give scholarships to (GPA and ACT/SAT scores), but they have been willing to bend the rules and find other ways to reward students who were not able to take standardizes tests due to the pandemic.

What if we stopped focusing so much on some of the mostly irrelevant topics like calculus (relevant to engineers but not many others) and pushed more for creativity and travel and experiences and useful projects and actual skills? What if we pushed to teach our kids languages, cultures, how to serve others, and be generally good people? At some point there can and should be exposure to some topics that may spark a desire to go on and become a great scientist or mathematician, without forcing those who don't need those skills to waste time focusing on something they will quickly forget anyway.

What if we explored nature and performed music and built things?

16 Free Tools to Create Media in eLearning

From a presentation at eLearning DevCon 2011 by Jeff Batt, a trainer with Rapid Intake.

• Video
  
  • JayCut - Online video editor
    
  • Video Spin - Desktop video editor
    
• Video Converter
  
  • Any Video Converter - Desktop video converter (batch convert, resize, etc.)
    
• Audio
  
  • Audacity - Desktop audio editor (don't forget the LAME mp3 encoder so you can export to mp3)
    
  • Aviary Myna - Online audio editor
    
  • Aviary Roc - Online music creator
    
• Images
  
  • GIMP - Desktop image editor
    
  • Aviary Phoenix - Online image editor
    
  • Sumo Paint - Online image editor (my addition, which actually bumps the list up to 17)
    
• Image Capture
  
  • Jing - Desktop image/video capture
    
  • Aviary Talon - Online image capture
    
• Animation
  
  • Vectorian - Desktop animation (Flash) editor
    
• Vector Images
  
  • Inkscape - Desktop vector image editor
    
  • Aviary Raven - Online vector image editor
    
• Color Schemes
  
  • Kuler - Online or desktop color theme picker
    
  • Aviary Toucan - Online color theme picker
    
• Course Analytics
  
  • enspark enfuse - Web analytics tool

I can vouch for Audacity, GIMP, Kuler (my new blog colors are from the Retro Package color scheme), and obviously Sumo Paint.

Now start creating!

Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest are important to pay attention to, especially in politics but also in other aspects of the business world. Our capitalist society is founded on the fact that people will naturally act in their own interests. A conflict of interest occurs when someone is in some position of responsibility that would allow them to personally benefit themselves or their loved ones at the expense of whatever group they represent or over which they have responsibility.

Disclosure is generally required when a conflict of interest is present. If the conflict is severe enough, the person will step aside and let someone else handle the decisions in question.

So what happens when the person with the conflict of interest is the expert in the topic? For example, if a state legislator is also a public school teacher, bills relating to funding public education and specifically relating to teachers' salaries would obviously be conflicts of interest. Do we want everyone with a stake in public education to step out of the room and let only the construction experts work on the public education budget? Then when it's time to allocate money for construction projects, those who work in construction will leave the room while the teachers come back in and set the construction budget? Of course not. Neither group has the expertise to efficiently allocate the money for the other group. Disclosure is always appropriate, but recusal may not be the best course of action in such a situation.

So, my humble reader(s), if you've made it this far, here's your theoretical situation. A professor writes a textbook and wants to use it in class. Requiring students to purchase the textbook results in more money for him or her, so there's the conflict of interest. Letting someone else choose another book may result in a less effective classroom experience if the professor's book would be better aligned to the structure of the class. Anyone that is a proponent of open education already has a solution most of the way formulated. What about all the capitalists out there? What's your solution?

Wrap Up

Near the end of what will hopefully be the busiest semester of my PhD program (roughly comparable to the busiest semester during my MBA program, except then I was only working part time), I finish up one of my four classes with this post. Intro to Open Education has been an interesting class.

Professors teach. They have not all been trained in teaching, so you don't necessarily expect every professor to always be a masterful teacher. Being in a department of Instructional Technology, however, there is a higher standard. In their teaching, we expect them to practice what they preach. I think that has happened in this course.

In another class where new PhDs get to know the faculty and write about how their interests align, Wiley said that someone once wrote on their evaluation that they had no idea what he was interested in. Oh. Well, in every class I have had from him, there have been elements of collaboration, reusing open materials, utilizing the latest technology, and learner control in the structure of the course. Looking at the research and presentations on his CV, it is all about collaborating with Web 2.0 tools, creating and reusing open content, providing instruction via the Internet with various technology, and giving learners materials that are most effective for them. So it's nice to see he's using what he's been researching. Okay, enough about Wiley.

There was a lot of content packed in this course. I liked both the individual comments directly on my posts and the synthesis or highlight posts. When Wiley stopped the comments and went back to the synthesis posts and we were supposed to respond to others' postings for the last three readings, I chose to leave individual comments on others' blogs rather than do my own synthesis post. The comments just seem a little more direct and personal. That said, I liked being able to see everything in one place. Either way, hopefully we boosted each other's pageranks by all the interlinking. For the future, a little more coordination and training up front on how to set up a feed reader and properly tag everything so it is easier to see everything in one place would be very beneficial. That is the power of the tools we used, but I don't believe we really harnessed that power. Or maybe just I didn't.

During the semester, I found myself citing articles we read in this course in papers I wrote for other professors. I also cited papers from other classes in my postings here. I plan on going back through some of the papers I've written over the past year and posting several of them here. For some reason it's just a little easier to find and cite my own writing when it's out in one spot on the web for me to access anywhere, instead of scattered among the four USB drives I carry around, my laptop, home computer, work computer, several wikis, and Google Docs.

In my day job, I'm in charge of Computer and Information Literacy at USU. We're currently starting the process to hammer out a statewide agreement so we have at least a minimum level of competency across all the local higher ed institutions. I have included in my recommendations that students should be able to contribute content via a wiki. I am also suggesting that in addition to teaching about copyright, plagiarism, and piracy that we make sure we teach fair use and the CC and GFDL licensing of content. I put together a wiki page and invited the representative from each school to put their recommendations there. One tried and couldn't get it to save right. Another school emailed me to post it for them. I've seen nothing from the rest. I sincerely hope we can keep up with the new kids, both their needs as well as their strengths, so we can really provide them something useful, not just a lame, out of touch test.

As I've been reading and writing a bit about virtual communities lately and thinking about how something along those lines might work for a dissertation topic, I've been impressed by the community in this class. I've communicated more with many members of this online class than I have with the people in my face to face statistics class I'm in right now. Other than a few of us that do stats homework together, I never talk to anyone. For this class, it was a little bit of a slow start, but we had to give time for half the class to drop out to really get going. Conversations started up pretty quickly on what people thought about how the class was going, and changes were made because of that. The conversations about the content were fantastic. The added diversity by having so many countries represented added valuable depth to the course, with many more points of view to consider. Now that it's over, a few people set up a wiki to keep the community alive. That's great. There are some people in this class that will make a real difference in the lives of a lot of people.

Time Keeps on Slippin Slippin Slippin

As I look into the future of higher education and the impact of the OER movement, I read OpenCourseWars again, having read it a couple times recently. A problem of this particular fictitious history, which simply requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, is the short amount of time in which the story takes place. It seems unlikely that any major changes in higher education generally could occur in a 7 year span, especially given several court cases and multiple levels of appeals, which themselves probably take most of that time. Then there's the part where Google becomes evil, but I digress, as that is not really the point of the story. What's important is the discussion of the problems with the CC-NC clause, license compatibility issues between GFDL and CC, and the explosion of the sharing culture.

My first prediction is that we will have compatible versions of the GFDL and CC licenses by 2010, although concessions will have to be made on both sides, and they will not be fully compatible. There will be certain versions of both that play together. Some people will care and use the license-exchange option, and some will continue not to care and mix them anyway.

My second prediction is that as new collaboration and communication tools are created and distributed over the next 10-15 years, more virtual schools like WGU will pop up, and the jucos, tech schools, and for-profit institutions will embrace collaborative education methods. Broadband access will finally become universal and inexpensive after a narrow vote in Congress funds a major investment in infrastructure, as lobbied for by Google. The two major options will be wireless and powerline networking. With increased access a whole new market of potential nontraditional students will open up. With the lower-tier schools enabling and empowering their students, the research universities will have no choice but to adjust their practices to remain competitive. The top-tier schools will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the collaborative age and then will immediately turn around and congratulate themselves on their innovative practices (like how the cellphone companies fought against phone number portability, but now tout it as a great feature since they were forced to implement it).

My third prediction (a subset of number two) is that the textbook industry will go away as we know it. As Wikipedia and its sister projects continue to grow, the younger professors, who are adept at Web 2.0 tools and who resent their professors that forced them to spend $1,000 per semester on out of date textbooks, will stop requiring textbooks for their courses. It will be a slow process, and some form of printed textbook will always be around, but the demand will eventually diminish.

My fourth prediction (also more details on number two) is that these young professors will adopt new teaching methods that leverage student and alumni knowledge and information-gathering skills to develop their lesson plans, giving them more time to complete their research. That won't last long, though, as many faculty positions will become 12-month, rather than 9-month appointments to deal with the increasing numbers of students and their tendency to take classes year-round, since many classes can be done from any location.

My fifth prediction is that my children will not remember a time when you had to pay for long distance phone calls. Okay, so that doesn't have much to do with OER or higher education, but that will be the seamless nature of technology within a few years, and openness will be expected in all facets of life.

A Call for Mashups

Greg called for some lighthearted and creative mashups to celebrate Wiley's 10th birthday. Here's to 10 more years!


Original photo by jylcat
I should have mentioned, but didn't, that the picture in my last posting was dedicated to Erik.

The Learning Objects Community

I recently read an article by de Souza & Preece (2004) about online communities. Specifically, they point out two components by which an online community can be assessed: sociability (people, purposes, and policies) and usability (software). In their framework, these two components have to be aligned to produce success. Any community (whether online, offline, or a hybrid) will have sociability factors that change as the people (or purposes or policies) in the community change. For any online community, the software has to work with those people, purposes, and policies. They continue on to discuss Semiotics and HCI and how communication takes place among users and designers. The important part, I thought, was that everyone is communicating all the time, but the message doesn't always get across how we expect it.


In the Learning Objects community, Wiley points out that since much of the work with implementing learning objects, defined by some as reusable (purpose) resources, was done by software engineers (people), who wanted to ensure that content systems were technically interoperable (policy). How usable are the software and standards we ended up with? Well to give you a hint, people don't use them. They use tagging and RSS, which are simple and friendly for all the non-engineers that are actually trying to develop and share content for teaching, rather than IEEE's LOM and other complex metadata implementations that the software engineering community designed. With two distinct communities, it is no wonder that tools developed by one were not usable for the other.

Since Learning Objects have been respawned as Open Educational Resources (OER), the usability side of de Souza's framework has changed to match the needs of educators and learners without software engineering degrees. OER are simply placed online so they can be easily found and licensed to allow reuse and localization.

How well do sociability and usability match now? It's better. When I google a term, whether related to statistics, learning theory, etc., I often find myself looking for the Wikipedia entry, and it often shows up right at or near the top of the results. Why do I look for it? The articles are consistently formatted, generally well-written, and I can use the material I find because of its GFDL license. The fact that Wikipedia shows up at the top of so many search results means that a lot of other people are using that content as well. There are still licensing compatibility issues and a need for more content to be contributed, but both are happening. It just takes time; learning objects haven't been dead that long.


deSouza, C. S., & Preece, J. (2004). A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, 16(3), 579-610.

The World is Flat

I read Tom Friedman's book The World is Flat a couple years ago. The only thing that I remembered reading before as I went through it this time was the introduction on the golf course in Bangalore and a vague recollection that he talked about Wal-Mart a lot. I don't know if he just changed it that much when he updated and expanded it from the original or if so much information has been stuffed in my head since starting my PhD that everything else has been displaced. Perhaps it's just my focus was different this time that it all seemed new. My focus this time was on how the flat world affects education, rather than business.


One point that stuck out to me (perhaps since I had recently read Wiley's report to the Secretary of Education) was Friedman's tenth flattener, The Steroids. These are new technologies that amplify and turbocharge all the other flatteners, making collaboration possible in a "digital, mobile, virtual, and personal" way. Wiley extends and slightly changes that list to digital, mobile, connected, personal, open, and participative. The specific technologies that Friedman lists as steroids are increasing computing and storage, IM and file sharing, VoIP, videoconferencing, computer graphics, and wireless. Since the book was written, wikis and blogs and exploded in popularity and Google has popularized online office productivity software. If I'm writing in my blog or working on a googledoc, and I have to go somewhere, I just close my browser and walk away, and I can pick up where I left off on any other computer. If you don't want to keep all your information online, you can install OpenOffice and Firefox or even an entire operating system (Linux) on a USB drive and carry your OS, programs, and documents with you. You'll notice it's the open source software that can be carried around. A few years ago, I remember seeing someone that got Windows 98 running on a CD through a painstaking process. The latest versions of Windows would make it even more difficult to accomplish something like that because of DRM and because of the bloat that would make them too large, but it doesn't matter, because the OS and office productivity software are becoming irrelevant, just as printed syllabi, textbooks, and DRM-protected, non-open content are becoming irrelevant. We are becoming used to being able to collaborate online from anywhere, and the classroom should be no different.

Something else that got me thinking, as I've been reading lately about open source, open content, copyright, and licensing mechanisms, was when Friedman talked about Japan and China working together. Even with the bitter feelings the Chinese still have towards the Japanese who occupied their country and used biological weapons to kill millions of Chinese, the Japanese are outsourcing to China. The economics override the hate. That made me wonder if at some point we'll see some collaboration among Richard Stallman, Larry Lessig, Steve Ballmer, Tom Giovanetti, and Marilyn Bergman. Stallman's and Lessig's licenses, GFDL and CC, don't currently work together even though they're on the same team. The software and recording industries seem pretty much united in their opposition to anything being open, although Ballmer does claim that he likes to see open source development happen using Microsoft products. If Lessig and Stallman can't present a united front, however, how will anyone be able to withstand the attack from the MPAA/RIAA/ASCAP/Orrin Hatch/Microsoft front?

Friedman points to the Apache project as a good example of how development could happen using an open foundation. IBM worked with Apache to ensure those using Apache would be legally protected and able to use Apache for free. Anyone can now use Apache as a base to build more free stuff, just the same as they can use it as a base to serve up commercial services. He gives the mash-up example of realtors combining Google Maps with Craigslist to produce an always-current map of houses and apartments for sale or rent in a certain city. The businesses that will survive the outsourcing of many common tasks, according to Friedman, are the ones that localize, defined by Joel Cawley of IBM as "[taking] all the global capabilities that are now out there and [tailoring] them to the needs of a local community." One of the important functions of the OER movement is in providing resources available to anyone that are compatible with technological and legal frameworks that allow localization.

More from IPI

After my post from just a few minutes ago, I read with interest a blog posting by Tom Giovanetti, president of IPI, where he discusses Venezuela removing intellectual property restrictions from their constitution and the rejoicing that is sure to follow from the copyleft camp. He thus mischaracterizes the copyleft movement as desiring to do away with IP protections altogether. I attempted to leave a comment on his blog, but it either got lost in the great bit bucket in the sky or is waiting for moderator approval to become public. Either way, the following is my comment to President Giovanetti, as closely as I could reproduce it from memory and remnants in my clipboard:

Your headline and comments about the copyleft folks being excited about the removal of IP protections in the Venezuela constitution display a surprising lack of understanding of the copyleft movement. Licenses like GFDL and CreativeCommons work within the currently broken copyright system to allow people to more freely share materials with others, of their own free will.

You mischaracterize Larry Lessig as promoting less-than-democratic policies. You point to countries with political and economic problems that happen to also not respect IP laws in a straw man attack that unfortunately adds to overall misunderstanding of the complicated issues at stake. I might suggest (if you have not done so already) reading Larry's book Free Culture and then making a more accurate statement on his position regarding Intellectual Property.

You might defend yourself by pointing to Richard Stallman attending a meeting with Hugo Chavez, and I don't doubt he has said something you could construe as his support of the removal of IP protection, given his outspoken activist nature. However, he has stated that he believes authors should be able to charge for their works in order to make a living if they so desire, and that a copyright system could help them do so.

Billions Stolen?

A headline in the newspaper about the tens of billions of dollars that are lost to piracy pointed me to the Institute for Public Innovation. The IPI is dedicated to "advocating lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a smaller, less-intrusive government." It appears that one of their methods of promoting a smaller government and lower taxes is tightening copyright laws, so I thought I would link to it here in the interest of providing another viewpoint on copyright.

They make it difficult to deep link to articles on their site, so you have to just go to their homepage and look for their articles, but the following is a synopsis from their site. While I was there, I also found an article about different types of fair use that I thought was interesting, and I've included that synopsis as well.


IPI Policy Report - # 189
The True Cost of Copyright Industry Piracy to the U.S. Economy
by Stephen E. Siwek on 10/03/2007
22 Pages

Synopsis:
Using a well-established U.S. government model and the latest copyright piracy figures, this study concludes that, each year, copyright piracy from motion pictures, sound recordings, business and entertainment software and video games costs the U.S. economy $58.0 billion in total output, costs American workers 373,375 jobs and $16.3 billion in earnings, and costs federal, state, and local governments $2.6 billion in tax revenue.


IPI Issue Brief
What's "Fair"? Why Those Concerned About Copyright Fair Use Need to Say What They Mean
by Lee Hollaar, Ph.D on 04/11/2007
8 Pages

Synopsis:
While many people in the copyright debate talk about "fair use," they seldom say which uses are of concern. But without specifics, it is hard to provide balanced exceptions to copyright protection. Congress should codify "fair use of necessity" and many instances of "economic fair use" so that people will know what is allowed, while reserving fair use primarily for the "transformative" or "productive" uses that reflect the goal of copyright.

Economics of OER

As I've been thinking and reading about the economic models of Open Educational Resources (OER), I can't help but think of some of the influential contributors and writers in the open source community like Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. Perens discusses software and how most software is developed as infrastructure, not as a product to be sold. Many companies run the open source Apache web server and along side that run Microsoft Office and Windows for their desktop needs. They could easily use a closed-source web server or pay to have their own developed, just like they could easily use OpenOffice and Ubuntu on their desktops. It doesn't really matter, since it all comes down to someone's personal preference. Much of the commercial software used is the same as any other company is using. No one can claim that they have a strategic advantage over their competitors by choosing to use Microsoft Office, because anyone else can buy the same software and use it as well. It is non-differentiating. It may even make sense to collaborate with a competitor, making both of you more efficient. Raymond discusses how using open source software can create goodwill that attracts customers, increase the size of a market so you can grow (even if it allows your competitors to grow also), regain control over a market that you might be losing, etc. Since the Open Source community is several years ahead of the OER community, it is important to keep a collective eye on the choices made by our Open Source friends to provide some guidance about what might and might not work for open content.


Benkler discusses the marginal cost of information, which is effectively 0, with perhaps some nominal transmission costs. Although it costs nothing to pass along information to others, Benkler continues on to say that IP laws do make sense by providing an incentive for "market-based producers [to] engage in the useful activity of creating new information, knowledge, and culture." The tradeoff to be made in IP issues is to charge enough to make it worth it to be creative, but to still be accessible for reuse by others. If existing IP is inexpensive enough (or free) for others, it will be less expensive for the next author to build on that existing material. As prices of output rise, that just means that the prices of inputs rise for the next generation of material, so their output prices have to rise to match. Costs go up because either all new materials must be created (if that is even possible) or more money has to be paid out for every reused expression. Theoretically, if everyone reduced the price they charge, everyone's costs would decrease together, and with costs decreasing the price they charge for their products could be reduced...rinse...and repeat.

So how much of our OER are created to be sold, and how much is infrastructure? I'm not sure I could pinpoint a percentage. Thinking back to my bachelors and my MBA, much of the material we learned was in textbooks (the same textbooks used at Harvard or other prestigious universities, it was pointed out to us). So if I have the same textbook as a student at Harvard, and I have the same ability as him or her to go to Google or Wikipedia and read or publish information or even collaborate directly with that Harvard student, what makes the Harvard degree so different from mine? The actual content being deposited into us is non-differentiating.

USU is currently going through the re-accreditation process like all schools do once every 10 years, just checking to make sure everything is in order, to facilitate the transfer of courses between schools and to ensure that the students here can continue receiving federal financial aid by working towards an accredited degree. Not only does the entire school work to keep accreditation, but individual degrees and departments can be accredited. The result of accreditation basically ends up being that degrees should be mostly interchangeable, because we're following the same curriculum. There are obviously other reasons why certain schools are more prestigious than others. After Boise State University's perfect season, capped off by a win over Oklahoma in a BCS bowl, a survey showed that the national recognition for their football team had a positive impact on the school's reputation for academics and research (although the two are probably not related). There will always be something else to differentiate schools on, but it does not appear to be the content taught in the classroom.

Many of the textbooks we use are written by academics who are already being paid to develop course material, so they're double-dipping according to my calculations when they get paid to write a book. Writing research articles and book chapters already fits into the promotion and tenure process as well as their duty to teach their classes. Anyway, giving them the benefit of the doubt, if they were to contribute to a bank of learning objects or OER of some other form like Wikipedia, they might lose money from book sales. But how much of the money from book sales actually goes back to the author? Perhaps something like 10-15% of the new book market, so maybe $10 per book? One author goes so far as to say that the reason textbook prices are so high is because of the evil used book market (even comparing the sales of used books to pirated movies and music). Dr. Roediger talks about "wear and tear" on authors (apparently including himself) who are constantly releasing new editions of books in order to continue receiving their cut of new book sales "until laws are changed to prevent the organized sale of used books". He even mentions his temptation to trade off between two versions of a book to save himself the time of revising again and again every two or three years...right in the middle of his observations of other behavior he considers to be unethical like sales of complimentary copies of books or the bundling/unbundling of workbooks and CDs. That man needs to be slapped, er, I mean introduced to the wonderful world of OER. Seriously, he needs to be sent a special invitation to next year's Open Education conference. Look at the obvious frustration and wasted time that he is spending all to make a few extra bucks, when he could be releasing his materials so others can remix and add more insight and check for mistakes. The time he spends is greatly reduced but the quality of the result is higher. Dr. Roediger is already being paid to research and develop teaching materials, so let him get back to being productive by developing new ideas and actually teaching, rather than being so concerned about all the evil bookstores taking advantage of both students and authors.

It seems that everything would run smoother and more efficiently without having to worry about tracking all the IP issues inherent in creating closed content.

If the content becomes free, where does that leave degrees that are based on mastery of that free content? That one is going to have to wait for another day, but I imagine it will come down to paying for the actual differentiating features of an institution.

Licensing

For this week's OpenEd class, I jumped on the readings early in the week, meaning to write early. When I looked at the questions, though, I got a little stuck, so I've had licensing terms floating around in my head for the last few days, as I've pondered: What is missing from CC, and how can we possibly make CC and GFDL content compatible with each other?

Stian and Greg both mention that a non-BY license would be nice. I would agree with that. That got me thinking, since Attribution is the most consistent and simple term across all the CC licenses. Obviously the implementation of a SA-only license would be pretty straight forward to implement, but then I wonder if without making a declaration to put your work into the public domain or selling the copyright to CC like in their Founder's Copyright, could you simply implement a license that allowed anyone to use your content however they like (similar to BY, but without the actual BY)? Would it matter that it would have the same effect as declaring it to be in the public domain? Would it have the same effect?


The CC license could possibly benefit by adding a Notification clause, which could go with or without any of the existing licenses, asking that those who remix or make certain other uses of the content notify the creator that their work has been mixed into something else. Something like that might be too difficult to understand and costly to implement. CC works because it is simple, and I believe it is important to keep it that way.

Looking to the software world, the shareware model comes to mind. We've all probably seen websites with a little PayPal donation box or downloaded software like WinZIP or others that can be distributed for free but require payment to continue using it. Pollock discusses the Magnatune music label that allows users to choose what price to pay for their album downloads. There's a restaurant in Salt Lake City, One World Cafe, soon to open another restaurant in New York City, where guests pay whatever they feel the meal was worth, and they can help do dishes or serve food to work off their meal if they need to. I don't know how well it would work with open content. You'd run into issues with both NC and SA with a shareware license, but maybe it would be worth it to CC if they provided a service to run payments through their system for a nominal 5% cost recovery fee.

The shareware idea there is kind of a brainstorming idea, not well thought out by me yet. Our GNU friends have a page dedicated to the various software licenses that are available and how they relate to each other. Perhaps another of the software licenses will spur an idea of how to license content differently. When it comes to GNU, however, something about them just makes me slightly uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the 20 pages about why we shouldn't say Linux, but GNU/Linux, when referring to that particular operating system. I mean, I enjoy and appreciate Open Source software, but perhaps not so much that I really care what the difference is between Free Software and Open Source Software (although I could very easily explain the difference between Free Software and Freeware if you needed another clue as to my location on the geek-continuum). Their approach seems to be one of a fundamentalist, with only one right way to license. Stallman and friends get pretty worked up about whether a given license is really open and get upset about CC's NC clause (not because NC is unclear or difficult to enforce, but because it is unfair to disallow commercial use). The CC licenses give more choice to a creator than does the GFDL, because of the range of available licenses. That additional choice adds complexity and incompatibilities, though.

I hope something can be worked out so these licenses can be more compatible with each other, but it seems unlikely to happen quickly. In the mean time, it may just be a liberal application of fair use that allows a mixture among the various incompatible licenses, along with a sprinkle of a gentleman's agreement not to sue.

Copyright and the Public Domain

Copyright has obviously gotten out of hand. Even ignoring the complexities of differences among laws from various countries, which you'll have to deal with anytime you cross international lines, just within the US, copyright law has become convoluted and complex. It is no surprise that the lawyers are making a killing off helping all these authors comply with the law and protect themselves from each other, all the while increasing costs and reducing creativity.

Unfortunately, when I teach about copyright as part of a larger unit, generally the most I have time for is to briefly explain that copyright protects your creation as soon as it is put in tangible form without any additional registration or notification required and that fair use allows some exception to this rule. I guess I go slightly (but not much) deeper than that, also briefly mentioning work-made-for-hire, open source vs all rights reserved software licensing, citing your sources, plagiarism, and the DMCA. If I have time I try to at least point out Creative Commons by showing a CC search on Flickr.

Other than government-produced works, 80-plus year old works, some works where someone forgot to renew the copyright or inadvertently left off the copyright notice back when the law required either of those things, or people who specifically release their materials into the public domain, we are left with tons of material that can't be reused by anyone without a big hassle...until the GNU and CC folks came along.

Ideally, we would have much more content in the public domain, but the GNU and CC open licenses allow for more sharing of content while protecting the author's copyright claim. So would we be better off by converting these open licenses over to public domain? That is, if more works moved from all rights reserved status to the public domain, we should theoretically see an increase in creativity and a decrease in production costs, so wouldn't it follow that by changing these open licenses (which contain restrictions) to public domain (with no restrictions) we would see a similar change? I don't necessarily think we would be better off.

The open licenses provide some benefits that the public domain does not, given our current IP climate of extended-length, automatic copyright. Copyright exists, according to the Constitution, to encourage new works by granting the right to exclusive use of those new works to their creator. If the only two choices given an author were infinite full copyright or completely giving up all rights to a creation, I believe we would see less overall sharing. The reason the open licenses work is that they allow the creator to retain the rights they care about, while allowing others to use their material in certain ways. This compromise is the strength of the open licenses.

If copyright reverted to its original term of 14 years or to a model of requiring registration or notice to retain copyright, the open license issue would be moot. Many materials would quickly become public domain and we wouldn't need alternate licenses for them. I believe that many people that are willing to voluntarily apply a "some rights reserved" license would be unwilling to give up all their rights. Even the simplest case attribution-only license is important so that acknowledgement is given to the author; that is not required of public domain materials. An author is unlikely to review his or her own materials on a regular basis to decide which old materials should be released to the public domain. He or she will likely decide that when it is published. The open licenses allow the author to set it and forget it.

Should copyright law be scaled back so works enter the public domain faster? Yes. Is that going to happen? No. Would we be better off by releasing our creations into the public domain instead of using an open license? That depends. If people will actually do it, then yes. If they reserve all rights, because they don't want to cede some, then no.

OER Repositories

Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative

The Open University, being a higher education institution, provides higher ed content. This content is available in units, which are different size chunks, anywhere from a smaller amount of material that could be reviewed in just a few sessions or a workshop to what appears to be enough material for a full semester course. The materials have learning objectives and are rated from Introductory to Advanced in the level of the material they cover, but they do not provide any clear prerequisites that might be required to successfully meet those learning objectives. There are discussion forums dedicated to allowing for exchange of ideas among learners of the content.

Rice Connexions

Connexions is a repository of modules and courses (collections of modules). From what I understand about Learning Objects, these modules are basically just that. Each of these modules are quite small, and could be used alone or along with the rest of the course, or remixed in some other way.

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

The OLI exists of a very small number of full courses, with all the same material as a student taking the course at CMU, but without access to the instructor or exams. By paying, the student can earn credit by working with an instructor and taking exams. Both methods allow the student to track their way through their completion of the course if desired.

UNESCO Open Training Platform

The UNESCO materials, put out by the United Nations, is not so much focused on higher ed like many of the other OER repositories reviewed here. The OER in this case look more like continuing/distance education or adult outreach education. A byline on the site says they are "Advocating open content in non formal education." I suppose that nonformal in this case probably refers somewhat to the fact that this is not formal university material. A lot of it looked like material that could be very helpful in terms of teaching something people can actually use. I was a little worried, however, by a 10-year-old document covering the basics of getting on the Internet; some of the other information may not change as much in 10 years as that particular topic, but that one was extremely out of date.

MIT OCW

This is one of the most well-known OER Repositories, but then again I am most familiar with USU OCW which is modeled after the MIT OCW. Again, we're looking at higher ed material here, and quite a comprehensive set of well over 200 courses published in the last 6 months alone and over 1700 courses altogether (compared to just under 100 or so total at USU). They look to be mostly full semester courses, including presentation of material, additional study materials, and exams. One course even had a pop quiz included. So the students reviewing the OCW content when taking the actual class at MIT might get an extra hint about when the pop quiz will come up. :) These are MIT classes, so a reasonable assumption might be that these are high quality materials.

National Repository of Online Courses

NROC OER consist of higher ed as well as high school level courses. They employ a staff of designers and evaluators to ensure the content consists of effective materials that follow accepted Learning Theories. NROC content is available for educational and nonprofit use for free, or for a price to commercial entities. Similar to the OLI described above, a small number of high quality courses are available.

Some of the differences among these repositories are terms of the licensing of content, the balance between quantity and quality of content, and tools for finding and working with the content.

One of the most useful features of any of these sites was in the Open University, where they have forums to discuss the materials with others that are there to learn the same thing. That interaction is key. Add onto that the myLearningSpace where you can track what you've studied, see what other people have been looking at the same materials as you, and be notified when new items are posted, and this one has to be tops.

If I had to kill one (or two), I'd have OLI and NROC take all their materials and post them to Connexions. I mean, I like the Open University's learning community better, but the fact that Connexions allows anyone to post their material is a bonus. Connexions has some tools for collaboration among authors, but I didn't see that on the learner side. Add the forums and myLearningSpace from the Open University to the collaborative development process of Connexions and that is the ultimate community.

The only thing that could possibly make this ultimate community better would be to take the enormous amounts of material from MIT and dump it by the truckload onto the community.

We'd have something to rival Wikipedia (or maybe we'd just be recreating their Wikiversity project).

Open Education: Past, Present, and Future

Several years ago while working on my MBA, I worked with a group of 3 or 4 other students on what turned out to be a 100 page marketing plan for Aggie Ice Cream. A friend of mine wondered how we could write 100 pages about ice cream. Those 100 pages seem to pale in comparison as I try to compile the several hundred pages that I've been reading over the last few weeks on Open Educational Resources (OER) into a blog posting.

The three reports are: Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources (OECD), Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (OLCOS), and A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (Hewlett).

OECD is an organization of governments focused on discussing and promoting policies to encourage democracy and economic growth around the world. They collect data and make forecasts to assist member governments in making decisions. The OECD report is fittingly a survey of OER movement, how it has developed over the past few years and some of the current challenges being faced.

According to OECD, much of the OER movement is driven by Higher Education, with some of that coming from institutional policy and some from individuals providing content on their own. Whether it is individuals or entire institutions participating in the movement, the purposes for sharing seem to be similar: reduce content development cost, promote lifelong learning and encourage more to seek a university education, return content to the taxpayers that funded it, compete for the best students, and improve content through transparency, among others. As content opens up, the traditional role of a teacher as one who simply provides content to students becomes out of date. If the content is already available, the teacher must become a facilitator and collaborator with students.

OLCOS is a project aimed at promoting the production and use of OER in Europe, targeting producers and users of such content, educational institutions that support them, and the technology developers and researchers who facilitate the sharing of OER through their innovation. The OLCOS report agrees with OECD that the shift to OER will bring along with it a decreased focus on a teacher-centered classroom, but points out that any change to the system will take time and sustained focus and effort by educational leaders.

As teachers begin taking a constructivist approach, allowing students to remix and reuse content, individual students will begin taking an active role in their own education, building on their existing knowledge and schema. There is much still lacking in terms of seamless support from technology to support collaboration; wikis do a good job in certain applications, but are not feasible in others. There are legal issues to deal with to allow a range of usage and remixing of content, as well as the unwillingness on the part of some educators to make any kind of change to how they have always taught. Creative Commons is a possible solution to the copyright issues, and a new reward structure may help with some of the traditional educators' unwillingness to integrate OER into the classroom.

The Hewlett Foundation is a grantor organization dedicated to addressing social and environmental problems and thus assist grantee organizations make positive contributions to society. The report to the Hewlett Foundation was the one that most drew me in. Although it focuses mainly on projects that have received Hewlett funding, that covers a lot of ground, since so much money has been made available to many organizations to encourage the growth of the OER movement. I liked seeing the specific projects that have been funded and the impacts they are making.

The Hewlett report provides a balanced view of the featured projects, pointing out that there are successes as well as items to keep working on. An interesting concept here is the meta-university, perhaps something along the lines of the WGU, where content may be provided from any number of sources, but then some central assessment or organizational structure exists to provide direction and verification of skills. An important consideration in providing open content is accessibility of that content through mobile devices or in remote locations.

To me, the most interesting piece of the entire OER movement has to do with an increase in direct participation in the learning process by students. Students will learn better as they take the time to invest in their own education. In addition, we should see more of the legal issues worked out as music, movie, and publishing industries fight to maintain copyright control while becoming increasingly irrelevant as the technology to share content becomes increasingly simple and available. The path ahead is long and filled with resistance, but change is already happening and will continue to happen. Hopefully the movement reaches critical mass (if it has not already) before some boneheaded senator is duped by lobbyists into passing legislation that cripples the growth that is already starting. Given the international nature of the OER movement, it seems likely to withstand the resistance that is to come.

Is Education a basic human right? Should it be mandatory?

This is an interesting set of questions to think about. It becomes one of those where there become so many layers and exceptions to the rule that it makes it difficult come up with a clear answer. Andreas' blog posting points the contrast between systems that implement education for nefarious purposes and teachers that thrive and make a difference in children's lives.

I believe that I agree that education is a basic human right. Whether it should be mandatory to a certain level, well, that depends. Education means so many different things to different people. Tomaševski's articles really made me stop and think about how different our situation here in the US is compared to other countries. We're debating here about NCLB, charter schools vs traditional public schools, and vouchers for helping students attend private schools, but rarely if ever do I hear an argument that schooling should go away all together. That is, culturally here in the US (although there are portions of the country that do not value education) it is generally a given that education will make us better, and we simply argue about the manner in which to implement it. I really hadn't given much thought before to how to handle young boys that herd sheep in the mountains far away from any sign of civilization. Who am I to say what education, if any, will help that boy? Or will it hurt him? Will he be outcast in his society because a Westerner came in and told him that he needs a Western education? Is his education, being out in nature, surviving on the land, communicating with his animals, learning to read the sky and the water, worth any more or less than the PhD I'm working on?

In the case of the girls who become worth less when they get married at an older age because they put off marriage to go to school, a burden is placed on the parents for trying to educate their children, so who should blame them for conforming to their society's reward structure? Certainly many great people have made sacrifices in spite of great pressure around them and have gone on to make a difference in the world. But is a person unsuccessful because they didn't change the world or because they conformed to society's expectations?

Of course, education is one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you become educated, then once you have become educated, it's somewhat too late to decide that you'd rather not be educated, a paradox in line with the Observer Effect. Rising literacy rates and the availability of education have led to improvements in medicine, communications, travel, efficiency in production, and a better understanding of the world around us, but does that mean that everyone has to take advantage of such? I hope that the opportunity is made available to all who wish to receive an education, but I don't believe that mandatory education is necessarily the answer in all situations. It does seem to be a difficult line to draw.

I think I've asked more questions that I've answered.