ccLearn
Vital Signs Launches New Site with CC BY as default
Yesterday, Vital Signs kicked off their new site with more than 300 supporters, including Maine’s former Governor Angus King, who spearheaded the initiative that resulted in a laptop for every 7th and 8th grader in the state. Vital Signs, a field-based science education program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, started 10 years ago just before the turn of the century. Since then it has evolved to “[leverage] Maine’s laptop program to enable students to participate in a statewide effort to find invasive species, and to document the native species and habitats most vulnerable to future invasions.” The new site “provides a digital platform, including social networking tools, to facilitate a fluid exchange of knowledge between students and experts. It changes each student’s relationship with science from distant spectator to thoughtful participant.” You might remember our Back to School feature on them, or even my Inside OER interview with Sarah Kirn, the Manager of the project, from the spring of 2008.
Back then, CC Learn and VS tossed around a lot of ideas on how to get them to move towards openness, and now more than a year a later those ideas have come to fruition. Their new site leverages the research and data of more than 50 middle school classrooms who are paired with real scientists, researchers, and conscientious citizens to explore and address the issue of invasive species.
“Stewarding 32,000 miles of rivers and streams, 6,000 lakes and ponds, 5,000 miles of coastline and 17 million acres of forest is a job for every Maine citizen, young and old,” said Andrew Fisk, director, Bureau of Land and Water Quality, Department of Environmental Protection. “Engaging seventh and eighth grade students in the issue of invasive species promises to build a heightened level of public awareness and a meaningful body of scientific knowledge. You never know who will save the next lake from a milfoil infestation. The kids are a resource of significant magnitude for us.”
Now Vital Signs work can be leveraged by other states and around the world. The new site’s default licensing policy is CC BY, which means that anyone is free to copy, distribute, adapt, or remix VS work as long as they attribute Vital Signs. The issue of invasive species is not unique to Maine, and now Vital Signs can lead in opening up the work that will enable future solutions.
No Comments »U.S. Dept of Ed funds Bookshare to make open textbooks accessible
Remember the California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative and how it resulted in 16 open textbooks, 10 of which met 90% of California’s standards? Well, since these textbooks were licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses that allows derivation (the licenses sans the ND term), they can not only be translated into various languages, but also modified and adapted into various contexts, including converting them into accessible formats, such as audio and Braille. No extra transaction costs have to be incurred by some middleman to allow these adaptations—any entity with the resources to adapt these textbooks may do so, since the rights for derivation are pre-cleared via Creative Commons.
Realizing this, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs has granted $100k to Bookshare, “the world’s largest accessible online library for people with print disabilities.” The grant is aimed at “[creating] the first accessible versions of open content digital textbooks. The initial planned conversion of open content textbooks, which are distributed freely under a license selected by the author, are math and science textbooks approved for California students.” From the press release,
1 Comment »“As other states begin to approve open content textbooks, Bookshare will continue to convert these materials to accessible formats for all students who read better with accessible text. The first open content textbooks approved for use in California will be available via Bookshare. The texts will be offered in the accessible DAISY format that enables multi-modal reading, combining highlighted on-screen text with high-quality computer-generated voice, and BRF, a digital Braille format for use with Braille displays or embossed Braille.”
…
“Traditional copyrighted books, including those contributed to Bookshare by publishers, are protected with digital rights management technology and available only to those with a documented print disability. But Bookshare’s open content books will become part of the freely distributable books in the Bookshare collection and can be used by anybody without proof of disability,” says Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman. “These accessible books will not only help disabled students throughout the U.S. and globally, but provide parents, teachers and assistive technology developers with free access to real talking textbooks.”
CC Learn Advanced Topics
Earlier this year, CC Learn launched CC Learn Productions, highlighting reports and three document series: CC Learn Recommendations, CC Learn Explanations, and CC Learn Step by Step Guides. Since April, we have greatly expanded our repertoire to about a dozen documents, touching on basic topics such as Why CC BY? to legally incompatible content in OER. We’ve verily become document-making machines, cranking out new publications every month.
In the course of production, we found there are certain topics that cannot be distilled to a general audience, mainly because these topics are too specialized, and impractical, for the majority of CC’s user base. We realized that another document series was necessary, one specifically dealing with advanced topics, topics which require additional expertise and address the concerns of a smaller cross section of the OER community. The CC Learn Advanced Topics series, which is not intended for general consumption or to serve as legal advice, aims for this.
The first CC Learn Advanced Topic is CC Licenses and Trademarks: A Guide for Organizational OER Creators and Distributors. This primer distinguishes between copyright and trademark as they pertain to OER, and clarifies some of the confusion surrounding CC licenses and trademarks. For OER organizations with a strong trademark, or with the plans and capacity to build and sustain one, this primer is a guide to understanding the relationship between your organization’s rights as a copyright owner using CC licenses (particularly CC BY) and your organization’s trademark rights within the context of open educational resources (OER). This primer is not relevant for OER creators generally, as trademark law only pertains to those entities with the capacity to build and sustain a brand.
Though CC and CC Learn are open to consulting around business models generally, we are not in a position to give advice around trademark law. This primer is simply an explanation of a separate set of rights you may have to protect your work – trademark rights – while still allowing for the downstream adaptation, translation, and localization of your work that are so central to the goals of OER. Additionally, this primer is an example of one way certain organizations may deal with their concerns, and we hope that it will become an important document in our ongoing work.
All CC Learn Productions are licensed CC BY.
1 Comment »WikiEducator, Connexions, and MediaWiki join forces in OER Remix Project
In case you haven’t heard, WikiEducator‘s Wayne Mackintosh announced earlier this week that they were joining forces with Connexions “to provide educators with greater freedom of choice to mix and match the best of two OER worlds, namely “producer-consumer” models with more traditional work flow approaches and commons-based peer production.” WikiEducator and Connexions are two collaborative OER projects that use Creative Commons licenses. While WikiEducator, licensed CC BY-SA, focuses “on building capacity in the use of Mediawiki and related free software technologies for mass-collaboration in the authoring of free content,” Connexions, licensed CC BY, focuses on the collaborative development, sharing, and publishing of modular educational content that can be easily integrated into larger collections or courses. According to the announcement, the two projects will partner “to build import export capability between the Connexions and WikiEducator/Mediawiki platforms.”
It’s definitely exciting to see these two OER projects working together, especially since the collaboration is being generously funded by a grant from one of our own biggest supporters, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. There are various ways you can tune into its progress, including visiting the project planning node, subscribing to the Connexions mailing list, or helping them develop use case scenarios.
No Comments »CC Talks With: Mr. Mayo’s Class Integrates CC, Skypes with Lawrence Lessig
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to George Mayo, known as Mr. Mayo to his students, a middle school Language Arts teacher in Maryland. Mr. Mayo was brought to CC Learn’s attention by Lawrence Lessig, CC’s founder and current board member, who Skyped with Mr. Mayo’s class for thirty minutes, answering questions on copyright, YouTube’s take-down policy and downloading music. Mr. Mayo and his class have integrated CC licensed works into their daily activities, documenting it all at mrmayo.org. Instead of elaborating on the various innovative ways Mr. Mayo and his class uses CC, I’m going to let George speak for himself. The following is the interview I had with him via Skype. You can also listen to the audio here.
No Comments »Donate Today to Have Your Donation Doubled by WhippleHill!
Our 2009 fundraising campaign continues, and to help us reach our goal of $500,000 by the end of the year, we’re delighted to announce a second corporate matching challenge, this time sponsored by WhippleHill Communications. WhippleHill will generously match every donation dollar for dollar for the next week – up to $5,000! Donate now to help us meet the challenge!
WhippleHill Communications was founded in 1998 and is based in Bedford, New Hampshire. This innovative company provides targeted communications solutions for independent schools seeking next-generation Web services. Like CC, WhippleHill values openness and innovation on the Web, with a particular focus on education, a realm CC is also heavily involved in through ccLearn.
Join WhippleHill in investing in the future of creativity and knowledge. Give what you can today!
1 Comment »Commoner Letter #4: Molly Kleinman of the University of Michigan
Molly Kleinman is a long-time friend of CC and has been doing incredible work for all things copyright over at the University of Michigan as Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries. From Espresso Book Machines to a CC-friendly Scholarly Publishing Office, we continue to be inspired by the University of Michigan’s innovative approach to open content, copyright, and especially open education, an area of focus CC is highly committed to developing through ccLearn. We’re honored to have Molly, a self-proclaimed dedicated advocate of Creative Commons, write the fourth letter in the Commoner Letter series of this year’s fundraising campaign.
Subscribe to receive future Commoner Letters by email.
Hello, Fellow Commoner,
Creative Commons licenses make it easier for me to do my work, and to help my faculty and students do theirs. Today I’d like to return the favor and encourage you to support the Creative Commons 2009 Annual Campaign, and help make sure they continue the wonderful work they’ve been doing.
Why is Creative Commons so helpful and important? Because it provides a balanced, sane alternative to the madly out-of-whack copyright system I deal with every day. I am an academic librarian and copyright specialist who teaches faculty, students, librarians, archivists and others about their rights as creators and their rights as users. Anyone familiar with the state of copyright law knows it’s messy and confusing stuff, and the very notion of users’ rights is contentious in some circles. Big Content has been waging a propaganda campaign to convince the public that all unauthorized, un-paid-for uses are infringing, illegal uses. It’s not true, but the widespread misinformation is bad for educators, bad for students, and bad for all of us who benefit from the fruits of scholarly research. Professors are afraid to share educational material with their students. Parents are afraid to let their kids post homemade videos online. All this fear hinders the ability of scholars, teachers, and students to do the work of research, teaching, and learning that is their job.
As my favorite CC video says, “Enter Creative Commons.” Creative Commons carves out an arena in which people can use and build on new works without fear. It frees us from both the looming threat of lawsuits and the time consuming and expensive demands of clearing permissions. Creative Commons helps people share openly, and the more content that CC helps to open up, whether it’s music or photography or scientific data or educational resources, the more it expands what faculty and students can teach and study freely.
I’d like to call particular attention to the work of one of Creative Commons’ offshoots, ccLearn. ccLearn is striving to realize the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources, and to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this work. In the United States alone, plummeting budgets and rising costs for both K-12 and higher education are making it harder for students and teachers to access the quality educational resources they need. Until recently, most educational content was locked behind digital paywalls or hidden in print books, and the free stuff you could find online was often unreliable. Now, the pool of high quality open educational resources is growing every day, with open textbooks, open courseware, and other experimental projects popping up all the time. Many of these projects have received support from ccLearn, and nearly all of them are built on the framework of Creative Commons licenses. Every one provides expanded access that is crucial to the future of a quality educational system, both in this country and throughout the world.
This is why it is so important to support Creative Commons, in any number of ways. Though I donate (and you should, too), I believe that one of my greatest contributions has been in helping to build the Creative Commons community from the ground up, one frustrated professor or librarian at a time. Every person I teach about Creative Commons is a person who may eventually contribute to the Commons herself, attaching licenses to her works and sharing them with the world. The bigger the Commons, the better for all of us.
Molly Kleinman
Special Assistant to the Dean of Libraries
University of Michigan Library
Preparing Your Educational Resources for DiscoverEd
In July, CC Learn officially launched DiscoverEd, a search prototype that provides scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. We blogged about it again during Back to School week, emphasizing the future of search and discovery of educational resources and how we hoped DiscoverEd would catalyze efforts in that direction. Since then, we have been working with various organizations and projects who want to include their resources into DiscoverEd, and through all the back and forth about feeds and mark-up–essentially what’s required to get your stuff included for greater discovery–we realized we could streamline the process by putting some necessary information into a brief document.
Preparing Your Educational Resources for DiscoverEd is second in the CC Learn Step by Step Guides series, which is part of our larger Productions schema. It is a basic guide for those interested in preparing their resources for inclusion into search engines like DiscoverEd that utilize structured data. It is targeted at people or institutions interested in making their digitally published educational resources more discoverable. Though the document contains technical language and sample XHTML and RDFa, it’s really not all too complicated. Basically, you just need one of the right feeds to start, which you can then copy and paste the link of into ODEPO (the Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations). ODEPO is hosted on OpenED, the community site for open education. It’s a wiki, so anyone can create an account and add their project or organization to the database.
But the guide explains all that, (as does the DiscoverEd FAQ) and the alternatives–which include contacting us directly. DiscoverEd already pulls from a number of institutions and repositories, and as it expands we hope to improve its search capabilities. Any feedback is welcome.
No Comments »The OpenEd ES Community: Educación y Comunidad—un nuevo portal internacional para la educación abierta, ¡en español!
Having just blogged about the UNESCO OER Community, I also want to emphasize that international communities like UNESCO are themselves made up of communities around the world, some as broad as OER for all Spanish speakers and some as specific as Food Safety in OER.
This week, we would like to highlight OpenEd in Spanish, aka the OpenEd ES Community. I’ve mentioned before that OpenEd is a community site for anyone interested in open education or OER, especially for those who want to develop their own mini-communities on the site. CC Latam and ccLearn have collaborated to localize OpenED for the ES Community, including translating and adapting the events, resources, and ODEPO pages. Our hope is that the Spanish speaking community around OER, including Latam, will grow and thrive within its native language. OpenEd ES is part of a greater effort to make visible all of the interesting work that is being done in various languages around the world. We hope other linguistic communities will see fit to build a home on OpenEd as well.
So I urge you to check it out and contribute. If you speak another language, consider localizing OpenEd for your own community or project. OpenEd is a wiki and anyone can create an account. Also, feel free to give us feedback.
Thanks to Carolina Botero for the Spanish announcement:
Educación y Comunidad: un nuevo portal internacional para la educación abierta, ¡en español!
Para impulsar el movimiento en nuestra región hace falta generar puentes que sirvan para conectar los fabulosos proyectos que están teniendo lugar en la comunidad de habla hispana en América Latina y en la península Ibérica. Tenemos la obligación y a la vez la oportunidad de hacer visible y promover lo que sucede en nuestro propio entorno y además podemos apoyarnos unos a otros para generar una cultura participativa y activa en pro de la educación abierta. Este es el espacio que la Comunidad OpenEd Hispanoparlante –OpenEd en Español http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es, busca ocupar, desarrollar e impactar con la ayuda de todos.
¿Qué es OpenEd?
OpenEd http://opened.creativecommons.org/ es la comunidad de educación abierta en Internet. OpenEd es el nuevo portal desarrollado y sostenido por el Proyecto ccLearn http://learn.creativecommons.org/ de Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ los invitamos a conocerlo y a ¡participar del sitio para hispanoparlantes: OpenEd-ES!
OpenEd es un wiki y por tanto, es una invitación para que colabores y aportes tu propia visión de la comunidad, para que ¡crezcamos juntos!
¿Cómo participar?
Para dar un primer paso hemos creado unos espacios que buscan dar inicio y bases a esta comunidad. Te invitamos a conocer el sitio y a colaborar, hay muchas formas de hacerlo escoge la tuya y encontrémonos en OpenEd
¿Tienes un proyecto de educación abierta o de recursos educativos abiertos?
Revisa si los datos están acá http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/Proyectos o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes
¿Vas a hospedar o conoces un evento en el que el tema de educación abierta sea eje central?
Revisa si los datos están acá http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/eventos o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes
¿Eres un novato en esto?, ¿ya sabes algo y quieres contribuir con recursos para informar y explicar a otros sobre educación abierta, recursos educativos abiertos, Creative Commons, etc.?, ¿quieres ayudarnos a traducir?
Puedes ayudarnos contribuyendo con material, podemos traducir lo que valga la pena y de esa forma comunicar a los demás de qué se trata. Si te interesa éste es el sitio que debes visitar http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/SobreAbierto
¿Quieres participar activamente y formar parte del grupo que arranque y dinamice esta comunidad?
¡Inscríbete en la lista de discusión!
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/OpenEd-es
Estamos presenciando el nacimiento de una comunidad que necesita nuestra región, ¡gracias por participar, divulgar y apoyar esta iniciativa!
Importancia de OpenEd en Español para la Educación:
Pensar en educación abierta es hablar del creciente y fantástico movimiento que ha surgido en torno a la apertura de los recursos educativos que pretende que cualquiera, en cualquier lugar, pueda acceder, usar y reutilizar materiales educativos ya existentes en formas nuevas y creativas o simplemente permitir que los adapten para satisfacer sus necesidades propias y sus contextos locales o culturales. Internet ha servido de plataforma tecnológica para potenciar y favorecer este tipo de proyectos sin embargo, reconocemos que el material y los recursos más visibles son aquellos del mundo angloparlante, ayudemos a dar visibilidad y fuerza al mundo hispanoparlante.
¡Repite este mensaje a quienes creas que pueda interesar!
No Comments »Global Access to OER – A report by UNESCO
The UNESCO OER Community attempts to put OER in light of not one, but many cultural contexts around the world. Connecting 900 individuals in 109 countries, the community runs on a wiki platform and communicates centrally via its listserv. Earlier this year in February and March, they held a discussion on the various barriers to accessing OER in different jurisdictions, with one of its ultimate aims to develop concrete proposals in this area. The outcomes of the discussion are now compiled into a report in both PDF and wiki versions.
From the announcement by Bjoern Hassler,
“The first proposal is about “Introducing digital Open Educational
Resources into Zambian primary schools through school-based
professional development”. Through this project we seek to overcome
access barriers, and engage with OER for Zambian primary/secondary
school mathematics teaching. The barriers are manifold, including
infrastructural, awareness, appropriateness of materials, etc, but we
hope that we’ll be able to draw on the various experiences and
solutions to make this successful… Further information is available herehttp://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/cce/projects/ictzambia/index.html
The second outcome is continued engagement through the UK National
Commission for UNESCO. Within the Information Society Working Group,
OER has been a long-standing theme. However, based on the experience
of the discussion, we are now focussing on issues around OER access
and collaboration. The aims for this are concrete: We are running a
series of meetings to further focus on feasible projects in this area.
The first meeting will take place on 25th/26th in conjunction with the
Nottingham Open Learning Conference (
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/olc/ ) and in conjunction with OER Africa
( http://www.oerafrica.org ).”
The report, as all content on the UNESCO OER wiki, is available via CC BY-SA.
No Comments »
