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Opening Education–the little things you can do
By now, you’ve heard and/or used the term OER (Open Educational Resources) a ton of times. Whether you’re an advocate for open education, promoting the use, reuse, and adaptation of openly licensed educational materials, or an everyday user of them because you find them convenient and effective for your teaching or learning needs, you have contributed in some way to improving the educational landscape for everyone, everywhere.
But there’s a lot of little things you can do to improve education and the educational process no matter who you are and where you’re located. These are things you do all the time as part of your professional or personal routines, such as filling out forms about your job or project, writing up summaries or abstracts on papers you’ve researched, or describing and tagging photos (aka adding metadata). These activities are also integral to the functioning of many open education projects, which depend on efforts from online communities consisting of persons like ourselves. A list of these projects are growing on OpenEd’s volunteer page, which currently points to projects like dScribe and AcaWiki. If your project could use help on a specific activity, please add it here! OpenEd is a wiki; anyone can edit.
dScribe needs descriptions for their medical images
dScribe has created over 200 images to aid instructors in their teaching, but they need to be made discoverable first! You can help by adding tags and short descriptions for one or two images. All images and their accompanying info will be licensed CC BY.
AcaWiki could use those summaries and abstracts you’ve written
AcaWiki makes summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research available to the general public via CC BY, allowing people like us to easily find desired information. If you’ve written summaries and reviews for papers before, now’s the time to make them useful by uploading those files to AcaWiki. And if you regularly research and write up abstracts for class or for your own good, you can easily make uploading them a habitual part of the process. It only takes a couple of extra clicks.
We also encourage you to add your project or organization to ODEPO, ccLearn’s Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations. Not only will this make your project more discoverable, it will enable better research across the landscape of open education related projects.
For other ways to get involved, see OpenEd’s Get Involved space.
2 Comments »Google Image Search Implements CC License Filtering
Today, Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. It is now easy to restrict your Image Search results to find images which have been tagged with our licenses, so that you can find content from across the web that you can share, use, and even modify. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain.
To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos.
Remember, Google can only provide search results that its algorithms find tagged with the license you specify; it is your obligation to verify the license of the image you’re using and make sure you’re conforming to its guidelines.
This is a huge step forward for the future of image search on the web, so congratulations to the Google team on another great CC implementation!
12 Comments »CAPL, the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon
CAPL, the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon originally founded at Washington and Jefferson College in 2003, re-launches today. From the announcement email:
“CAPL is a free, online, non-commercial visual glossary comprised of authentic photos for language and cultural instruction and research. Created at Washington & Jefferson College, CAPL seeks to provide teachers and learners with high-quality authentic images for their classrooms and teaching materials. Additionally, it provides researchers in applied linguistics, visual cognition, and automated image recognition with a database of high-quality culturally authentic images they can use in their research. At the core of CAPL is the generous creative commons license.”
CAPL is based on the premise that “visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture.” It asks the question, “Is a house really a Haus, is pain really хлеб, and when we see red cabbage, is it really red?” To find out, go check out CAPL for yourself!
All CAPL images are licensed CC BY-NC.
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