In case you missed this week’s Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco, you can now view it online thanks to our media sponsor, VidSF, who filmed and broadcast the event.

We heard from four stellar individuals involved in transforming the education landscape through the power of the internet and digital tools, such as open educational resources (OER). The presenters talked about their and other innovative projects rethinking what a textbook is, what a classroom can be, and how a person should learn. Especially enriching was the panel portion of the evening, when all four presenters came together for a thought-provoking discussion about the roadblocks to implementing a more open approach to education, from a policy perspective as well as in terms of practice, including the important issue of how to get teachers, already over-burdened, more involved in helping to build this pool of shared educational knowledge.

Watch the video now!

Thanks to pariSoma as always for the use of their wonderful space, and thanks to the evening’s presenters for their insight and expertise:

• Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
• Amee Godwin, Director, Strategic Initiatives, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
• Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
• Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

Can’t make it to tonight’s Creative Commons Salon in San Francisco? No problem! You’ll be able to tune in virtually thanks to the talented and generous folks at VidSF, our media sponsors for the event.

Watch the salon live at http://parisoma.com from 7-9pm PDT.

Use Identi.ca or Twitter to join the conversation with hashtag #ccsalon.

On the evening’s agenda:
Presentations from 7:15-8pm

• Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
• Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
• Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

Panel and discussion from 8:15-9pm:

• Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
• Amee Godwin, Director, Strategic Initiatives, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
• Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
• Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

When: Monday, May 3, 7-9pm
Location: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door.

Check out the event posting on Facebook and Upcoming.

Join us at what’s sure to be a stellar Creative Commons Salon next Monday, on the power of open education. Bring a friend, come meet CC staff, and enjoy a refreshment as we explore the challenges facing the future of learning and how to harness the power of the internet and digital technologies as forces for good in education.

On the evening’s agenda:
Presentations from 7:15-8pm

• Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
• Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
• Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

Panel and discussion from 8:15-9pm:

• Brian Bridges, Director of the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN)
• Amee Godwin, Director, Strategic Initiatives, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
• Murugan Pal, co-Founder and President of CK-12 Foundation
• Carolina Rossini, Berkman Fellow, Advocate for OER in Brazil, and Peer2Peer University community member

When: Monday, May 3, 7-9pm
Location: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for CC at the door.

Check out the event posting on Facebook and Upcoming.

CC Salons are global events, and anyone can start one, no matter where you live. We encourage you to check out our resources for starting your own salon in your area.

For those of you who don’t know Karien Bezuidenhout, she is the Chief Operating Officer at the Shuttleworth Foundation, one of the few foundations that fund open education projects and who have an open licensing policy for their grantees. A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet Karien despite a six hour time difference—she was in Capetown, South Africa—I was in Brooklyn, New York. Via Skype, I asked her about Shuttleworth’s evolving default license (CC BY-SA to CC BY), her personal stake in OER, and how she envisions us (CC Learn and Shuttleworth) working together. She also gave me some insights into three innovative open education projects they have a hand in: Siyavula, M4Lit, and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).

The conversation below is more or less transcribed and edited for clarity. It makes for great holiday or airplane reading, and if you’re pressed for time, you can skip to the topics or projects that interest you. This is CC Learn’s last Inside OER feature of 2009—so enjoy, and happy whatever-it-is-that-you-are-doing-in-your-part-of-the-world!

How did you arrive at your current position and its relation to open education and open educational resources?

I did an undergraduate degree in accounting and taxation, but I very quickly realized I don’t ever want to be in a purely finance job. I wanted to be in social development, but when I went to university I didn’t actually think of this as a viable option. After I finished my degree, I started looking around and I was fortunate enough to find a job in social development, helping to establish an organization and its programs. Next the work of the Shuttleworth Foundation looked interesting so I joined them as a Project Manager in their free and open source software unit. It wasn’t software development; it was basically advocacy programs around free and open source software, engaging government, education, the private sector and the public on the use and underlying philosophies of free and open source software. From there, I moved into the education unit at the Foundation, it was actually a very natural progression. We believe in the principles of free and open source software, and the Foundation became interested in saying, well, it’s not just about software, but also about an intersect between the ideas behind free and open source software and education. We became interested in this idea of open education or open educational resources, and it went from there. My position grew with the organization’s interest in this area. So I started as a Project Manager specifically around this area, grew to a Program Manager, and from there I became the Chief Operating Officer.

Were you interested in open source and openness in general before you joined Shuttleworth?

Not really; I didn’t really know about it before I joined. Once I joined I thought, wow, everyone should actually know about this—why don’t people know? That was in 2004. Now I actually find more and more people have at least heard about something in this general area, whereas at that stage it really was just in the realm of geeks. I joined based on the fact that I could project manage, but I don’t know anything about this stuff. I told them I’d like to learn and it’s actually been a very interesting journey.

What were you doing before that?

I was in program work as the Project Coordinator at the Trade Law Center for Southern Africa.

How has that work influenced what you do at Shuttleworth?

It’s very interesting because we were working on trade law and trade regulations and one of the things that was being investigated at the time that I was there was the TRIPS provision on Intellectual Property rights. A lot of the work we did was in preparation of and in conclusion from the Doha Declaration on protecting African interests in the trade negotiations and implementation around it. So I had the formal exposure to, “we should protect and we should lock down!” Coming here (to the Foundation) it was really interesting because you see the other side of it. What it did help me do was think about the other side of the issue, what the arguments are that people use when they’re talking about lock-down and increasing rights for owners and decreasing rights for users… So when I started working in this area, it was easier to understand the contrast and to be able to present the case to people in a way that counters their arguments.

So then, as an overarching mission statement, what would you say the Shuttleworth Foundation stance on OER is if you could sum it up in a few words?

The underlying philosophy of the Foundation is around methods of openness, you know the values that underly the free and open source software movement. Transparency, building communities, collaborating, sharing, building on what others have done, making available what we’ve done. These, for us, are the values of what we’re trying to do in open education as well. And then of course the Cape Town Declaration which Ahrash (Bissell, from CC Learn) was a part of developing. So there are three things from the Cape Town Declaration that is important for us: People should participate. (Open education is about more than open licenses.) People should make their works available under open licenses. And people should make policies to allow for and encourage these things to happen.

What would you say is the role of Creative Commons in facilitating that process or that mission?

It’s an interesting question because the Creative Commons license for me is actually the key part, and enabler. I mean we wouldn’t be able to do it without the Creative Commons licenses, simply because trying to explain and make clear to people what it is they can and can’t do in each instance would be almost impossible. You’d have different lenient licensing statements on each and every site which would result in things that are almost as difficult to navigate as the uncertainties in the prevailing copyright system. So basically licenses set the rules of the game for everyone who wants to play. And they’re absolutely essential in that.

The question about what Creative Commons as an organization’s role is, is a completely different one. And that’s one to which the answer isn’t entirely clear to me. I think, especially in the early days, there was a lot of pressure on Creative Commons, and I think the same for CC Learn when it started, to be the community leaders. And it didn’t appear to me that that was what the organization wanted to do. It mostly tried to focus on the licenses. Now, looking back at it, I think that was appropriate, making sure that the licenses are clear and understandable and usable and are used—I think that was the most important part that they had to play. Of course connecting people is equally important. It seems the role is evolving, including more networking and connecting the people in this space, in the way that you now do the interviews and showcasing of projects, saying these are the people who use these licenses, you guys should know about each other.

Going back to what you said about the licenses and how they’re a key part of open educational resources, I found that really interesting because there is sort of this trend going towards people arguing how Creative Commons is part of the infrastructure of open education. So I was wondering if you had any analogies or real world analogies that you would use for the licensing aspect of open educational resources.

Hmm, I started thinking of them as the rules of the game, but a colleague suggested they are actually more like the rules of the road. Because the roads are part of the commons (like knowledge) and everyone uses them, nobody thinks this is my road, I’m here now, and nobody else can be here. It’s about there being something for everyone to use that’s valuable, that everyone contributes to in terms of development and upkeep, and that people need rules to be able to use safely and happily and get where it is they need to be going in their educational journey.

I guess getting more specific, talking about the actual OER initiatives that are funded by Shuttleworth, including the M4Lit project, Siyavula, and the P2PU, could you tell us a little bit about all of them?

Sure. Siyavula is an initiative to provide access to open educational resources that specifically match the South African school curriculum for grades 1-12. The making available of the resources is a key element of it, but it’s not the only one. It’s more like a grain of sand when you’re trying to make a pearl, because what we’re actually interested in are the processes around that—how teachers collaborate, how teachers form communities of practice around the materials, how they adapt the materials for their own uses and share that back with the greater community. And we believe teachers have a lot to offer in that regard, but that it’s under utilized by the teachers themselves. They just don’t have the time or they’re not mobilized around it. By making the resources available, we give them a head start, but then we’re interested in how those communities form and how to help teachers with professional development and curriculum delivery in the classroom.

M4Lit is a practical exploration of the use of mobile phones specifically in education. In South Africa there’s still, and I think it’s the same for around the world, there’s still a great deal of  suspicion from schools and teachers around mobile phones, most considering it a distraction. But it’s a pervasive technology in the hands of teens and learners anywhere, so we’re interested in finding ways of actually using them for education. It’s a way that kids communicate; they do more writing on mobile phones than they would have ever done in essays and/or letters in school, so is there a way that we could harness that in South Africa? So we made available this serial story specifically for mobile phones to see—do kids read more, do they interact, do they write back, do they comment, those kinds of questions. It’s a small project in the sense that we started with one story and a small focus group, wanting to engage with learners directly, and we’ve had some pretty good responses so far—pretty good comments from kids and the focus groups have been really positive about it. That’s actually been really great.

So have you gotten a lot of participation from the students?

We didn’t publish it that widely, we wanted to make it a small pilot, because there are so many mobile phones around and so many potential uses, it’s easy to get lost in trying to meet too many needs and requirements, when actually there are specific solutions we’re exploring for specific groupings, and so we tried to keep it small. Initially we had a couple of hundred teens participate, which is pretty good, but eventually we reached a couple of thousand teens, exceeding readership numbers for accepted “best seller” figures for teen literature.

What would be the next step for the project after this initial phase?

Once we have all the findings back, I think there will be two ways of taking this forward. One is to go into schools and try to create direct links to the curriculum and involve teachers. We could show that we have interest from learners in terms of engaging in this way with long form writing and mobile phones, so instead of just chatting and responding via text message, [it would be] reading things that are a bit more substantial. It would be interesting to see how teachers respond, how they could use it for language teaching as it happens in the classroom. Or as a matter of fact, beyond the classroom. The other path is, of course, that we’ll make the platform and the story available under open licenses, if anyone else wants to try it in their local area, then they’re open to do so. We’d love to see more applications of the approach, and some variations on it.

And then of course you know about Peer 2 Peer University… Given that there is so much open courseware out there now, how do we support self-learners who want to use some of those materials.

Which direction do you see P2PU going in? Because I’ve heard it described more as a study group for peers to get together and the role of the course organizers is less of a teacher or an instructor but more as an organizer or facilitator. And then other people might view it more as these volunteer instructors [that’s] more akin to distance learning but with open educational resources. And I was wondering what your stance or view on that was.

I have my personal preference but I think it should be open to both options. I think it should be the kind of platform where you can have, as we have now, courses run in different ways. My personal vision, if I were to put it in that way, for the Peer 2 Peer University, would be more peer study group—less distance education.  But I think the really important part is that there should still be a course coordinator, who puts together the curriculum and reading list, because I think for self-learners, what’s sometimes difficult is that you can find fifty different articles on a specific topic. How do you know you’ve got the balanced view? How do you know you’ve got all the information you need? I think the course outline done by a tutor or coordinator is important and I think that peer learning is the way to go.

On the specific course that I was on, we had peer assessment and it was really challenging! You read other people’s work and it’s difficult to assess while you’re still learning yourself. But it was also very valuable, because we made sure that we read all the other answers to the weekly questions, and we thought well, do we agree, don’t we, is it similar to ours and if it isn’t, why isn’t it. The subject matter (copyright for educators) also meant that the answers would be jurisdiction specific. I’m in South Africa, so I focused on the South African situation, but then I also had the opportunity to learn what’s happening in Australia, the U.S. or India and that was great.

So all these initiatives that the Shuttleworth Foundation is supporting, they’re all licensed pretty openly, either under CC BY or BY-SA, and I was wondering why the foundation decided to support these initiatives that allow for commercial adaptation of its content when a lot people are pushing the Noncommercial term in other open educational projects.

Well, I think, to begin with, we were open to the commercial angle because in the greater Shuttleworth group we’re the only nonprofit entity. We’ve got venture capitalists that’s part of the group, so commercial pursuit was normal to us, I think that kind of predisposed us to be open to that. I just don’t think that you can separate out education and commercial use so easily. If you look at a private school, for instance, is that commercial use or isn’t it? If you take schools in South Africa, they can’t survive with only the government subsidies so they charge school fees. In some instances they charge for the printed educational resources; is that commercial use or isn’t it? I don’t think that commercial use is clearly enough defined, and I also don’t think that you can entirely separate it out of education and say, education is always not-for-profit or noncommercial and therefore, it’s only those people out there who are trying to make money off it.

Secondly, I think commercial enterprises are key participants and an important part of social development. Otherwise you will always have nonprofit entities or donor entities pushing money into certain sectors, and at some point you don’t want to only transform the nonprofit sector, you also want to transform societies, and you want people to be social entrepreneurs and you want society to take up the ideas. The only way I believe you can sustainably do that in the long run is by involving commercial entities and allowing them to be part of the process. It’s not to say that every single thing should have a commercial leg or anything like that; I just think that we should also allow them to be part of it. If you brought a big enough community around open educational resources and you say, we’re going to make available these resources for free; we’re going to put them on our websites, we’re going to publicize that they’re there for use—that will actually prevent those who are trying to profit unjustly off other people’s work by making it widely known that there’s a free version available. People who do use it for commercial purposes are going to have to add value to be able to sell it as a commercial product. And therefore I think that’s okay to allow that in.

So then even within those projects I mentioned, you have distinctions between the kinds of licenses that they use, and I was wondering what was driving those distinctions, and how it affects those projects. For instance, M4Lit is BY-SA and P2PU is CC BY.

Part of it is an evolution in our own thinking, and part of it is specifically project driven. The evolution in our thinking happened as the open educational resources community matured. Initially we picked CC BY-SA, because there were very few open educational resources out there, and we believed it was the only way that you could grow the community and provide some comfort and security to early adopters. We were essentially saying, don’t worry, everybody else has to do the same. Everyone else who uses your material is going to have to contribute back into the pool.

But as the content pools have grown and as the community has grown, opportunities for partnerships came up and we started running into interoperability challenges more and more. Because of this, [interoperability] started becoming more important to us. The ShareAlike provision was a safe condition for people who were worried about adopting open licenses and saying, won’t someone else use my work and benefit without giving back. But actually there are bigger questions than that. It’s about saying, do you want to participate? Do you want to contribute and collaborate? And do you really believe in the principles behind this? Then you should contribute and collaborate; you should participate. And it should be as free and open for people to use as possible. We don’t want unintended restrictions. We don’t want to end up with people who can’t translate our work, or who can’t include our work in their collections, thereby limiting their reach. If OER Commons wants to use it, or Curriki, or CK12, or anybody else, they should be able to, and they shouldn’t be stuck with a licensing restriction that prevents them from reusing and remixing the work in ways that we want to support.

Siyavula for instance [is a project where it] became most apparent and important to shift. Even though we were philosophically thinking in that way already, we hadn’t yet made the shift in the license we applied throughout all of our projects. Then we started working with Connexions on Siyavula and we realized that Connexions used CC BY and we used CC BY-SA, and essentially those weren’t compatible and we could lose a partner because of the more restrictive license we used. That was the final point at which we decided that CC BY was the license for us.

We still allow projects and initiatives to debate the licensing issue for themselves and motivate for an alternative license for their specific situation if they’d like, but CC BY is now the default position.

So judging by a lot of your answers, CC Learn and Shuttleworth—we seem to be on the same page about a lot of these things. And I know you mentioned before how you envisioned Creative Commons or CC Learn’s role in sort of developing the community a bit and serving as community leaders. Do you picture us working together in the future? And what do you see CC Learn’s role becoming in the future?

Yeah, so we would love to work together in the future. I think one of the things we’ve been doing over the past couple of years is staying in touch and sharing information which has been really valuable. This links to the role CC can play, putting people in touch and saying, this is what other people are doing, take note, how does it impact on what you might want to do. It has changed some of my own thinking over the years and that’s been really, really valuable.

Also the Shuttleworth Foundation has a fellowship program, which I’m sure you know a little about given that you know quite a few of our current fellows. The fellowship program is really about freeing up the time of individuals who have a vision for their part in bringing about positive change in the world, to do just that—go and change the world in the way that they see it. There is also the possibility of matching project funding – if the fellow wants to implement a project idea within the scope of their fellowship, the Foundation will match every unit they invest themselves by at least ten-fold to help them get their projects off the ground. I think that it would be great if CC Learn could share ideas with us on individuals that they think are valuable to support in this way.

And then obviously I think networking and connecting the community around the licenses are really important, especially in [the] education sector, and CC Learn can (and does) help to drive discussion and establish a base around issues like, what does commercial and noncommercial really mean? What is the best license for my situation? CC Learn just recently released a paper on Why CC BY. Those kinds of activities are very important because the community really looks to Creative Commons and CC Learn to see what the right thing is to do. CC Learn are the ones who should drive making the rules of the road and supporting others in using them.

Do you have anything else to add, any last words?

I think that [open licensing] is really important for foundations and funders to do. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Berkman report on open licenses and private foundations. It mentions the Foundation, among others, and our approach to open licensing. It is important for funders and foundations to actively use open licenses. Because if anyone can say, I don’t have to earn my keep by commoditizing this content, I really do believe that our funding should go as far as possible and that the investments that I make should reach as many people as possible, it’s funders and foundation—using open licenses is the way to do it. It’s a policy within the Foundation to release everything under an open license. We’ve had a couple of potential partners who’ve said, no we don’t want to do that, and then we walked away and said that, well maybe they’re not a good match for us anyway. We have also found people are more and more open to this idea, and if anyone can afford to do this it’s funders and foundations. I really do think that they should prioritize that.

We have a recommendation sheet just on this, on encouraging funders. It’s called, Increase Funding Impact. It’s on learn.creativecommons.org/productions. And we have a bunch of documents on there—Why CC BY? Stuff like that. So I would encourage you to check it out.

I will, definitely, thank you very much. That is one of the challenges, starting from scratch on every discussion. Advocacy documents are so valuable. It helps convey the message that the ideas we present aren’t coming from a lone ranger, but are well established and backed by sound arguments from a growing global community.

The pilot phase of P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University) ended in October, after having run for six weeks with seven courses and approximately 90 participants. Last month, the pilot phase volunteers, including the course organizers, met in person for the first time at the first ever P2PU Workshop in Berlin. The goal of the workshop was to integrate pilot phase experiences into a working plan for the future of P2PU. Judging from the outcomes, the workshop achieved its goal. Check out CC Learn’s video download of the workshop at Blip.tv, Vimeo, or YouTube. (It’s CC BY, so feel free to share and remix!)

Background

“The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.”

Why is CC Learn interested in P2PU?

“P2PU is the social wrapper around open educational resources.”

The open education movement started by focusing on the legal and technical aspects of educational resources, and how they could be opened up for use by anyone, anywhere. Creative Commons licenses provide the legal, technical, and social infrastructure for OER, enabling the easy use and reuse of OER while improving discoverability and adaptability around the world. This movement towards opening education has resulted in an abundant and still growing commons of open educational resources (OER).

However, P2PU recognizes that content isn’t enough. Accessing OER does not automatically result in learning. There are reasons why traditional education institutions exist, one of these being the social interaction between peers that enables, facilitates, and motivates learning. But what about those that want to learn outside of brick and ivy walls? P2PU is an initiative outside of the traditional institution that aims to provide the social learning structures, the “social wrapper”, around existing open educational resources.

Because P2PU is a true OER project, testing the bounds of what can work when you empower a community of volunteers and peers to learn for free from each other, CC Learn is interested in where it’s going.

Where is P2PU going?

In the short term, P2PU is aiming to double its courses for its second pilot, which launches towards the end of January next year. P2PU has also established a strong community of core volunteers in tech, outreach, sustainability, research, and course organizing. These volunteers run P2PU, and they are all very busy getting P2PU ready for its next phase which will feature, among other things:

• a new website and social platform
• an orientation process for new course organizers
• a CC BY-SA licensing policy (and a compendium on how to choose a license for your open education project)
• a set of core values that the community subscribes to

P2PU is also preparing a research workshop on alternative accreditations in early 2010, and building relationships with other organizations (such as CC Learn) to explore avenues in research, assessment, and sustainability.

What is the role of P2PU in education?

Good question, and good answers—here. Like the education landscape, P2PU is still evolving. For more reflections on the workshop, check out the video, Nadeem Shabir’s post on Talis Education, and my post on OnOpen.net.

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Photo by Chan Wong CC BY-NC

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

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:

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!

One aspect of open courseware* is its draw for potential students who are deciding where to spend their parents’ or their own hard-earned dollars in obtaining a higher education. The fact is unsurprising, as we saw in 2007, with MIT OCW reporting that “One in four current MIT students who knew of OCW prior to choosing MIT [indicated] the site was a significant influence on their school choice.”

However, beyond free advertising for its school, certain open courseware programs have begun to evolve past the open licensing status of their courses. As the global learning commons of OCW is growing, so are the local learning contexts of open courseware, as more colleges realize the benefit of working with high schools in their areas to prepare, and perhaps to propel, their youth into higher education.

Last month, the University of Massachusetts Boston was awarded a $60,000 grant by the Boston Foundation, with the specific aim of better preparing Boston public high school students for college level courses. The grant will fund workshops for teachers, training them on how to use open courseware to educate their students at gradually accelerated levels. Similar to MIT OCW’s Highlights for High School initiative, these workshops promote high school teacher and student use of open educational resources.

However, I imagine it also going one step further. In providing training for teachers on the use of open educational resources (OER), teachers will not be simply accessing OCW resources on the web. They will learn how to use OER according to its license status, and realize that the commons of open educational resources is vast and global, open to be adapted, derived, and remixed with other OER on the Internet. The Boston grant would enable teachers to see open courseware as part of a larger world of open materials and communities, rather than as simply an institution.

We hope that many other universities and colleges offering OCW will follow this same trend, localizing their university’s offerings at the same time that they are globalizing them via CC licenses. Especially, initiatives like Academic Earth, a site that pools a number of OCW in high definition video, could really run with this idea of contextualization for teachers and students, educating them on the new communities that are opened to them via something as simple as the licensing status of a resource.

*Traditionally, open courseware are university or college courses that are freely accessible online, usually via an open license (the most commonly used license for OCW is CC BY-NC-SA), consisting of lectures and other multimedia, core content, supplemental materials, or tools to aid learning. Nowadays, open courseware sans an open license that allows derivatives, though free, are not considered open, as the ability to adapt the work to global and local contexts via translations and cultural references has become integral to the spirit of OCW.

A summary in Spanish:

De regreso al colegio: Open Courseware como una transición a la educación superior. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17411

En esta entrada Park indica como en este momento los Open Courseware (repositorios de cursos virtuales que se publican para acceso abierto en Internet, como el famoso MIT OCW http://ocw.mit.edu/) han provocado un interesante efecto de publicidad para las universidades americanas que hoy reconocen como cada vez más de los nuevos estudiantes consideran que conocer el material docente de la universidad en la que esperan estudiar ha influido en su toma de decisión y cómo este efecto ha hecho que las universidades americanas estén creando un puente entre la educación superior y media a través de los cursos en estos repositorios abiertos.

Park señala que los cursos se han convertido en material para los docentes de educación media que les permiten más y mejores recursos para preparar los estudiantes para su experiencia universitaria. Sin embargo, Park hace un llamado a la necesidad de llamar la atención y preparar a los docentes para ir más allá de la simple reutilización pasiva de materiales de los cursos y pasen a ser actores de la recreación de estos materiales localizándolos y ajustándolos a sus circunstancias particulares.

Park espera que donaciones como la de la Fundación Boston a la Universidad de Massachussets, que tiene como finalidad preparar a los graduados de la escuela para enfrentar los cursos de educación superior, sirvan de promotor para contextualizar a los docentes y estudiantes en las nuevas comunidades abiertas a ellos a través de herramientas tan sencillas como la licencia que se asocia con un recurso, de modo que puedan ver estos cursos como iniciativas de comunidades abiertas globales más allá de la institución que los hospeda.

La ruta que presenta Park puede servir de inspiración para nuestros países y sus iniciativas nacionales como inspiración para los actores del sector.

Open Ed, the new Open Education Community site, is the result of brainstorming with other initiatives in the movement on how to provide such a space. We designed the site for open education community members, but also for teachers, learners, and those who just want to get involved. We were able to build it thanks to the strong support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Open Ed is hosted by ccLearn, but we are merely providing the web space. We’ve done some initial work on it, but the site is yours—be you an OER advocate, a teacher wanting to connect with other teachers, or a learner who would love to do the same. And you can contribute in any way you like, because Open Ed runs on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia. Additionally, Open Ed utilizes the Semantic MediaWiki extension to enable data querying and analysis. For added functionality, we have installed various other useful extensions.

Wait… hasn’t this site been up for a while?

You’re right; it’s been public on the web for a couple of months now. Some of you may already have accounts. Others have even blogged about it previously. But we haven’t made the official announcement launch until now because we wanted to get some initial feedback from existing community members. So we need your help! Please spread the word, via your personal and professional channels—and most of all, use the space for what you need to do! It’s a wiki. That means you can create a page for your own project, add your project to ODEPO (the Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations) for others to find, run your own data query for research purposes, or do virtually anything else you deem necessary to strengthen and promote open education, including translating the entire site into other languages. Not to mention that content is a little lacking right now, and it’s up to us to make it a great landing place for newbies to open education.

Give us feedback!

Please let us know what you think. Anyone can add to or improve the space by simply clicking “edit”, but as the hosts of this space, we would love to help with the process. You can also share your thoughts on Twitter with an #opened hashtag.

Lastly, thanks to White Whale, an Oakland-based consulting, design, and development company, who designed Open Ed and helped us with some of our messaging points.

Happy exploring!

With the production of this white paper, we would like to officially announce the launch of DiscoverEd. Entirely open source, DiscoverEd is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set.

As noted above, DiscoverEd has been discussed at a few meetings already, so this launch is mainly to help spread the word and to spark additional conversation. If you are an educator or anyone else looking for educational resources, it is available for immediate use and we welcome your feedback.

We want to emphasize that DiscoverEd is a prototype intended to explore how structured data may be used to enhance the search experience. We are by no means launching this as a definitive tool; in fact, we intend just the opposite. We are launching this so that others in the search and discovery space can contribute to this project. There are a number of known issues which we would love help on, especially since we think the community’s input and work should go into shaping future versions of this tool. This tool is currently intended for educational resources, but there is no reason anyone can’t take and adapt it for other purposes.

Where do the search results come from?

Results come from institutional and third party repositories who have expended time and resources curating the metadata. These curators either create or aggregate educational resources and maintain information about them. If you’re a producer or curator of educational resources and would like to be included in the search contact us. If you’re an educator, we want to hear from you. What works for you? What’s broken? What can be improved?