The U.S. Department of Education’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Using ARRA Funds to Drive School Reform and Improvement (warning: Microsoft Word .doc) mentions Open Educational Resources (emphasis added): Use technology to improve teaching and learning. Purchase and train teachers to use instructional software, technology-enabled white boards, and other interactive technologies that have…

Back in March, we were so excited about the new Physics Flexbook aligned to Virginia’s state standards that we had to catch up with the foundation that helped to make it possible. The obvious choice was Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the CK-12 Foundation, “a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook…

The Digital Open, a new online community and competition for youth, is now accepting free and open technology projects from anyone 17 or younger. Free and open means openly licensed, with software licensed under a GPL license and content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. (See the Digital Open–approved Licenses for more details.) The competition runs until…

One of the benefits of public domain books is that once they are scanned and made available on the Internet, they are then available for anyone, including other organizations, to use and reuse in other contexts and sites. The Prospector Alliance, the union catalog of Colorado Alliance Research Libraries, did exactly this by enhancing the…

Never has it become more plainly evident that the old model of news reporting—reporting via professional print media to the people—is crumbling, as one by one newspapers across the country shut down. We can lament these long-standing institutions, wax poetic for the “good old days”, or we can actually do something about it. The solution…

Welcome to Alex Kozak, our new Education Program Assistant! Alex will be graduating from the University of California, Berkeley next month, with a BA in Philosophy. (That makes three former Philosophy majors at ccLearn.) In this economy, it was no surprise that we had access to a great pool of highly-qualified candidates. Thanks to everyone…

We have finally concluded our rigorous search for summer interns. This year, we’ll be welcoming five students to work at the San Francisco office. Thanks to everyone who submitted an application. It was great to see such an incredible number of responses! Please let me introduce: Lee-Sean Huang will be the International Outreach intern for…

Through its Copyright Advisory Group, the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) has published a Creative Commons information pack online, a bundle of eight documents that distills the basics of CC licensing and the philosophy behind it. This pack is a great resource for educators and students, and we encourage…

In these tough economic times, getting a great return on an investment can be difficult to achieve. However, increasing the impact of investments in open educational resources (OER) is pretty easy – simply adopt a policy that strongly encourages or requires education grantees to disseminate their resources under one of the Creative Commons licenses, ideally…

ccLearn is constantly getting requests from people—teachers, heads of organizations, and people just curious about how it all works in general. (Open licensing in education? What purpose does that serve? How do I attach licenses to my resources anyway?) These requests are more for brief overviews and instructions than for long, detailed reports about the…