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…

San Francisco, CA, USA — 04/01/2009 Noted educator, education innovator, and journalist Esther Wojcicki today became Chair of the Creative Commons (CC) Board of Directors, taking over from founding board member James Boyle. Wojcicki first joined the board of Creative Commons last July. Creative Commons is a world wide non-profit organization that promotes the creative…

Flatworld Knowledge, an open textbook initiative that has been in development since 2007, received $8 million in investments earlier this week. That’s right. $8 million. In investments, not grants. The open textbook world got a lot of press last fall, and I’m guessing that not long after it started piquing the interest of the rich…

The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say? Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the…

The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say? Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the…

It’s that time of year again! That is, time for planning the line-up for Open Ed 2009, the annual, international Open Education Conference, hosted this year by the University of British Columbia in breathtaking Vancouver, Canada. From the conference website (OpenEd 2009: Crossing the Chasm): “The field of “open education” is in its second decade.…

When it comes to the open educational resources world, we all know that the University of Michigan is a pretty hopping place to be, what with Molly Kleinman as their copyright specialist and their Attribution-only (CC BY) licensed OER repository. Since they pop up pretty regularly in our blogosphere, I didn’t want March to pass…

For those of you interested in knowing how Copyright Exceptions and Limitations (known as Fair Use in the US) might affect open educational resources, there will be a working session on CEL at OCWC Global 2009 in Monterrey, Mexico next month. OCWC Global 2009 is the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s first international conference of its kind. The…

ccLearn is collaborating with the Peer 2 Peer University and Mozilla to teach practical open education skills to educators and anyone else who is interested. From the announcement on the course wiki: “This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on…

In this age of information overload, traditional teaching methods and roles are fast becoming extinct. Students have access to most of the relevant information in their teachers’ heads and more, but this doesn’t mean students know how to organize and interpret this information in a meaningful way. George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger have developed a…