Today, I’m honored to be a keynote speaker at the Technology Affinity Group conference in Monterey, CA. I’ll be talking about my career and my experiences in the open space, and sharing three suggestions for the foundation community: Technology deserves a bigger place at the table. Technology is what drives the big innovations in the…

Global Map Test / Mike Rosenberg / CC BY Here’s an exciting opportunity for the open education community. Susan D’Antoni, a long-time leader in Open Educational Resources (OER), is coordinating an important effort to map the global OER space. You can join the list by sending an email to: oer-community-request@athabascau.ca and typing “subscribe” in the…

In August we wrote about the European Commission’s request for information on the topic Opening Up Education. The point of the consultation is to gauge the need for EU action to promote the adoption and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. Several Creative Commons affiliates in Europe have…

Teaching Open Source Practices / opensource.com / CC BY-SA It is an exciting time for the global open educational resources (OER) movement. In the past few months, several governments and institutions have shown their support for OER: California Passes Groundbreaking Open Textbook Legislation National ‘Digital School’ Program in Poland British Columbia Government Lends Support to…

MOOCs — or Massive Open Online Courses — have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so, there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX) and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed…

Victoria Lungu Leading a School of Open Challenge / Open.Michigan / CC BY Last Friday, Open.Michigan helped a group of students get Creative Commons savvy in an offline version of the School of Open’s “Get CC Savvy” challenge, a course originally designed for independent online learners. For those yet unaware, the School of Open is…

One Thursday a few weeks ago, just as most of us at Creative Commons were on our way home for the evening, we saw this startling tweet: @creativecommons You need to know: ~30 maths enthusiasts begin a CC-BY course book hackathon in five hours in Helsinki, Finland. — Joonas Mäkinen (@JoonasD6) September 28, 2012 Of…

On October 5, Creative Commons and P2PU convened community advocates and policy leaders from the various “open” movements to lay the curriculum framework for the School of Open. If you haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a community initiative that will provide online educational resources and professional development courses on the…

Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap’s announcement at #opened12 / Giulia Forsythe / CC BY-NC-SA The government of British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, has announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first- and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. The texts will be available for free…

Ada Lovelace / Kaldari / CC0 Ada Lovelace — widely considered the first computer programmer — famously said, “I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” That quotation brings to mind the axiom that a…