There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is…
The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and…
The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) has been hosting an OER Handbook on WikiEducator for a while now, inviting others to contribute and edit various elements of the book. Now they’ve finally published the first printable version of one of their mini-handbooks: OER Handbook for Educators 1.0. The actual handbook isn’t so mini—though…
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) is dedicated to education. It is now available online, including two articles specifically devoted to open education: “A Flat Network for the Unflat World: Open Educational Resources in Developing Countries” (Steven Muegge, Monica Mora, Kamal Hassin, Andrew Pullin) and “Why Give Knowledge Away for Free?…
Today TED announced the 50 millionth view of a TED talk, marking its success since it first launched online two years ago in June of 2006. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—and it features talks by various speakers from Bill Clinton to Bono. However, the most viewed talks are actually given by persons previously unknown.…
OpenEducation.net tracks the changing climate of education–more specifically, the movement towards the growing availability of Open Educational Resources on the web. In a recent post entitled, The Digital Commons — Left Unregulated, Are We Destined for Tragedy? , they explore the potential of the open digital commons, concluding that open access is the key to…
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a tremendous supporter of Creative Commons and our new educational division, ccLearn. The foundation’s newsletter just published a great interview with Catherine Casserly, their Program Officer for Open Educational Resources. Here are a couple excerpts: Aren’t copyright laws an obstacle to all of this? Traditionally, they have…
Caltech economics professor Preston McAfee appears to be mad as hell about high journal and textbook prices, and he’s doing something about it. He’s published a complete Introduction to Economic Analysis textbook under a Creative Commons license. See his page about the license and high textbook prices: Why open source? Academics do an enormous amount…
This is the second of several postings describing potential innovations to our licenses. It comes courtesy of Rob Hallman, a Stanford Law School student in the “Advanced Contracts: Creative Commons” seminar. Commons.edu? You have the power to make learning fun. At least partly. Promoting education is a personal goal and a corporate mission for many…