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Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad. - Boing Boing
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:
* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. -
International Journal of Education and Development using ICT - Vol. 5, No. 5 (2009)
Abstract
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways that are not yet fully understood. In an extraordinary development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as ‘open education resources’ (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling some senior level support for the notion of OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide roll-out, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make them more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term “open” hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER, namely social, technical, legal and financial openness in an attempt to make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. While acknowledging the potential value of content, we contend, however, that it is the opening up of educational processes, which we are calling Open Pedagogy (OP) enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies that are set to play the more transformational role in the collaboration between students and lecturers. -
Blog U.: Open Courses: Free, but Oh So Cheap - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
Alternative ways of producing OERs - more emphasis on student production of resources. Less fuss about getting IPR clearance for every picture - just have a take-down policy that enables you to remove stuff if anyone complains...
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The worry about clearing rights to every last lecture image is, I think, over-blown. Most publishers would be delighted with the free advertising if an illustration or graph is utilized in a lecture. Faculty should be sourcing these images in their materials, just as we demand of our students, with the sourcing providing great marketing. As long as an easy "take down" procedure is in place (which I doubt will be used much) then the default should be to publish (if the faculty member wishes).
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Online university -- free for all - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source
It has no campus, no lecture theatres and hardly any paid staff, but the International University of the People, which opened last month, does have one big plus point -- no tuition fees.
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UNESCO OER Toolkit - OER_Wiki
Overview from JISC:
15 October 2009 --- Today the UNESCO OER Toolkit (with support from the UNESCO Communications and Information Sector) was released as a resource for academics and institutions -- with a special focus on developing countries -- who are interested in participating in open education projects. -
'Self-learners' creating university of online - Times Online
From the OpenSpires Blog: http://elearning.oucs.ox.ac.uk/openspires/2009/10/11/it%E2%80%99s-extraordinary-the-fact-that-throughout-the-world-5000-people-are-downloading-my-lecture-every-week/
“An excellent full page article in the Sunday Times on Open Content, featuring an Oxford academic who is involved in the OpenSpires project talking about her experience. It is in the main section of the Sunday Times and also highlights a range of Oxford podcast series with good quotes from the Open University’s OpenLearn, Cambridge and from a few individual learners. As always, we’re not quite sure what triggered the article but it is a very helpful and positive piece. There is also an online version for those who missed it but without the rather striking central graphics. In the paper feature there are podcast titles from Oxford – “End of the Roman Empire”, “NanoTechnology” and “Global Challenges” – bursting out of a portable mp3 player.
I particularly like the blog title quote from Marianne Talbot, who very recently topped the global download charts with her Introduction to Philosophy series. BTW The project team are proud to be referred to as “the techies” in the article.
From the Sunday Times article…
Her talk, “A romp through the history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present day”, had topped the list of most-downloaded items on iTunes U.
“I got congratulatory e-mails from the techie people and I was tickled pink. I started thinking: how many \ is that? Presumably more than 20, but is it 100?”
Talbot, director of studies in philosophy at the department for continuing education at Oxford, had no idea how far her lecture was spreading. “Apparently the number of downloads is 5,000 a week,” she said.
“It’s extraordinary. It’s difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that throughout the world 5,000 people are downloading my lecture every week.”
Talbot admits she was fortunate to choose an engaging title in a subject of wide appeal. Nevertheless, she describes the potential of such open access as “awesome”.
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The Ed Techie: 10 reasons to use open content
I gave this presentation to set the scene at a workshop recently at The Open University. The aim of the day was to promote the use of third party resources, so during the day the teams had to devise a learning activity based around third party content.
I set out ten reasons (with an extra one for luck), in this slidecast below: -
'Self-learners' creating university of online - Times Online
Great article in the Times Online about the value of OERs.
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Sharing, not just planning to share - Crowdsourcing OER Search for Africa at EdTechPost
"I am hoping that Dave Cormier will write this up fully, as it was his idea for which he deserves full credit, but the eleganceand simplicity of it, coupled with the real need it hopes to serve, compelled me to post something right away in hopes of helping it get going.
As I understand it, after Catherine Ngugi’s powerful opening keynote at Open Education ‘09, Dave spent some time chatting with Catherine, in which he came to learn that there was a person tasked with locating useful open resources for faculty but that this was an overwhelming task. Dave, being Dave, immediately saw the potential for our existing networks to pitch in, sharing as we already do, and set about creating a twitter account, findanoerafrica to send out requests to the community for help finding appropriate resources. The idea was hatched on Wednesday and announced this Friday morning.
Only time will tell if it works and how effect it is. You can help, really easily. If you use twitter, then follow findanoerafrica and basically respond in the helpful way you already do. The difference being you’ll be helping someone who is in turn supporting hundreds of educators. The beauty - it isn’t asking you to do anything you’re not already doing, and the cost was essentially zero. Obviously, this is not going to solve all the worlds ills, but it’s one of those little steps to maybe make it better than it was. " -
Connectivism
Utah State University has announced the closure of its OpenCourseWare initiative due to budget woes. I call nonsense (or BS). Apparently OCW needed $120,000 per year. Given the size of Utah State University, I’m going to guess they have an annual operating budget somewhere in the range of $300-400 million. This is not a budget shortfall – this is a commitment shortfall. 120K is a fraction of a fraction in light of the larger university budget.
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About OA week — Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009
"About OA week
October 19-23 will mark the first international Open Access Week.
Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results." -
Open Access Week at Athabasca University – Join us! | Virtual Canuck
Terry Anderson's blog post about Open Access Week: The first session (Monday Oct 19) with myself as speaker, focuses on the general theme of open scholarship. The Tuesday session features a presentation on research opportunities and issues related to open access presented by Patrick McAndrew from Open University UK, who co-leads the OLNet research initiative. The Wednesday session features Athabasca University President Frits Pannekoek on Open Academic publishing and features an overview of the issues surrounding the founding and operations of Canada’s first open access scholarly publisher Athabasca University Press. Thursday’s session, by AU Librarian Tony Tin, focuses on open institutional archives and repositories. Rory McGreal winds it up on Friday with a session on Open Educational Resources.
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Times Higher Education - Get it out in the open
From downloads of lectures to entire courses for free, Rebecca Attwood reports on how universities are fitting open educational resources into their missions and marketing
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Defining Noncommercial - CC Wiki
In 2008-09, Creative Commons commissioned a study from a professional market research firm to explore understandings of the terms “commercial use” and “noncommercial use” among Internet users when used in the context of content found online.
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