Badge On: Open Assessment

I began the #ioe12 open assessment module by watching the Badges for Lifelong Learning: An Open Conversation YouTube video. The video is a snappy introduction to the concept of open badges with endorsement for them from a number of senior educationalists/academics and CEOs.

“Digital badges will make the accomplishments and experiences of individuals, in online and offline spaces, visible to anyone and everyone, including potential employers, educators and communities.”

OK, sounds good…but what exactly are open badges?? And what do they have to do with open assessment?

When people talk about open badges they are usually referring to the Mozilla Open Badges project. The project is making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web, through a shared infrastructure that’s free and open to all. Badges can be issued by anyone (educational institution, work place, online learning organisations) to anyone. These badges can then be displayed publicly on a digital (or non-digital) space (blog, Web site, Facebook, email signature, CV etc).

In the Launch of HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation DML Competition 4: Badges for Lifelong Learning YouTube Mark Surman from Mozilla talks about how they are building an open badge infrastructure system. The first building block is a backpack system where users can store badges (a set of APIs for users). There is also the DML badge competition.

One example from the ioe12 resources is the Mozilla run School of Webcraft in which you can obtain badges. This is through the Peer 2 Peer University, a grassroots open education project that “creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education”. They leverage the internet and educational materials openly available online and so enables “high-quality low-cost education opportunities“.

On closer examination there do seem to be other badging systems, such as the Global Kids system within the Hive Networks system in the US. Their paper Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning gives an overview of how they badging system works:

1. Badges as an alternative assessment – This is the idea that assessment can take the form of ‘validated accomplishments’ instead of tests
2. Gamifying education with badges – The games based achievement system has it’s origins in the Xbox 360 game score system – qualifications filtered through achievements.
3. Badges as Learning Scaffolding – Badges, as a form of scaffolded learning, reveal multiple pathways that youth may follow and make visible the paths youth eventually take.
4. Badges to Develop Lifelong Learning Skills – By offering names for their new competencies and supporting communities.
5. Badges as DML Driver – Badges support digital, media and learning practices.
6. Badges to Democratize Learning – Some badges change who does the assessment and allow learners to shape the content of their badging system and perhaps even the structure itself.

It’s a really interesting area, and seems to be very much ‘taking assessment to where the students are’. New and different approaches always face challenges and I didn’t feel there was enough on this in the ioe12 module. I expect some of the key problems are around validation of badges, the ease with which badges can be created and standards. Also by focusing on badges I think other ideas around open assessment (such as e-assessment, portfolios/diaries, PLEs, self-evaluation, learner created content) were sadly missed.

Multiplying the Benefit: Open Teaching

In Olympics speak … I think I’m on the home stretch now with the #ioe12 Introduction to Openness in Education MOOC.

Getting your courses from iTunes…

The Open Teaching module is a strange one in that it reflects on the process of open teaching (and learning) – something that I am participating in by taking part in this MOOC and writing this post. It starts out with a Keynote given by David Wiley at 2009 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Wiley starts off with a story that highlights the challenges posed by the move to teaching and learning online (comparing water polo and horse riding polo). There are different tactics and challenges for each, caused in part by the rate of change.

The six key changes are:

Analog > digital
Tethered > mobile
Isolated > connected
Generic > personal
Consuming > creating
Closed > open

Wiley introduces the idea of book-ification of TV, originally coined by Lawrence Lessig, basically TV on demand. This can obviously be applied to our on campus courses – “why do I have to be in a room at 10am to hear you give that lecture” (see my recent post on flipping lectures). All this applies to education because the historic monopoly institutions have had is being challenged on almost every front. Students can now go to other places for their content: Opencourseware, Wikipedia, Public Library of Science, Arxiv.org, Google Scholar, Flat World Knowledge etc. and for their support services: ChaCha, Yahoo Answers, RateMyProfessor, email, IM, Twitter etc. and for their social life: Facebook etc. However institutions believe they are the only place students can get degrees, but what about technical credentials – MCSE, RHCE, CCNA?

It seems that everything that a University provides is being offered by someone else. Institutions aren’t even cheaper. Institutions have to innovate and change. E-learning is not enough – it may be digital and mobile but isn’t necessarily connected, personal, creating or open. Openness underpins many of the values that e-learning is missing, need to be able to access courses and be able to modify them, you need to be able to be creative. Wiley goes on to advocate MIT Open Courseware and other open projects he’s been involved with (such as getting students to write on blogs). He explains that there is a role for OER in the classroom. By being open you hope certain things will happen but in reality different things happen that you don’t even expect. Wiley is making moves to be even more open and this course ‘Introduction to Open Education’ is one example of this. He talks about the self-management process of getting students to comment on each other’s writing. [Personally I haven’t found that that has happened much but I’ll talk more about that when I reassess the course at the end]. He also mentions that students were keen to get certificates at the end (which led to a newspaper writing that “professors print their own diplomas, who needs Universities”!). Wiley has also explored using gaming in teaching

The keynote was given in 2009 so a little dated but Wiley sees the future as being disaggregation, while people will consider what is the value of integration (through institutions). HE needs to move away from using policy to defend tradition (as the music industry are doing) and to change. “Don’t innovate to avoid the Doomsday scenario, do it for the students”. It still seems a pertinent warning given the current climate in HE here in the UK.

Other notable resources on the module are Wiley’s article Open Teaching Multiplies the Benefit but Not the Effort which looks at practices like encouraging student blogs and their effect on the quality of outputs. The article concludes with an interesting question, one that may split the academic community

Do we professors, who live rather privileged lives relative to the vast majority of the planet’s population, have a moral obligation to make our teaching efforts as broadly impactful as possible, reaching out to bless the lives of as many people as we can? Especially when participatory technologies make it so inexpensive (almost free) for us to do so?
I believe the answer is yes. —David Wiley

Graham, Hilton, Rich, and Wiley’s paper on Using Online Technologies to Extend a Classroom to Learners at a Distance analyses the Introduction to Open Education online course (this course) originally given in 2009 through a survey conducted on students.

The MOOC Guide and MOOC YouTube video introduce the idea of MOOCS (an area I’ve already covered in some detail). Fini’s The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools and the MOOC Model for Digital Practice are more in depth looks at the role MOOCs have to play in learning.

The MOOC model takes a look at research gaps and future directions explaining that the model is so new that it has been subjected to little research so far. oherent research agenda would help assess both the overall viability of the model and the conditions under which it might achieve its potential. Some specific pedagogical issues and questions given are:

• How can a MOOC support deep enquiry and the creation of sophisticated knowledge;
• What is the breadth versus the depth of participation;
• Can participation extend beyond those with 
broadband access and sophisticated social networking skills;
• What are the processes and practices that might encourage lurkers, or “legitimate pe
ripheral participants”, to take on more active and central roles;
• What is the impact or value of even peripheral participation, specifically the extent to which it 
might contribute to participation in the digital economy in extra-MOOC practices;
• What strategies can maximize the effective contribution of facilitators in particular and 
more advanced participants in general;
• Is there a role for accreditation, if any, and how it might be implemented.

I’d like to reflect on these questions more after I’ve finished the course.

Professional Development Using Open Content

Earlier this month I had a guest blog post published over on Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus blog entitled Professional Development Using Open Content. The post was part of a series of guest blog posts on open practices, originally intended for #openeducationwk.

At the time I was off on holiday so forget to mention it, but I think it sits nicely with my other posts for the #ioe12 module.

Open Data Now!

Aaaah, the one I was waiting for – the #ioe12 open data module.

Created on Pixton

I’m just in the process of writing the slides for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2012 (IWMW 2012) so this module came in handy. My parallel workshop is entitled Big and Small Web Data and open data definitely falls into the remit.

“A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” Open Knowledge Foundation

The opening TED talk by Tim Bernes Lee is primarily an advocacy talk for open data. Tim talks about how the community feel that was around at the start of the web is similar to the community feel now around open data. While people he asked people to put their documents on Web many years back he now wants people to put their data on the web. This is primarily because “you can do all types of stuff with data” and you can link it up – linked data. He explains that the more things you get to link together the more powerful it is. Tim ends by encouraging a communal shout of “Raw Data Now!” because “data is about our lives“.

It was an enthusiastic talk but lacked depth: no discussions of what exactly it is and the reasons why people might to or not want to be open with their data or the challenges that they face in doing it.

The Wikipedia entry offers a better overview exploring the roots of open data (e.g.Mertonian tradition of science, the open movement), the lack of an agreed definition, commercial issues and the ‘reluctance’ to put licences on data – which causes uncertainty. The arguments for and against open data are contextual and often depend on the type of data and how it can be used. I see the two key arguments for open data as being the use of public money to fund research (i.e. we paid for the data) and the advancement of science through collaboration. The arguments against open data are less clear but centralise around safety, commercial and reputation incentives for controlling data use and the cost of preparing data for publication.

One of the more interesting resources for the module is the data.gov Web site and their open data community section. This is the US government Web site which was launched in late May 2009, part of the process of “rebuilding confidence in government and business” (Aliya Sternstein). The site was a forerunner for the uk data.gov.uk one which appeared in beta version in September 2009 and went live in January 2010. The open data community section of the data.gov site is primarily a series of forums and blog posts looking at international governmental data sharing.

There was also the Open Data Commons which comprises of a set of legal tools to help users provide and use Open Data. This includes licences (additional licences to CC) and dedications. The site was set up by
Jordan Hatcher (who I actually worked with on the JISC PoWR project) and was
transferred to the Open Knowledge Foundation in January 2009.

Other resources include a list of where to find open data on the Web (e.g. CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), Infochimps, OpenStreetMap and more) – very handy. The comments add a lot of good resources too. There are also details of the New York Times linked open data work and a link to the Linked data site which provides pointers to resources from across the linked data community. Good to see a list of tools there including tools for publishing and consuming linked data and for end users.

The whole ‘open data’ movement is becoming so huge it was almost impossible to give a snap shot by just a few resources. I still feel there is so much to learn and then there is also so much discipline specific data/tools too. Phew!

Open it Up: Introducing Open Science

Mouse Embryo

Open science is a relatively new area of interest for me. I’m not a scientist, though I did do a psychology degree (well a joint honours degree: Psychology and Literature – a lot of Freud…don’t think that counts!), but I’m quite keen on science “as a way of pursuing knowledge”. In my newish role as an Institutional Support Officer for the Digital Curation Centre open science has a big role to play. To get to the point: good research needs good data, good data is (more often than not) open data and open science promotes open data.

So “yes!” to open science.

The OpenScience project (6 interrelated projects writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software in a collaborative environment, led by Dan Gezelter, a chemistry professor at Notre Dame, currently over 470 software programmes available) gives what I found to be the most useful definition:

• Transparency in experimental methodology, observation, and collection of data.
• Public availability and reusability of scientific data.
• Public accessibility and transparency of scientific communication.
• Using web-based tools to facilitate scientific collaboration.

The #ioe12 module on open science kicks off with a slick TED talk by Michael Nielsen, one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Nielson tells a collection of open science stories looking at the successes e.g.

• Tim Gower’s polymath project which asked the question ‘is massively collaborative mathematics possible?”, he ended up with over 800 comments.

And the failures e.g.

• John Stockton’s quantum wiki (quiki). It was like Wikipedia but specialized on quantum computing. Nobody was interested in contributing.

Nielson argues that although open science leads to an acceleration in the rate of scientific discovery there is much stacked against it. The situation still stands that writing a single mediocre paper will do more for your career than writing lots of brilliant comments on blogs. Scientists aren’t rewarded for sharing their data. The successes (like polymath) only work because they use unconventional means to an conventional end (the end result was a scientific paper).

Nielson speculates that this is changing. This often because openness has been embedded into principles. The Bermuda principles used on genbank (a genetic sequence database) state:

• Automatic release of sequence assemblies larger than 1 kb (preferably within 24 hours).
• Immediate publication of finished annotated sequences.

The aim is to make the entire sequence freely available in the public domain for both research and development in order to maximise benefits to society. In my working environment I’ve seen the situation changing due to research council guidelines (such as the EPSRC) and through funder requirements.

However lots of data is still locked up and it is routine for scientists to hoard data. The open science movement want to change the culture of science and the value of individual scientists. Scientist need incentives to share.

I thought it was interesting that in the ‘definition of open science’ blog post on the Science Commons web site Cameron Neylon is quoted as saying:

“I think for me the most striking outcome of [a session to define it] was that not only is this a radically new concept for many people but that many people don’t have any background understanding of open source software either which can make the discussion totally impenetrable to them.“

It appears again that understanding the open source movement is essential for getting a grip on all the open ‘products’. Yet people don’t know the history. I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself. In the The Meaning of Open Content #ioe12 post I actually wrote “It appears that it is incredibly difficult to understand the terms used in the open movement without understanding some history and background.“. At least I’m being consistent!

The Introduction to Science Commons Concept paper uses the fictional case-study of a Brazilian postdoctoral student to explore some of the concepts behind the open science movement. Open science is often about access to science research through open access journals but it is also about allowing us to mine the data that is there. This data mining is sometimes carried out through technical means (semantic web, linked data, open data) but often takes the form of collaboration – human to human. Eliminating the legal and technical barriers to building a “semantic web” for science is what Science Commons is all about.
“Perhaps the result would be dramatic; some fairly impressive scientists and computer scientists believe so. Perhaps it would be more modest. But where it is practicable to do so, lowering those barriers is clearly a good idea. It might be a great idea.“

Science Commons takes many forms. The Science Commons Publishing Project promotes effective use of digital networks to broaden access to all three types of information: data, peer-reviewed journal articles and metadata. It does this by encouraging pragmatic open access publishing, self-archiving and facilitating the use use of metadata. The Science Commons’ Licensing Project is working on simplifying licensing and the creation of a ‘research commons’ (a funded place researchers can put open research. They are advoicates of the semantic web and keen to promote common formats for interchange of data.

Another key area in the open science movement is open notebooks, making the entire primary record of a research project publicly available online as it is recorded. The wikipedia article gives a good overview with links to key practitioners and software. The article also explores the arguments for and against opening up notebooks. The biggest deterrent to researchers is the possibility of data theft and difficulties regarding patents and publication in peert reviewed journals. Another concern is data deluge – the importance of curation and validation of data are highlighted here, issues that fall under the DCC remit.

The final ioe12 resource is a overview of a session ran at a Open Education 2011 Meeting by Sarah Kirn and Ahrash Bissell on Open Science and OER: Where do they Intersect? The premise of the session was is that “‘open’ efforts may not be so seamlessly interoperable as we might think.” Kirn and Bissell see open science as “democratization of the capacity for anyone to ‘do’ science as well as the elimination of the barriers to accessing the outputs of scientific research“. This strikes me as being the first true indication (though it has been implied) that the ‘citizen science’ concept also falls under open science. Their write up from the discussion session considers ‘citizen science’ changes anything and if it is diminishing the expertise necessary for science, or is it expanding it (by requiring new and additional roles), or simply shifting it to new places. There was also discussion of the worries that opening things up means that people can ‘mess things up’. It seems this concern is ubiquitous in both OER and open science conversations. The worry was data is more sacred – it’s clear that dataset integrity is crucial for accurate archival and referral.

The ioe12 resources give a useful introduction to open science. It’s definitely an area I intend to find out more about!

Open Access: It’s All About the Money?

I am planning to revisit some of the topics covered in the open courseware and open educational resources topics for #ioe12, but I’m reluctant to get too behind so I’ll save that for a later date.

The next ‘open’ on the list is open access.

Open Access 101, from SPARC

The Open Access 101 video by SPARC gives a quick overview of open access and the contentious financial issues it raises.

The best known definition of open access (OA) is from the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

“By open access, we mean its immediate, free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.”

As is always the case definitions vary and I’d say it is the use area that is the contentious one here. Some people view open access as being purely about access, while others see there as being more to it (open licences etc.) The OA introductory article written by Peter Suber focuses on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints.

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions).“

There are different degrees to this but the key is the removal of legal, financial and technical barriers. There also seems to be emphasis on use of open licences to support this, and it should not involve copyright infringement.

“The legal basis of OA is the consent of the copyright holder (for newer literature) or the expiration of copyright (for older literature). The campaign for OA focuses on literature that authors give to the world without expectation of payment.“

It is pointed out that “OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model, license, or content. ” OA delivery mechanisms are more likely to allow the author to retain copyright – many commercial journals will often ask authors to transfer copyright to a publisher.

“Many OA initiatives focus on publicly-funded research. OA literature is not free to produce or publish. OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.“

The Higher Education institution open access movement is the one I’m most familiar with, especially work of advocates like Stevan Harnad. A long while ago I project managed the ePrintsUK project which developed a series of national, discipline-focused services for access to e-print papers available from national compliant Open Archive repositories. I worked with the SHERPA project which now seems to be a partnership of research-led institutions, all with practical experience of building and populating eprint repositories.

Suber explains that there are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles, OA journals (“gold OA”) and OA repositories (“green OA”). He goes on to explain the different business models behind these. Some use “author pays” approach (the fees are often paid by author-sponsors (employers or funders) or waived) while others have a subsidy from a university or professional society. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. The OA movement has attempted to be seen as ‘constructive, rather than destructive’ in their criticism of the traditional publishing models. However, over the years, there has been significant resistance from traditional scholarly journal publishers.

The other resources listed in the module include the SPARC perspective. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. They provide a list of links and resources for those interested in pursuing open access publication or advocating for open access to others in the academic community. The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) which gives a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. The UK entry gives details of relevant organisations and research council policies on OA. There are also details of open access week (22- 28 October 2012) and links to the Directory of Open Access Journals.

To finish off there is a nice statistical summary of 2011 by Heather Morrison, Simon Fraser University School of Communication, who calls it ‘the year of open’. It does certainly seem that way: “There are over 7,000 peer-reviewed fully open access journals as listed in the DOAJ, still growing by 4 titles per day“. Noted journals include PLoS ONE, PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS. It seems that there are “over 2,000 repositories, linking to more than 30 million items, growing at the rate of 21 thousand items per day“. For many the open access model is the only way forward and this requires some people to do a lot of rethinking.

Openness in Education

It did seem very timely to be thinking about Open Educational Resources in Open Education Week #openeducationwk. Unfortunately while the thinking went on in Open Education Week, the writing has gone on in this week, and still isn’t really finished! Nevertheless there were some great blog posts and promoted resources on related topics here in the UK last week and I’d like to start off by listing a few of my favourites:

• Open Educational Resources Timeline:
  http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/othervoices/2012/02/13/open-educational-resources-timeline/
• JISC released a series of Open education – case studies
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/opentechnologies/openeducation.aspx
• Hacking the university – Lincoln’s approach to openness – an article on the Student as Producer project
  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/opentechnologies/openeducation/lincoln-university-summary.aspx
• The Economics of Open – blog post by Paul Stacey on the business case for OER
  http://edtechfrontier.com/2012/03/04/the-economics-of-open/
• Openedspace – by Amber Thomas with some great diagrams of an open educational space (a series of 3, along with David and Lawrie
  http://amberthomas.typepad.com/fragments/2012/03/openedspace.html
• my #openedspace- by David Kernohan
  http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/my-openedspace
• My #OpenEdSpace by Lawrie Phipps
  http://lawrie.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2012/03/05/my-openedspace/

The ioe12 module on open educational resources starts of with a TED talk by David Wiley (he pops up a lot, I guess it is his course!) where he defines the idea of openness: “it’s moving away from the toddler in you where you scream “mine, mine’!!” Wiley explains that it’s all about sharing, because without sharing there is no education. A successful educator is one who shares the most with their students. Knowledge is non-rivalrous, i.e. you can share part of yourself without loosing part of yourself.

As Thomas Jefferson said “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.“

While knowledge is non-rivalrous, resources and content can be. David takes a look at the invention of the printing press and compares it with the current advancement of new technology. He sees education as being on the brink of reformation and openness is the missing element. Access to education needs to improve. There has been a collision between powerful new media (i.e. the internet), ravenous demand for education and outdated thinking by educators about the content of material. We need to learn the lessons of the reformation and be more open. “The only proper role for technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous“

There were quite a lot of other resources in this module and the majority of them have been squirreled away by me for a long train journey I have coming up. Once I’ve digested the lot I hope to write a more comprehensive post. The resources include a paper by Yochai Benkler entitled Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials. Benkler talks about the vast pool of human talent the Internet has given us access to. There has been a deep transformation in the digitally networked environment, and in the information economy and society. Benker states that “the critical change is that social production based on commons, rather than property, has become a significant force in the economy.” In his paper Benkler looks at textbooks and other educational resources and decides whether they are amenable to peer production, what are the barriers and what strategies could facilitate wider development of educational resources in a commons-based and peer production model.

I’ve yet to get my head round the true opportunities and challenges relating to OER. The Jan Hylén lists the 5 main arguments for institutional involvement in OER:

1. Altruism – sharing knowledge is a good thing to do and also in line with academic traditions
2. Public Money – Educational institutions should leverage on taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources developed by publicly funded institutions
3. Enrichment – What you give, you receive back improved
4. Reputation – it is good for public relations and can function as a show-window attracting new students
5. Diversifying – Need to look for new business models, new ways of making revenue.

There are a couple of big questions starting to surface here, firstly ‘who pays? What is the business model? What are the economics of information?’ and secondly ‘what about quality? Is quality better in an open educational environment or a closed one?’

I intend to write more on this topic as soon as I get the time.

Keeping the Magic: Open Course Ware

My next #ioe12 module is on Open Course Ware – a term applied to course materials created by Institutions and shared freely via the internet. Although some higher education institutions had been releasing videos and content online since the 1990s it was the MITs launch of their materials that really brought the practice to the masses and began use of the term.

The video resource from the module is the MIT press conference held on April 4, 2001 when MIT released their first instalment of OpenCourseWare. I can actually remember hearing about this at the time (quite scary that it’s now over 11 years old!) MIT courses were the first to be offered using the open courseware model and I’ve used them as an exemplar example many times when presenting on Creative Commons. MIT committed itself to delivering open courses for 10 years in an innovative way that widens access and improved education.

The MIT OCW project uses Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license and the program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. They now use more video lectures and many video and audio files are also available from iTunes U.

It is really refreshing to hear senior people on the committee talk about how their concerns were not about money but about quality of the materials delivered and whether MIT would be able to support the programme. They are very keen to state that for MIT it is not about ‘selling courses for profit’ but about how you disseminate and create human knowledge – that fundamental value aligned well with distributing open course ware.

Right now, when education seems to be increasingly about budgets and bank notes, this back-to-basics approach in education reminds me of why I’ve always been interested in education. As one of the panel explains: distributing raw material makes you ask some big questions – “what happens in the classroom now?” Hopefully the answer is “that is still where the magic happens.” OCW combines the traditional openness of education and the ability of the Web to make resources available to many. For MIT it was not about providing a course but about delivering materials on the Web. The plan was that allowing the resources to be delivered in this way would encourage more collaboration. Also by providing a window into MIT it would result in more people wanting to enroll at MIT.

I’m interested in open course ware from a two different angles – firstly the open angle, secondly the ‘flipping lectures on their head’ pedagodgy idea. I’ve touched on this in some of the amplified event work I’ve carried out and when talking about lecture capture software (such as Ponopto). This is the idea that you use technologies such as video to record lectures and talks and use these as a precursor for a seminar – in which you actually work together, rather than sitting and watching someone talk. Because when you get together in the classroom, this should be where the magic happens…

OER Commons Celebrates First Annual Open Education Week, March 5-10, 2012

Massive Open Online Course crib sheet

I found the above Massive Open Online Course crib sheet on Flickr. It was created for a workshop being presented at ISTE 2011 on using a MOOC model for professional.

The Meaning of Open Content #ioe12

I have to admit to breathing a sigh of relief at the smaller number of resources given for the Open Content module on the Introduction to Openness in Education course. An opportunity to make up some time?

The Wikipedia article gave a good overview (open content is a creative work that others can copy or modify). The term initially referred to works licensed under the open content licence but now covers a “broader class of content without conventional copyright restrictions.“. Basically any items that can be reused, revised, remixed and redistributed (the 4Rs Framework) by members of the public.

It’s important to note that the concept is a different one from free content, which is content that “has no significant legal restriction on people’s freedom“. I would interpret the difference as being around the area of commercial use, and free content being in the public domain, but then the wikipedia entry goes on to say that:

“Although different definitions are used, free content is legally similar if not identical to open content. An analogy is the use of the rival terms free software and open source which describe ideological differences rather than legal ones.“

It’s a very hazy area…and I’m getting a little confused!

It seems that the terms are changing in meaning and “openness is a ‘continuous
construct’“. Nevertheless the basic idea is that open content is out there to be used by anyone, though not necessarily in any way they chose.

The Wiley article explores this further:

“What does “open” mean? The word has different meanings in different contexts. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is a continuous (not binary) construct. A door can be wide open, mostly open, cracked slightly open, or completely closed. So can your eyes, so can a window, etc. “

The video resource was interesting as back ground knowledge – David Wiley talking about 10 years of open content at the iSummit conference in 2008. Open content’s roots are in the open source movement and spring from a moment when David Wiley realised, while working on an online calculator, that “Digital content is magic because it is non-rivalrous“. He then decided that he wanted to make an open licence for materials and discussed it with open source gurus who insisted that he decided between ‘free’ and ‘open’ – he opted for ‘open’ and created the open content licence, which he later developed into the open publication licence. He admits the licences were a good idea but poorly executed, however they did allow Lessig and co to learn from his mistakes and create the Creative Commons movement. Wiley concludes with some of the current issues with CC licences, such as remixing licences, compatibility issues, and future work.

It appears that it is incredibly difficult to understand the terms used in the open movement without understanding some history and background. In the post on open source (Open Sourcing for #ioe12) I asked some rhetorical questions at the end (areas I’d like to explore more). I said “Do the people who (now) use open source software and openly licensed materials care about the ideology behind their resources?” Unless they look back at the history behind these ideas they’d struggle to understand the concepts anyway, Hmmm, it all requires a lot of effort, is there no such thing as a free lunch?