At 11 o’clock this morning I decided to sit in on David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course, so after a trudging drive to the heart of Provo I parked my car at the public library and walked three blocks and up a delightful hillside path to the BYU campus. I might have grumbled that it had been snowing heavy and wet, but the trek was peaceful and the cold air and warmed blood brought on that feeling of happy exertion I normally associate with snowboarding, so by the time I hit the David O. McKay building at 12:00 I had no complaints.
The course is IPT 692R: Intro to Open Education, and Dave has structured the activities in homage to World of Warcraft; for example, each student will be required to select a class to identify the direction of their coursework, and our guild will embark on a series of quests both individually and collaboratively as we seek to level-up.
As I work through the course requirements (er, quests) I’ll be posting my outcomes and reflections here on Flexknowlogy–for the convenience of Dr. Wiley and my classmates I’ll be categorizing them under “IPT692R”. And for the benefit of everyone else, I will aim my writing at providing a context and message in line with my regular postings.
I’m not the only person who will be sitting in on this course: numerous attendees from around the world will be joining in at a distance.
Some notes from the first session:
- Several students said they “want to change the world”. Dave suggested that one goal for the course is to “be able to say that with a straight face“.
- I asked myself if there is a CC license post plug-in for WP.
Looks like WPLicense may be the best. I’ll try it out tonight.Matthew Tabor just informed me that Per Post CC License is more in line with my needs. - GNU is a recursive acronym, like PHP and LAME. I note this only because now I have the right vocabulary for a long-standing geek naming tradition.
- The “magic” of the Internet is resources are nonrivalrous: Make one and any number of people can access it.
- Dave used a photo of one of my geek heros web standards guru Tantek Çelik. Is he involved in the open content movement?
- Sure, we know all about Creative Commons licenses, but I hadn’t heard of CC0 (“C-C zero”) or CC+ (“C-C plus”) before. CC0 will allow for creators to give up as many rights as they can. CC+ sounds like the opposite–a Creative Commons license plus additional custom restrictions.
- NC is predictably popular amongst producers.
- Do we have any data as to how substantively useful SA is to users/consumers? Are there measurements of the demand for reusability?
- While CC By is the least restrictive, some copyleft folk argue that CC By-SA is the most “free” license for philosophical reasons (i.e. it preserves “freeness” in perpetuity; restrictions aren’t mutually exclusive from freedom.)
- I enjoyed a good lecture.
- Three greatest challenges to OER/OCW in near future: Sustainability, Incentives, Licenses
- Re. sustainability , universities have to say, “Look how much we can save money. Look how much we can improve on-campus education.”
- I’ve talked about potential sustainability of the UVU OER model, but I had some more ideas:
- We can make the tools part of the system. (e.g. use technology that can be opened up)
- We can make publishing part of the process. (e.g. convince Distance Education or campus IT to adopt OER/OCW as part of it’s mission)
- First encourage translucent education among faculty so it’s easy to encourage open education later (e.g. real blogs, real wikis).
- Dave suggested that people still make money even after they’ve published an “open” version of a work because some consumers will still choose to buy the work. My question is how much of that is due to consumer ignorance vs. consumer preference?
- My note: Copyright is the de facto license for any work in the USA. There is no legal question about it. Open licenses modify or replace the default copyright.
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