Open Everything

EdTechPost asked the question What is the most successful formal OER (open educational resource) project?. Of course, it's a question without a definitive answer, but I like one possibility: the public library.

Public libraries - especially the modern incarnations - are great examples of OER.

OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again. This is made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know. You can browse and search the OER Commons to find curriculum, and tag, rate, and review it for others.

In my home state of New Jersey, it is a critical time for public libraries and the budget process. According to savemynjlibrary.org, over 80,000 New Jersey residents have filled out orange postcards protesting the 74% cut to state funding for New Jersey libraries and the bill to eliminate minimum funding for public libraries. Over 54,000 emails have also been sent to the state officials. Library supporters have rallied in Trenton, legislators have been visited, and letters have been written.

The budget crisis is not unique to New Jersey, so public libraries across the country are threatened.

Libraries are possibly the most successful open education resource and are certainly one of the earliest examples of OER. My own small, local library shares CDs, audiobooks, DVDs, Internet access, workshops along with the books, magazines and newspapers.

I'm involved right now in training for advocating for and using open textbooks and came across this resource in our course.

Wikieducator is one of many types of sites that house information related to the open educational resource movement and open textbooks. Its goals are to be considered an "evolving community" for collaboration on:
- planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
- development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
- work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
- networking on funding proposals developed as free content." (Wikieducator.com)

Locating and Adopting OER Content is an "open course" site written by Valerie Taylor that should be useful for learning more about open content. Valerie is an Advocate/Trainer for open textbooks as well as an instructor for DeAnza College.

Tomorrow, I will be attending an NJEDge.Net-EATF meeting that is an exploration of all things e-reader, e-book, e-textbook at Fairleigh Dickinson University in NJ. The release of the iPad has heated up the conversations about these formats generally and adds yet another possibility to what schools might be considering.

There will be reports from three eReader pilot projects at Fairleigh Dickinson, Princeton and Seton Hall Universities. Pearson Education will discuss eTextbooks and ePublishing formats. eBook purchasing will be addressed by VALE. I will talk my own interest in all this which is Open Textbooks rather than the hardware used to use them.

Electronic textbooks (eTextbooks, eBooks) are digital versions of textbooks. The media varies widely from digital reproductions of print editions to versions that include embedded animations, video and interactive features. A good deal of interest in using e-textbooks comes from the reduced cost for students.

Most e-textbooks are currently distributed by commercial publishers and have DRM (digital rights management). They can be read via computer, some cell phones and using eReaders (like a Kindle or iPad) depending on the file format.

Open textbooks are quite different in spirit - though similar in formats and reading options. They are free, openly-licensed textbooks offered online by their author(s).

The group that I have become involved with is the CCOTC (Community College Open Textbook Consortium) which reviews and collects available textbooks in order to encourage adoption.

I am collecting information on all these topics - Open Textbooks, "free" Textbooks (not the same thing), but also on evaluating textbooks and e-readers - on a new website. I'm also adding information on schools that are creating their own textbooks that may not be "open" or shared and may actually be created with the cooperation of textbook publishers.

There are also efforts that might be considered hybrids. For example, Flat World Knowledge has already released a dozen open textbooks that are used by more than 400 professors. Their business model is to offer the open textbook free online, and then sell ancillary products that students are likely to buy if prices are reasonable - print copies, study guides, PDF download, etc. Flat World Knowledge compensates its authors with royalties on these sales.

Most of you reading this will not be attending tomorrow's session, so I offer my brief introductory presentation below and recommend that you check my site on eTextbooks at pccc.libguides.com/etextbooks. I will be adding information and links there from tomorrow's session and from my own work over the next year.

I am also participating in the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative and the related Open Textbook Advocate Trainers group. It is my hope that we can get a New Jersey advocacy cohort group started for Open Textbooks. Several cities and states have started groups, so look for your region.


RELATED
Open Textbook Advocacy
College Bookstores Putting eTextbooks On Shelves



Visit Community College Open Textbook Project




Visit OpenTextbookAdvocateTrainers

Video is the dominant medium of the web and more video content is open video content. The development of open source players and codecs that are alternatives to Flash, Quicktime, and Windows Media is part of that. Public browser tools, like Firefox’s Firefogg extension, which is being used experimentally by Wikipedia is also part of the movement. Firefogg also allows for uploading and playing non-proprietary video formats.

Will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Some observers feel that online video is already becoming a glorified TV-on-demand service. Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video through open standards, open source, and open content.

Nonprofits like the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Open Video Alliance and for-profits like Kaltura and Intelligent Television are also dedicating efforts to open video. There's funding from the Mozilla Foundation and Ford Foundation to support developers, programmers, and activists.

Wikipedia is now opening up to video. (It's possibly more surprising that it hasn't included video already.) They are working to include video in an open format (Ogg Theora). A video from the  Open Video Alliance talks about that day when video will be much easier to create, edit,
annotate, and remix. How easy? As easy as we do it now with text.


How to post a video to Wikipedia

Back in May 2009, I wrote about the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, CCCOER, which had launched in 2008 the Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project with funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Their goals are to centralize open textbook information for use by community college professors and other educators and to document sustainable workflow approaches for producing, maintaining, and disseminating open textbooks.

What is an Open Textbook?  Generally, they are:
- free, or very nearly free
- easy to use, get (download) and distribute
- editable so instructors can customize content
- cross-platform compatible
- printable
- accessible so it works with adaptive technologies

Recently, I began attending webinars offered by Open Textbook Advocate Trainers (a part of the Consortium) which uses a Ning social networking site as a learning stream for college campus promoters of open educational resources. Though I wasn't able to attend all the webinars yet, I am interested in being an Advocate/Trainer. These advocates foster interest in open textbooks, help faculty discover, select, and adopt open textbooks and help students choose a format (online, downloaded, printed, bound). Hopefully, they will work with all the stakeholders on campus (including bookstore, print shop, library, and administration) and also provide feedback to the authors and educational community.

Our own New Jersey Educational Activities Task Force is holding an event on April 9, 2010 on e-readers, e-books, e-textbook and I will present briefly on open textbooks. It will be held at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison and anyone is welcome to attend (information at http://njedge.net/activities/ ) I'm hoping to get some interest so that we can offer an open textbook adoption workshop soon.

Although open textbooks are electronic textbooks by their delivery, when there are discussions about eTextbooks, it often means textbooks from traditional publishers that are also offered in an electronic format at a reduced cost from the print editions. Open textbooks are a very different approach to using textbooks.

An nice introductory article from Educause Review about the CCCOER project is called "It Takes a Consortium to Support Open Textbooks" and that is probably true.

I have just started collecting some materials on electronic textbooks online at http://pccc.libguides.com/etextbooks that will include information on open textbooks, commercial eTextbooks and free textbook resources, and I welcome your comments here and on that site.

Visit Community College Open Textbook Project




Visit OpenTextbookAdvocateTrainers

Well, I have taken the plunge back into being a student. After writing and presenting about many of the "open learning" initiatives online, I registered last week for my first course at P2PU. P2PU (as in Peer To Peer University) has a mission "to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other." It combines open educational resources and structured courses to offer high-quality low-cost (or no-cost) educational opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.

I signed up for "Copyright for Educators, Cycle 2."  All courses are open for sign-up until Wednesday the 3rd of March and the courses will begin 12 March. This course is for educators and learners who want to understand how copyright affects the use of learning materials and how to use copyright to facilitate education.

The goals of this course are:
1. to help you identify copyright issues in education and give you a firm grounding in copyright, exceptions and, licensing
2. to help you recognize open licenses, and find open license material and apply open licensees to resources
3. to get you thinking, writing, and conversing about how to use  copyright exceptions and open licenses to enable education.


I have several reasons for taking the course. I have always had an interest in copyright issues for educators and have done presentations and workshops on it over the years. Though I don't consider myself an expert on copyright, I know more than most educators. Of course, that's fairly easy since most educators (perhaps I will need to qualify that as "U.S. educators") know very little about copyright other than claiming "fair use" when questioned about their use of copyrighted materials.

Since P2PU has more participation outside the United States, part of the appeal to me of this course is to learn something about copyright beyond the United States.

I also want to see how P2PU works from the inside. How are the courses designed? How are they facilitated? What kind of audience and interactions occur?

I know that when I have mentioned P2PU and other open courseware initiatives to other educators (and in posts on this blog), they have a very skeptical attitude about free and open learning. They are immediately wary of anyone "giving away" learning for free. They are distrustful of the quality of the courses and the instructors.

My only hesitation in signing up for the course was time. It runs 6 weeks. Although I am not teaching any courses his semester, I am designing a new grad course for summer session and my full-time job fills the daylight hours. If I just stop all my blogging though, I should have plenty of time to do the assignments! Of course, knowing myself pretty well, it is likely that taking the course will generate a lot that I will want to blog about, so...

The course "organiser" (instructor, facilitator...) for my course is Delia Browne. She is the National Copyright Director, Copyright Advisory Group of Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education Institutes(TAFEs) and an experienced intellectual property lawyer. In her current role, Delia manages the National Copyright Unit which provides specialist copyright advice to the education sector and conducts negotiations with collecting societies on behalf of schools and TAFE institutes. Prior to her current role, Delia worked at law firm Minter Ellison providing specialist copyright advice to the education and media/entertainment sectors. She is also a strong advocate of the open education movement and has actively participated in several international meetings and projects on promoting open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.

I would be very pleased to get an instructor with those qualifications for a course I would pay for at a local college.