karen
COSN report on Creative Commons and Open Content for K-12
Posted by karen on July 3, 2008 in Uncategorized
COSN has published a new report that includes a chapter called “Creative Commons and Open Content: What K-12 Schools Need to Know.” It’ s a good concise discussion of the relevant issues.
It is an awesome world… or How Web 2.0 Came Through for Me
Posted by karen on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized
I had a weird experience today. I was at NECC, sitting at the back of a big room waiting for a session to start. It was on open content, something I am very passionate about and am always looking for new information and perspectives on.
The time of the presentation came and went, and there were no presenters. I could see concern mounting, and people starting to shift around, getting ready to leave. I approached the person coordinating things and asked if they needed a “stand in.” They said sure. (There were over 100 people in the room, and I hated to see that many people interested in the topic leave empty-handed. I think OER is such an important topic that everyone needs to know about… and I’m mostly not very shy. :)
Lately, I’ve been putting up all my presentations and workshops on the web with a variety of tools such as wikis, Slideshare, etc. Because of this, it was super easy to stand up and use any Internet-connected computer to present. (Bizarrely, it was probably the first time during the conference that I didn’t have my own laptop with me.) Considering what a weird situation it was, I think the presentation went really well. This is something I wouldn’t even have dared attempting without technology. It is an awesome world we live in.
And best of all, some great new people know about the kids open dictionary and are helping up build this important tool.
Thanks to everyone who attended the session (even though it may not have been exactly what you expected :). Special thanks to Randy Orwin and Brad for helping with the tech setup to make this happen.
…and yes, for those of you wondering, I did verify that the small intestine is approximately 7 meters long!
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How much food has changed
Posted by karen on June 25, 2008 in Uncategorized
In working on the kids open dictionary, I expected to find out a lot of interesting things. (This is one of the things I love about working in education.) Here’s one that came up today. Our eating habits have changed enormously in the last 80 or so years. These are all words that did not appear in the 1913 dictionary:
pizza
hotdog
hamburger
sushi
teriyaki
bagel
croissant
meatball
naan
burrito
taco
quesadilla
cheesecake
I’ll leave out all the kinds of coffee…. :)
Thanks to FoodTV.com for helping with ideas for this. What others can you think of? If you find any that aren’t in our dictionary yet, email them to us.
Dictionary goes live — come play!
Posted by karen on June 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
The Kids Open Dictionary builder is now live!
Please try it out and enter a word or two. Whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect; others will jump in and refine as we go.
In case you missed it, this is the first completely open, public domain-licensed dictionary designed with kids in mind. We intend for the final product to be used by a variety of OER producers, web sites, book publishers, hardware manufacturers, teachers, students, and others.
In a lot of ways, this is one of the most needed components for many OER projects and is a great mass collaboration project. Please join us!
Tags: dictionary | oer
License info for images - metadata
Posted by karen on June 20, 2008 in Uncategorized
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to record information about an image’s license, attribution, etc. In the past, I have used not-very-efficient techniques such as recording this info separately in a text file and sometimes trying to include it in the file name.
A friend recently recommended storing this in the Properties Summary. (Right-click an image; choose properties; click Summary tab and Simple.) What a simple and useful idea. I am going to start recording the following (slightly modified from CC suggestions; see below):
- License: [include license and license URL]
- Attribution URL:
- Attribution name:
Here’s an example. (You can download it to view the properties.)
That reminded me that I’d heard that Creative Commons suggests a standard for metadata. They suggest something called XMP — Extensible Metadata Platform. In reading more about this, it appears that you need special tools, both to create and to read this. (I’m not entirely clear on this though; I spent almost an hour looking for an example image and couldn’t find one. If anyone knows of one, please post a link.) Possibly not very feasible for the “mass” audience. The good news is that doing this makes content machine-searchable as open content.
For now, I think I’m going to stick with using properties for this.
What other ideas do you have?
Tags: oer | metadata | licensing | images | photos | clip art
What is most important about OER?
Posted by karen on June 12, 2008 in Uncategorized
I am facilitating a series of hands-on workshops to help educators to learn about the value of OER. What topics do you think are most important to spread this movement? Licensing issues? Available resources? Wiki editing skills? Open source tools?
Tags: oer | licensing | wikis
Kids dictionary goes beta!
Posted by karen on June 8, 2008 in Uncategorized
We’ve released the beta of the kids dictionary builder. Yay! The tool is a sort of combined database and wiki, with functionality to “freeze” final definitions at some point and output the actual dictionary in a variety of formats (ebook, web, PDF, etc.). It was written in a combination of mySQL, PHP, and Python.
If you would like to help beta test this or participate in the building (even writing one definition will be a helpful contribution), you can sign up here or send us an email.
There have been a few days this month when I’ve wondered if creating a free, open kids dictionary was an overly ambitious project, but mostly it’s been very rewarding, and I have high hopes that lots of people will participate, and we’ll produce a great tool for anyone who wants to use it.
The dictionary builder will launch more publicly in late June. So stay tuned for another update then.
Tags: dictionary | kids dictionary | oer | open
Kids and copyright preso
Posted by karen on May 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
My most exciting classroom experience this year - Kids, copyright, and open content
Posted by karen on May 19, 2008 in Uncategorized
[This is cross-posted from Mobile Musings. I don’t usually cross-post, but I think this is one of my most important posts and learning experiences of the year. I hope every classroom teacher who reads this will incorporate some of this into his/her classroom.]
As a part of a project in which students are writing poems to be included in a collected ebook, I had the opportunity this week to teach several groups of middle school students about copyright and open content. (I am often frustrated by teachers telling kids to “just get any image from Google to include in your Powerpoint/Word doc.”)
[For a lesson plan and accompanying resources for this, visit www.tinyurl.com/5qahht.]
Facilitating this discussion with kids was tremendously enjoyable and thought-provoking. I am sure that I learned as much as they did (and I think they learned a lot).
Here are a few of my big take-aways:
1. Relevance leads to critical thinking and engaged learning. Copyright is a topic that is immediately relevant to kids — as a result, they were highly interested and had a ton of questions, comments, and thoughts. While they were engaged, I was able to insert other topics from math, writing, and reading. I think this is a key to improving learning (and it doesn’t flow naturally from a textbook or a pacing guide).
2. In general, kids want to be legal. They are, however, seriously uninformed. (When asked about what they knew about copyright, many confused it with plagiarism. They think this is a what-I-can-do-in-school issue rather than a legal issue.) They had many questions about what they needed to do to be legal.
3. The filesharing tools these kids use (almost universally) are Lime Wire and Photobucket. For those not in the know, Lime Wire is P2P file sharing software, apparently used by kids for exchanging music illegally (being used as the new Napster or Grokster). I believed most of the kids when they told me that they didn’t understand the legal issues involved with this. Their big concern with the service: viruses.
4. Most kids were not aware of the fundamental premise of Wikipedia: that anyone can edit it. This was shocking to me. When they understood this, they found it very empowering. (Together, we edited an article about their school district — something that you’d never find on Encarta or EB.) This led to a very sophisticated discussion about the pros and cons of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. These kids got it a lot faster than most adults. We also talked about vandalism, wikispam, and version control.
5. Once the students understood the basics of copyright and open content, they quickly began discussing some pretty high level concepts about intellectual property. Unprovoked by me, they asked about financial issues, transference of copyright, IP address tracking, use of personal images (image release issues), paparazzi photos, parodies (as they relate to fair use), and lots more. It was phenomenal.
6. Kids are all over Firefox and view it as a better browser.
7. They were not familiar with the term “open source.” :( On the other hand, they expressed a universal contempt for Microsoft (to an extent that I found a little scary, but what a force for the OER community to harness).
8. Only one kid out of about 150 had ever heard of Creative Commons. How had he heard of it? YouTube.
9. They enjoyed finding open content that is legal to use in their projects. They were surprisingly adept at finding and understanding the licenses (CC, GFDL, public domain) and at including appropriate credits for the pieces used in their own work.
10. Kids who often appear bored and lacking in critical thinking and articulate communication skills suddenly seem like geniuses when they are discussing something that matters to them.
———–
What fun! My mind is still reeling at all the epiphanies I had during these few days.
Looking for open ed stories
Posted by karen on May 16, 2008 in Uncategorized
A group at COSL and WikiEducator is working on an OER Handbook for educators. As a part of that, we are looking for stories from educators or learners who have used or created open educational resources. If you or anyone there would be able to contribute a short blurb for this, it would be much appreciated. Examples of the kind of thing we’re looking for, as well as the wiki where these can be added, are available here:
Please circulate this request. Anyone who has used Wikipedia as a part of a lesson or used music from ccMixter for a classroom video has a story to share!
I think that the OER movement is one of the most exciting things going on right now and hope that this and other projects will help spread the word!
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Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
