October 2007
Kids simple dictionary…not as simple as I thought
Posted by karen on October 31, 2007 in Uncategorized
I’ve been doing some work on the idea of creating a free open kids simple dictionary. Two questions that have been central are:
- What open dictionary would be best to use as a starting point?
- How could this be hosted to best facilitate mass collaboration?
To look at the first question, I started by putting together a list of what’s available. As it turns out, there are not as many choices as I had thought. There is the WordNet/Princeton one, Wiktionary, Webster’s 1913 dictionary, and then a variety of adaptations of those. (If anyone knows of a gem I missed, PLEASE let me know!)
I then chose 10 words basically at random that should be in any good elementary level dictionary and looked them up in each of these dictionaries. The results are here. Ugh!
The bad news is that only a few of these definitions are at all usable for a kids’ dictionary. Almost all would need significant editing. (I’ve used Noah on the Palm, but have steered clear of it with schools because of the objectionable adult language. I didn’t really realize until now how completely inappropriate the general language level/readability is for kids though.)
Wiktionary and Webster’s 1913 are the most verbose and would need the most editing. WordNet and the Online Plain Text English Dictionary both seem more reasonable as a starting place. However, the amount of editing required will still be mammoth. We really will need mass collaboration to do this….which brings me to the second question.
In some ways, I would really like this dictionary to live in Wikibooks. This is because (1) I like Wikibooks; (2) I think Wikibooks is an effective platform for mass collaboration; and (3) I would like to bring more people to Wikibooks for the benefit of other projects there. However, there are some issues. One of the big ones is that as a school-appropriate dictionary, we would want at some point to “freeze” a copy to ensure that we are putting out a safe, accurate, high quality product. Wikibooks isn’t really set up for this (though wikis can be designed to accommodate this). In addition, MediaWiki doesn’t handle version control or forking (though it does handle revision control very well).
A tentative solution to this that I had thought of was to put it in Wikibooks and then at some point slurp it off to a database hosted on K12 Handhelds that would be restricted to a small group of editors for final editing and publication. Interestingly, this is similar to an idea that xixtas has proposed in a letter to the Wikimedia folks. He goes a step better though by suggesting that the “controlled” copies be hosted on a Wikimedia site www.wikijunior.org. I think this is a great idea for all kinds of reasons. I hope that Wikimedia gives this serious consideration. Of course with all the content being GFDL, I guess we could do this ourselves if we didn’t mind hosting it.
So that’s where I am with all this. Any thoughts?
Tags: wikibooks | dictionary | oer | b | free
Proposed blogging law in Italy
Posted by karen on October 27, 2007 in Uncategorized
A proposed law in Italy would require that all bloggers register with a national database. This is scary. Governments all over the world appear to be hugely out of touch with modern technologies and their uses.
OpenEd-Week 9-Part 2
Posted by karen on October 24, 2007 in Uncategorized
More on Larry Lessig’s book Code v2….this time on a couple ideas from the book that I have a hard time agreeing with.
I agree with many of Lessig’s points. In particular, he is a staunch defender of fair use and is concerned about the effect of technology in limiting fair use. He sometimes goes too far in my opinion, both in terms of what he considers fair use and in ideas for remedying the situation. (Many of these ideas involve extreme machinations, instead of just clarifying what fair use is and making sure such uses are legally protected.)
At one point in the book, Lessig makes the case for preserving what he calls “amateur culture.” This is the culture of those who do things not for money, but for the love of what they do. It includes all of us who write, make music, draw, paint, etc. just because we love to do it.
Lessig makes the case that it is important to preserve this culture and then jumps to the conclusion that such culture should be able to use copyrighted works to an extent that far exceeds anyone’s conception of fair use. Lessig seems to feel that such use is not “piracy.”
Lessig says that “this kind of cultural remix has historically been free of regulation,” and goes on to say that we have always been able to “tell a joke around [our] dinner table” that includes copyrighted material. Surely the difference between this and broadcasting copyright-infringing videos worldwide is evident though. Apparently, not to Lessig though. He says that such infringement has “just one real effect: to promote the the underlying artists’ work.” I would strongly maintain that this is a decision for the copyright holder to make.
Another issue I have with Lessig is his use of extreme language. I think the cases for most of what Lessig argues for — protection of fair use, protection of various liberties and privacies, etc. — are fairly straightforward and relatively easily to establish. But rather than making the case in a simple, logical way, Lessig often resorts to extreme language and emotional appeals. Language like “profiling,” “manipulation,” “segregation,” and “discrimination” is designed to evoke emotional responses. I think Lessig’s causes would be better served by less emotion, more direct arguments.
Open Ed-Week 8-Sustainability
Posted by karen on October 21, 2007 in Uncategorized
QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)
I’m going to take a different approach to the questions for this week, which is basically not to answer them. :) The various ways that sustainable OER models can be built are well outlined in the readings for this week. Rather than summarizing them, which will be of limited value to me or to other readers, I am going to spend my time on this assignment in reading and responding to others’ posts this week and in posing some additional questions for everyone’s consideration. This approach is in part in response to the dialog we’ve had this week about the dynamics of this course.
So…some things this week that made me think and a few questions for your consideration:
1. In Wiley’s On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, he defines sustainability in terms of a project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals (broken down into production, sharing, use, and reuse). He also points out that while many (most in higher ed?) projects are intended to be a resource for teachers, many (most?) are actually used primarily by learners. My question: Shouldn’t the goal of every OER project to be to facilitate learning by a maximum number of learners?
Many projects seem not to be not primarily focused on learners or maximizing learning.
2. In Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, Downes says “Rather than think of each of these five steps [discovery and research, designing the learning experience, teaching, learning, feedback/assessment/evaluation] as something that is done for learners, and supported through some sort of sustainable (or commercial) program, we need to think of each of these five steps as something that learners do for themselves, and indeed, that any act of learning consists in exactly these steps.” How does this perspective relate to OER (especially in the context of OERs used by informal lifelong learners) and sustainability?
3. In Koohang and Harman’s Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources, the authors ask “Does a constructivist paradigm make design a function of serendipity rather than an issue of value or perceived value?”
Tags: oer | sustainability | openedcourse2007week08
OpenEd-Week 9 (yes, I’m jumping around)
Posted by karen on October 17, 2007 in Uncategorized
Two of the best things about the OpenEd course I’ve been blogging about are the conversations among the brilliant and diverse participants and the reading list for the course. In addition to supplemental readings on a variety of issues critical to OER, there is a reading assignment for a book of our choice from this list:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Benkler)
Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (Benkler)
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Easterly)
The World Is Flat (Updated and Expanded): A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Friedman)
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Lessig)
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Prahalad)
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Sachs)
Other recommended books:
While I’ve already read a few of these books, there are several that I haven’t, and so I’ve gathered up copies of those to read over the next few months. On my list of been-planning-to-read are Larry Lessig’s books, so I’m reading them in order starting with Code.
The questions that have been posed for this assignment are:
QUESTIONS: What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?
Rather than answer these questions in one long impossible-to-read post, I’m going to answer in parts as it comes to me.
The first big idea from Code that has struck me hard is Lessig’s model of four constraints that regulate behavior:
[Source: Larry Lessig, Code Version 2.0, page 123. CC-Attribution-ShareAlike.]
While we typically think of law as a major way that things are regulated, Lessig makes the case that the other three modalities can be equally, and in many cases more, effective. He gives very compelling examples of each in the “real” (non-cyber) world, and then goes on to expand them to the cyberworld. Much of the book is about architecture, which in the cyberworld is the “code” in the title of the book. Lessig makes the case that the way in which the net is coded allows, disallows, and steers behavior in very specific ways that are in many cases more effective and important than regulatory or economic constraints.
All four of these realms have very important implications for OER. Here are few thoughts.
Law
- In this course and elsewhere, IP law has been discussed extensively, so I’ll just link to a few thoughts on this.
- Legal issues regarding the accessibility of OER materials must be addressed if they are going to be used by mainstream educational communities.
- The legislative environment surrounding the adoption and procurement of school textbooks is complex and in some places nearly impenetrable. In the United States, for example, it is very unlikely for OER to be successful in the K-12 environment due to legislative issues. This suggests that parts of the world with fewer legislative constraints will be more fruitful breeding grounds.
Market
- OER needs to have more sustainable models.
- Free is good, but to many, free implies a lack of quality and seriousness.
- If there is sufficient critical mass, market forces will sort out quality issues as well as licensing issues. Better content and more open licenses will triumph, regardless of the legal environment or the infrastructure issues.
Norms
- OER has to be socially accepted to be successful. We are a long way from this currently. To counter this, advocacy is necessary with policymakers, educational organizations, teachers, and learners.
- Community norms may be a more efficient way to deal with “openness” issues than IP law or industry declarations.
- If there is a critical mass, mass collaboration with open peer review can result in high quality content. (Wikipedia is a testament to that.)
Architecture
- Non-accessible file formats (PDFs, streaming media, not-easily editable or sharable pages, etc.) limit openness.
- Systems greatly affect true openness, regardless of how “open” a project claims to be. Systems that are producer-driven, that are difficult to access and use, and that don’t make it possible to remix content on the fly with the results open to others all make content less open. (There is a big divide in the OER community between the use of CMS systems and the use of Web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs. The decision of tool affects openness.)
- The digital divide and the general lack of net access in the communities most in need of OER is the biggest issue to the future success of this movement. We must be creative in resolving this, looking to solutions that include print, mobile devices, and other non-traditional methods of content distribution. Most importantly though we need to acknowledge the issue and start working on a solution.
A licensing compromise
Posted by karen on October 16, 2007 in Uncategorized
For those who want to use open licenses but have concerns about giving others commercial rights, one option to consider is specifying a more restrictive license (e.g. CC-NC) for a limited time (e.g. 5 years) after which the license will revert to something less restrictive (e.g. CC-By) as suggested by here.
Tags: oer | creative commons | free | licensing
Open Ed-Week 7-Licensing issues
Posted by karen on October 14, 2007 in Uncategorized
QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement? As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content? Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why? Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?
One license option that my partner and I have thought would be useful for certain of our own purposes is one that allows derivative use (commercially or NC) as long as the piece that is used is not the entire new work. This is similar to the Sampling license that allows a piece of the original to be used, but not the whole thing; however, in this case, we don’t mind if they use the whole thing; we just want the resulting piece to be something new. Essentially, we are happy for people to remix some of our works, but we don’t want them just reposting our works with no changes. (This is kind of the opposite of no derivs; we want only derivs for a certain category of works.)
I don’t know that this has particular relevance to educational works, but it may. For example, I think a license like this may assuage the concerns of some regarding commercial use. I think that many would be ok with commercial use providing that whatever reusers are selling is not just their work. If for example, I write an article, I might be fine with someone incorporating it into a much larger work and selling that. I would not, however, want to permit them to sell just my work alone.
Also, we need to think harder about what “commercial use” is in an educational context. Universities charge fees. Is using something licensed as NC in a university commercial? I would argue that it is. How about charging just enough to cover printing costs? There are a million examples of uses that are technically commercial but that wouldn’t be objectionable to most who specify NC. I am not suggesting that we cover all of those instances in NC licenses; I am suggesting that NC licenses be used more sparingly in educational contexts.
Regarding the question of the incompatibility of CC and GPDL, I don’t have an answer, but I hope someone will provide insight into this. I am currently starting a large new open project and want to put it on Wikibooks and am thinking through the licensing implications related to this.
One possible solution that Wikimedia Commons is offering is dual licensing, so, for example, you can license under GFDL and CC. I have been licensing my own photos on Wikimedia Commons this way, but at this point, this does not apply broadly to text articles in Wikipedia or Wikibooks.
The GFDL says ” A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.”
I have reread this several times now and am not sure exactly what this means, but it seems to me to allow for the aggregation of GFDL and CC work. I believe that GFDL is compatible with some CC licenses, most especially a CC-By-ShareAlike license. Dr. Wiley, can you clarify why these licenses would not be compatible? [I think I’ve answered my own question….the problem is with the license OCW has chosen, not all CC licenses.] Presumably, an aggregated work could be licensed under the license that has the most conditions (in this case GFDL, which in being more open requires more) as long as none of the conditions contradict licenses of other pieces in the aggregation.
In regards to the claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause, I think they are two different things. I can produce Work A with a NC clause and Work B with a ShareAlike clause (but no NC clause). Work B could be incorporated into a commercial work that then must by virtue of my license be licensed as ShareAlike. The same is not true for Work A, which could never be used commercially.
I think Share Alike is good for the educational community. I also think that allowing commercial use is beneficial for the community. However, I also think that each artist/author should be able to choose the license they wish, including NC, and for that to still be considered “open.” As there is more and more content available, market forces will give a heavier value weight to more truly open content.
These are complicated issues. I’m going to reread a few of these pieces and may add some resulting thoughts over the next few days.
Tags: creative commons | gfdl | licensing
Open Simple Dictionary
Posted by karen on October 12, 2007 in Uncategorized
I’m starting a new project to collaboratively produce a simple kids dictionary. If anyone has seen anything similar or has experience with any public domain dictionaries or other info that might be useful (or if you’re interested in participating in helping to build this), let me know. Thanks.
What is “open”?
Posted by karen on October 11, 2007 in Uncategorized
There are a lot of discussions going on in the OER community about what should be considered “open.” This starts with licensing issues with many considering the no derivatives or non-commercial licenses being too restrictive. In addition, there are format issues revolving around non-accessible formats (e.g. PDFs, etc.). Then there are issues of adaptability, language, language level, etc.
While we will probably never agree on a definition of what is “open,” perhaps we can agree on what is not open. Clearly, content that is licensed under a traditional all rights reserved copyright is not open. Similarly, content that is licensed under terms that do not permit third-party hosting or dissemination (even in a non-derivative form) cannot be said to be open.
While this may seem to be obvious, many OER repositories contain such works.
I understand that the Internet is all about numbers, but more is not always better. The OER community will not establish itself as a transformative force in education if it succumbs to the temptation to include everything under the sun in OER repositories so that there are x-million items attracting x-million eyeballs.
Let’s start the consensus-building process on what is “open” by agreeing on what is not open and removing the “open” label from it. Or better yet, let’s get the content providers to clarify or change their licenses so that they are truly open.
Tags: creative commons | oer
OpenEd-Week 6-Copyright and the public domain
Posted by karen on October 6, 2007 in Uncategorized
The questions for this week: Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license? To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.
For the first question, I think the percentage of value realized is dependent on how “open” a work is as implied by which license is used. A picture here is the best way for me to think about this. [I am interpreting the use of the term “public domain” in the question to be its literal meaning, not the use of it to mean anything in any sense in the commons.]
In general, as the degree of openness of the license goes down (with public domain on the left being the most open and full copyright on the right being the least), the value also goes down. Two exceptions, though, are CC-By and GFDL, both of which require attribution, but little or no other restrictions. I would argue that these two licenses actually give users more value than public domain because they require including information about the source.
Two other interesting inflection points in this graph occur at the imposition of the non-commercial restriction and at imposition of the no derivatives restriction. At both of these points, there is a significant diminution of value.
Given these points, I don’t think the OER would necessarily benefit from works being placed in the public domain. However, I do think it would benefit greatly from more people loosening restrictions, particularly by avoiding the no derivatives and non-commercial licenses which reduce value considerably.
Nonetheless, I do think that those license variants should exist and that publishers/authors/artists should be able to choose them and still have their work considered a part of OER. To take away those options would restrict the movement too much. As the universe of open resource grows, search and use preference can be given to those resources that are more open.
Tags: public domain | creative commons | GFDL
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Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
