April 2008

When share alike doesn’t work

Posted by karen on April 29, 2008 in Uncategorized

In discussing licensing options for open education items, I suggest that the CC BY license is in many ways the most open license. While share alike sounds like a great option, because it prompts sharing down the road, it is sometimes overly restrictive. It’s not always easy to envision how this might the case, so here is an example.

I am working with a school district to create a series of movies that highlight vocabulary and essential questions in their social studies curriculum. The essential questions come from their textbook, and the publisher has given permission to include these in the movies. Because this material is copyrighted, however, we cannot “share” the movies we are creating beyond this district (or others to whom the publisher has extended permission). As such, we can’t include any share alike images. This eliminates a lot of great material.

Tags: oer | licensing | creative commons | semantic web | share alike
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Wikis - Building content vs. displaying and using it

Posted by karen on April 22, 2008 in Uncategorized

In education, we often run into objections to wiki-based content because of the potential for objectionable content. This kind of problem mostly stems from spam, and you don’t have to spend much time in wikis to see some pretty awful (and juvenile) examples of this.

We’ve wrestled with this problem a fair amount with our kids open dictionary project. We want this to be a mass collaboration project, but know that if there are instances of obscenities or other inappropriate content, it won’t be usable by schools.

Our solution is to separate the building — which will be done in a wiki — from the final version — which will be in a variety of “frozen” formats (ebooks, uneditable web pages, print, etc.). While the approach may sacrifice a bit in terms of ongoing updates (which still could be submitted by admins or emailed to admins by others), the upside, in terms of being able to ensure quality content while minimizing maintenance work, is high.

I think this is a good solution that many other wikis might find useful.

Tags: dictionary | wikis
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Sight word videos

Posted by karen on April 18, 2008 in Uncategorized

I am working on creating some sight word videos from the word lists at FreeReading. (If you haven’t seen this site, it is a phenomenal resources for early literacy.)Before I crank out more of these, I’m looking for input from early literacy teachers.

  • How is the music? Too distracting or ok?
  • How is the timing?
  • Does the “pointing finger” idea work?

Any input anyone has is appreciated. I’m hoping to produce a whole library of these to match the FreeReading lists over the next few months.

Tags: reading | literacy | freereading | free | oer
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Quotes about OER

Posted by karen on April 3, 2008 in Uncategorized

I finally got around to redoing the home page for this site, and in doing so, I put together this gif of quotes I think express what OER is all about. (You may need to wait a second or so for it to load.)

Let me know if you know any quotes that should be added to this.

Also, as with other content on this site, feel free to use this for any purposes you like (with attribution to K12 Open Ed please).

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