Next Monday is the beginning of the Introduction to Open Education course! Hurray! We already have over 20 participants from major US instructional technology programs (Georgia, Indiana, George Mason, South Florida) and folks from six countries outside the US signed up to participate. I suppose the USU participants (my school) are all waiting for next [...]

No time for a long post today, just a quick announcement that the first info about our OER Recommender (funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation) went online today: http://www.oerrecommender.org/. The underlying technology, Suggestr, will be open sourced as soon as we have a minute to breathe.

This has been the primary question asked by people providing feedback on the OEL draft. Below I provide a four point response.

From the Open Education 2007 Conference Committee: We’re pleased to announce that the conference registration for Open Education 2007 is now open. The early registration deadline is Friday, September 7 — after that date all of the rates will go up. So please register early! To register online, please visit http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007/registration. To view the preliminary program [...]

Thousands of people complain that the term of copyright is too long. They point out that documents like the US Constitution make it plain that the term of copyright should be finite, and that it is absolutely critical that copyrighted educational content and other cultural artifacts eventually enter the public domain. This was recently demonstrated [...]

If you follow this blog with any regularity you’ll have seen this coming for several weeks now. When I began recommending that people quit using OpenContent licenses (developed in 98 and 99) and begin using the new Creative Commons licenses (in 2003), I said it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. [...]

I was really privileged to work with Brett Shelton on editing this new book, and now it’s available! While we weren’t able to convince the publishers to use a Creative Commons license for the book, they did agree to provide perpetual access to a free electronic copy of the book. So download yours today, kick [...]

I have posted the first draft of the syllabus for my fall course, called Introduction to Open Education. I would absolutely love your feedback on important literature I’ve missed (especially your own papers!), topics that you think deserve their own dedicated week’s worth of time, etc. Feel free to either edit the syllabus directly or [...]

Well, it appears I’m playing catch up again! For all my ranting about the problems with ShareAlike lately, I have missed Leigh’s eerily similar criticisms that predate me by several months. The writing is so similar, in fact, that I expect an online plagiarism detector would convict me hands down. Here’s Leigh’s commentary from May:

The final pre-print of my upcoming chapter reviewing the learning objects literature is now available.

Still working on my Introduction to Open Education class for the fall… In digging around for resources, I was pointed to the free content tutorial on Wikieductaor, which reads in part: Free content, for the Wikieducator community, refers to the liberty to adapt, modify and use content without restrictions. However, because the free content promoters are [...]

There have been a number of comments on my recent post about license compatibility problems. I want to address two specific, related comments…

Preparing for my fall course “Introduction to Open Education” (more about that coming soon in another post), I’ve been thinking hard about licensing and the “pro-freedom” camp. Wikeducator and FreedomDefined.org have several interesting pieces, including WikiEducator’s Free Content Defined and FreedomDefined.org’s The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License. [...]

Looking for an aggregator for your new iPhone? iPhone + Aggregator = iGag! iGag has: out of the box support for del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, Last.FM, and several other popular services support for adding generic RSS or Atom feeds and OPML files (online or uploaded) OpenID support for authentication (so most of you won’t even need [...]

A fun service over at http://www.careerdistinction.com/ measures your “online identity” on a scale of 1 to 10. I did pretty well: Your online identity score is 10 out of a possible score of 10. Congratulations. You are digitally distinct. This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google [...]

Bekir passed his dissertation defense on Friday! Congrats, Dr. Gur! Bekir did his dissertation in the “multiple paper” format (which I encourage all my students to use), so he should be ready to submit the three papers for publication much more quickly than usual. I’ll put links here when preprints go up. But for now, [...]

My Freebase invites post was so popular, I’m offering Pownce invites now. Thanks to the dozens of you who asked for Freebase invites; sorry I couldn’t hook you all up.

Leave a comment if you would like one.

Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER [...]

Derek Keats, who I greatly respect and admire, responded to my earlier post with this reply:

You may be somewhat surprised to hear that talk on the UNESCO IIEP list, set up for the discussion of open educational resources, has temporarily turned to the topic of open versus free versus libre again. Here is my contribution to the conversation, in which I quote and than “adapt” John Adams…