One of the use-cases for UCalgaryBlogs.ca is for a class to integrate external resources such as OpenLearn courses, or potentially anything that has an RSS feed, to be ingested into the class blogsite. Currently, there are 2 scenarios possible for doing this, each with their own specific benefits, but neither quite matching what I think would make for a more powerful way to contextualize these external resources within the activities of a course.

With the VERY sweet OpenLearn Republisher plugin, you can set up a set of Sources (courses on OpenLearn, etc…) to be pulled into an installation of WordPress Multiuser. The OpenLearn plugin creates a new blog for each Source, and sucks down all items in the provided RSS feed into that blog, and creates blog Posts for each item.

OpenLearn Course Importing Plugin Workflow

The benefit of this is a set of centralized blog sites for each course, which could be shared across multiple courses. But that’s also the big downside of this model – what if you want to contextualize the content differently for each course that’s using it? If you didn’t want to do that, why not just use the online OpenLearn hosted version of the course?

With FeedWordPress (or wp-o-matic) you can pull RSS feeds into a single course blogsite, and all items will be published as blog Posts within that site. Categories can be set up and inherited to help organize the imported content.

FeedWordPress RSS Importing Workflow

But, if the activity of the course takes place as blog Posts, it becomes mixed in with any content imported from the external resources. Conversation and content become merged.

Ideally, a course blogsite would use the Pages feature to manage “content” – the stuff the conversations refer to – and use the blog Posts for the activity and conversation of the course. As such, I think it would be more effective to have the content from external resources be ingested into a blogsite as Pages, created within the hierarchy of pages (select a parent page, and a full table of contents structure is generated as needed).

Ideal open content ingestor workflow

I’m not sure if that’s possible now with the available tools, but I think we’re getting REALLY close to a powerful open content contextualization platform – ingesting prepared resources for use within the spatial and temporal contexts of a course.

Ideally, the power and features of OpenLearn Republisher, with the ability to designate the “host” blog for the ingested content (or have it create new blogsites as needed), and to create Pages rather than Posts. It’s VERY close, and it’s got the potential to change how people interact with (open) content.

I just got back from Michael Geist’s inspiring presentation “Why Copyright?” – where he laid out some of the issues relating to copyright, open access, sharing, reusing, mashups, and a long list of implications for the potentially pending Canadian DMCA.

It felt like there was much agreement among the faculty and staff who were present for Dr. Geist’s presentation. When he was talking about the need for, and the power of, open access, many heads were nodding. People were agreeing, and it felt like we might be about ready to start moving forward on some Open Content (if not all the way to Open Education) initiatives. I’ve got some ideas that I want to incubate for a bit longer, but I’ll be following up with faculty members to see what we can do to move in that direction.

Walking back from the presentation, chatting with two unnamed faculty members. They were saying how eye-opening the session was, and how they had no idea that Fair Dealing was as useful and potentially as flexible as it sounds like it is. How great, that they can go ahead and scan books as PDF and post them in their courses in Blackboard.

“But,” I replied, “what if we went further than that, and started sharing course materials on the open web for others to use as well, instead of just locking copyrighted materials behind Blackboard’s login?”

“No. I could never put my course on the open web. I’d get sued. I don’t worry about this now, because it’s all in Blackboard. They have no right to look in Blackboard, so it’s safe.”

My jaw is still sore from when it hit the elevator floor.

Fair Dealing, and open access, and creative commons, and all of the wonderful things that these entail. Only seen by faculty as ways to get content into their courses. A one-way trip. Roach motel.

I can see I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Ron Murch hit the nail on the head with his comment/question in the discussion after the presentation. He asked if there was something more we could be doing, rather than just using citations to show the content that has been reused in the context of a course.

Yes, Ron. There is absolutely more we can do.

First and foremost, we need to model ethical and appropriate use of copyrighted materials. Hiding copyright infringements behind the Blackboard login is not good enough. You have to realize that you’re modeling this infringement for your students to see. “It’s OK to infringe on copyright, because The Man can’t see, right?” “uh… if Dr. Whatsisname could do it, why can’t I?”

I’m not saying you shouldn’t repurpose content in your courses, but do it legitimately. We have a copyright policy here on campus. Use it. Follow it. Show your students what it means to properly use copyrighted materials. Find materials that you can legally use for your purposes. Link to materials that you can’t republish directly in the course.

But, that is only half of what we need to be doing.

The other, perhaps more important part, is that we need to walk the walk. We need to publish content in forms, and under licenses, that make it possible for others to use and reuse it. A professor publishing their research publicly in DSpace is a fantastic way to show their students about the power of sharing. An instructor keeping a public blog and/or wiki with resources is a great way to model active contribution.

This is the primary reason I’ve chosen to publish everything I do online under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license – it’s important to model this, and even more important to fully understand what it means to be an active participant in this collaborative publishing medium. Restricting yourself to publishing within the confines of Blackboard (or any other restricted walled garden) is not contributing to the Greater Good.

We can do better than that. We need to do better than that.

I was present at a faculty collaboration project meeting today, and one of the profs was showing some of the resources they’ve built to support their classroom teaching. It was some impressive video work, which the prof admitted could easily have applications in other classes, or institutions, or even other disciplines. He then went on to describe the rigorous steps that he’d had to take in order to prevent that from happening – video being hosted on an internal streaming server so nobody could find it without seeing the video embedded on a course within Blackboard. He was struggling to implement the embedding as effectively as he wanted. When asked why that was necessary, why not just put the video onto YouTube or Google Video? They had actually thought of that initially – it solves the bandwidth, hosting, and embedding problems quite nicely.

But they couldn’t let non-registered-students see the video because it contained several pieces of media that would involve rather blatant copyright violations if distributed outside the context of the course.

It struck me how much effort and energy was being expended to protect disclosure of these violations, and how relatively easy it would have been to just avoid potential copyright violations in the first place by using Creative Commons and/or Public Domain media instead of commercial.

It then got me wondering – how much of the content generated by institutions is simply not sharable – not as a result of philosophical, technical nor design constraints, but because there wasn’t thought put into the implications of integrating copyrighted materials into this content?

The following are my notes made while reading the first 3 articles for the Open Education course facilitated by David Wiley. The reading list (and links to the original articles) is available at the course wiki page. (I’ll clean up the categories/tags asap, but the course wiki and David’s blog are down at the moment, so I don’t have the exact course tags handy right now…)

General shift toward individual-centric, collaborative and connective styles of communication. Reminds me a bit of this blog article titled “we are living in good times”.I’m unsure of the need to have a concerted need to force these shifts to be reflected in higher education – appropriate communication strategies will emerge in pockets and spread as needed. Did Gutenberg and his colleagues need to push the printing press as an agent of change in higher education, or did it become adopted because it was a valuable shift in communication technology? Or did modern higher education emerge because of the development of technology…I would argue that a good classroom has never been truly tethered to a place, forcing students to act as consumers to the teachers knowledge producer. Yes, that has been a common pattern, but effective classrooms have always been different.

As students adopt technologies in their personal lives, they apply it to their academic lives as well. It is the job of educators to adapt to the needs and abilities of their students, including technologies and paradigms that are in the students’ repertoires.

I agree that the importance of degrees and credentials is changing, but universities are more than simply job training programs. The goal is not to come out of university after 4 years with a piece of paper to get a job – the goal of a university education, at least a successful one, is to gain experience and understanding that is difficult or impossible to attain outside the context of an academic campus.

On distance learning as a non-solution, Wiley makes a good point – typical online classes are merely digital and mobile versions of dysfunctional traditional classrooms. Sage-on-stage, but online, without the social supports of face-to-face classrooms. Not the way to go.

Open courseware will become more important and relevant if teachers and students are able to separate content from teaching. MIT’s OCW project doesn’t devalue an MIT education by making many of the MIT course materials freely available online. It does extend the reach and relevance of MIT’s instructors. But, the natural extension of this is not having every school release their own versions of course materials in hopes of reproducing this effect, it is in instructors from different schools collaborating to develop a shared set of resources. The power of open courseware is in the potential to bring classes together to build a common library of domain specific content, which can be taught in various ways by individual instructors (or utilized by individuals without an institutional context or teacher).

It can’t really be argued that higher education has “fallen out of step with business, science and everyday life” – but that might not be a bad thing.

Question: Would education as a human right require the creation of a United Nations Department of Education? (an extended or reformulated UNESCO?) Other human rights are relatively straightforward, but education is extremely culturally based – what might be considered education in one culture might be considered propaganda in another (beyond some universal definition of “the basics” – reading/writing a language, basic math, etc… )

Thought: If compulsory education is an artifact of the industrial revolution in the first world, it may be an artifact of the global information economy in the remaining nations.

Universal access to education goes well beyond having available textbooks, or even open courseware resources. There may be political, economic, and social factors that must be addressed before education can be possible. It’s as simple as just fixing the entire world in order to ensure access to education. Not sure why that hasn’t been done yet.

Thought: The concept of universal basic education is attractive, but I worry that it sets up just another arena for imperialism and cultural domination. Countries without resources will have to adopt freely available materials or face potential sanctions. This essentially hands control over global education to the countries that can afford to create and distribute free educational resources – the same countries that would be imposing sanctions if these resources were not effectively adopted. There’s a dangerous potential for conflict of interest and sociocultural imperialism there.

Thought: if implementation in local countries is left to the respective local governments, there will be too many individuals left out through the use of exceptions and caveats (either to protect economic hegemony, or through corruption). The alternative is an externally controlled and implemented education system, which would be universally rejected.Thought: if a human right can be diminished through reservations, exceptions or caveats, it’s not truly a human right. Human rights are non-negotiable. If education is a human right, there can be no exceptions.

“Education should be compulsory until children reach the minimum age for employment” – I find this more than a little depressing. Education is about so much more than just job-training. I’m not sure how to describe that in the form of a requirement, but it’s important that education is seen as more than just preparation for employment. Children need to know that they are more valuable than just as future wage slaves.

I’m realizing that I’m a little squeemish with the idea of mandated universal education. The idea of education-as-right is a great one, but I worry about the implementation. Who gets to define “acceptable basic education” and who gets to provide the curriculum and supporting materials? How will countries and states be convinced to play along? Education is often a state or provincial domain – how to convince everyone that it’s a global/UN concern (even if it is)?

Given that the main obstacle to globally universal access to education isn’t education, but rather political, social, economic and cultural pressures, I am not sure what the initial impact of open education will have. The problem largely isn’t access to content, it’s the role of basic education. If education isn’t valued in a country or region, all the free educational resources in the world aren’t going to make a difference.Having “open access” to materials may also be complicated, as access may be defined differently. If we assume everyone has a computer with internet access (or can reasonably access such a computer) that implies one type of access. The vast majority of the global population doesn’t have access by that definition. Is “access” more along the lines of Google Book, where a truck travels through a region with a satellite dish to download and print books on demand for individuals without internet access? Do we wait for OLPC to hit critical mass? If education is a human right, we can’t wait to fulfill it.

I should preface this with a reminder that I am not a lawyer. I don’t play one on TV, nor the internets. But as someone who creates and publishes a fair amount of content under an unrestrictive Creative Commons license, I have some thoughts on the topic.

I read David’s post on the proposed new Open Education License, and I’ve been struggling to understand why a new license is needed. Here’s the comment I left on David’s post:

David, I’ve been struggling to understand why a new license is warranted. How would this benefit either the original creator, or the content “repurposer” beyond what a plain vanilla Creative Commons Attribution license provides? That license allows derivative works, doesn’t require share-alike (although that can be added), and requires attribution. It also allows commercial use (of the original and/or derivative works) – or not, if desired.

Would it be as effective to just recommend a particular combination of CC bit flags?

From the post, David mentions that the new license is strongly inspired by CreativeCommons, using the same language and terminology, right down to the compatible XML description of the license:

<rdf :RDF xmlns=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#”
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”>
<license rdf:about=”http://opencontent.org/licenses/oel/1.0/”>
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Reproduction” />
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#Distribution” />
<permits rdf:resource=”http://creativecommons.org/ns#DerivativeWorks” />
</license>
</rdf>

But, if the license can be described using CreativeCommons clauses, why not just promote a particular flavour of CC license for Open Education content? It could be essentially a branding/marketing effort, to promote the Creative Commons Attribution license:

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This flavour of CC is pretty open – it explicitly allows copying, modification, redistribution, and distribution of modifications. It also (optionally) allows commercial use of the content and derivatives. All it requires is attribution. (more on this below)

By building on CreativeCommons directly, it would take advantage of localized versions of the licenses, and wouldn’t “fork” the mindshare of “open” licenses. Under the proposed license, a contributor has to decide if they want to use the more common Creative Commons series of licenses, or try out the new OEL.

David mentions that one goal of the new OEL license is to do away with the Attribution clause, because that may cause friction when content from one culture is used in another. A Sunni-created work might be frowned upon in a Shia-created derivation, if it was obvious through attribution that the work originated from a Sunni group. I don’t buy that argument – if there is that level of cultural intolerance, it will go beyond the name mentioned in the credits of a derivative work. The cultural origin of a work is inherent in the work, not just in the attribution byline.

I firmly believe that the requirement of Attribution is essential in sharing content. It brings along the concepts of trust, responsibility, reputation, and even simple credit. I don’t believe that many people will willingly expend resources (time, energy, money, social capital) in the construction of valuable educational content, only to cast if off in an essentially Public Domain license. They will want to know that they will at least be given credit for creating the work. And consumers/reusers of these works should be able to follow the provenance of the derivatives, to go back to original sources. Removing Attribution as a requirement breaks that chain.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that these licenses are not exclusive. If Attribution is impossible,  contact the creator of the work and arrange a separate license. This could involve a fee, or just an agreement. This is already possible under Creative Commons.