I like sharing some personal stuff about my week in the reviews. Normally, I do it at the end of the post. But this week’s overriding memory is a personal one. My 8 year old son, after living with an egg allergy for his entire life, was given the green light to eat eggs by our allergist after a successful oral challenge.
The immense impact of this on our family is difficult to fully explain as we have lived with dietary limitations for his entire life. For the first 3 years, his total avoidance allergy list was all nuts, eggs, soy, dairy and wheat. Slowly, over the years this list has been reduced to where it is now just nuts and dairy. This development means a pretty massive change for our family, and will likely go down as our families biggest collective memory of 2015.
Onto work stuff.
I was invited by Colin Madland at TRU-OL to participate in their annual Open Learning faculty development workshop. TRU is a fantastic supporter of the open textbook project, and open education in general. I presented on the open textbook project with a few people at TRU who are involved in the project, Rajiv Jhangiani (who gave one of the clearest explanations on the basics of cricket that I have ever heard using a set of flight beer glasses), John Belshaw (who authored the new Canadian History textbook in our collection), and TRU librarian Brenda Smith (who has been involved with the BC-OER librarians group). I also facilitated a couple of f2f workshops on finding and using OER. Slides from my plenary presentation, my workshop, and the workshop outline.
While at TRU, I also met with Irwin DeVries and the instructional design team at TRU-OL on how they can use open textbooks in their course development and redesign courses around open textbooks. I also met with Val Peachy, who is the Director for Program Delivery at TRU-OL. Also met with another open textbook adapting author at TRU Bill Little (Intro to Sociology) to do a bit of a f2f Pressbooks overview with him. Spent some time with Nancy White &, of course, hung out with Brian. Also good to see Grant Potter and Jason Toal.
OpenEd 2015 proposal reviews. Coordinated an external review panel of BC post-sec folks to evaluate OpenEd 2015 proposals. We had a quick turnaround time as proposal acceptances are going out this week. Thank you to the group of you who helped with the proposal evaluations. There are just shy of 150 proposals for OpenEd this fall – a phenomenal response.
Other OpenEd 2015 work: put together outline of possible roles for BC (and especially Vancouver based( higher ed folks as I continue to work towards getting a local organizing committee together for the event.
Spent a day working on both an open textbook sustainability plan, and an open textbook tactical plan for the next year. This summer we will be wrapping up the creation phase and will have met the official goals of the project (textbooks that align with the top 40 academic subject areas in BC and 20 textbooks for skills and trades training) and now need to start looking towards what is next for the project. These 2 documents are my big rock projects right now.
Attended a webinar from John Hilton III about efficacy of open textbooks. Prompted a blog post from me.
We’re working on a self-serve stand alone instance of Pressbooks for BC faculty. The idea behind this instance is that faculty (or anyone with a BC post-sec institutional account) can sign up for their own Pressbooks site and use it to create a textbook. These books won’t be added to the curated collection at open.bccampus.ca, but will be connected with the larger collection in the sense that faculty who sign up for an account can create a copy of any book in our collection and use that as a starting point for their own textbook. This is a way to support faculty who have the technical skills and knowledge of open licensing a venue to D.I.Y. an open textbook. I’ve got the keys from Brad this week and have been playing with it in preparation for a limited summer launch.
Working with Lumen and University of Minnesota on textbook conversion program. We are trying to coordinate our efforts on converting existing open textbooks in the commons into our common Pressbooks platform. First step was a list of what we are all working on in terms of conversion projects and we got that done last week. Next step – how to best share these resources so we don’t duplicate efforts.
Ministry meeting to give them an update on our activities.
Registered for ETUG at SFU in June.
The OT Summit is just a few weeks away. Registration closes May 25.
Was involved in a few emails with folks around rebooting Creative Commons Canada.
We added a number of books to the collection last week as the 20 skills and trades training books continue to roll off the shelves. Notably Introduction to Tourism and Hospitality in BC, and an ABE English textbook and accompanying reader.
One more personal note. Celebrated not only Mothers Day this weekend, but 12 wonderful years of being married to my wife, Dana.
Image credit: Happy Face by abhijith CC-BY-NC-SA
Drop me a line when you a sandbox setup … very interested. Had a student led textbook project running in DokuWiki Winter 2015 that had some success, but thinking DokuWiki isn’t the place/platform for it on the next pass through – would like to see if Pressbooks would serve better.
So! I’ve been vaulted into doing a presentation about OER at the end of the month. Your slide show was helpful as a model. HOwever, I couldn’t help but notice that in the chart of compatible licenses, it indicated that if you remixed something with a SA label, you had to have the same label, and your show doesn’t include the SA.
Now, I also figured that since what was taken was a little quote from wikipedia — completely within “fair use” had it been all rights reserved — that because of that there wouldn’t be a problem. (I’m pretty sure the more legal text says things like that the licenses won’t change fair use.)
Has this question been considered?
Hi Xiousgeonz,
Great question. Under the terms of the -SA license, I have to share the modified version with the same license. In this case, the modified version is not the entire presentation, but the actual image that I used the Wikipedia text on. So, what I need to Share Alike is not the entire presentation, but the newly created shark image that uses the Wikipedia content.
If you notice at the beginning of the presentation where I mark the entire presentation with a CC-BY license, I also include the words “unless otherwise noted”. This is an example of where the “unless otherwise noted” phrase comes into play. I have noted within the presentation that the newly created image I created using the Wikipedia quote is an -SA license and, therefore, not covered by the CC-BY of the larger presentation. This is a great example of where that clause applies.
This is a nuance that I wasn’t able to cover in a face to face presentation due to time.