Open

by Clint Lalonde on Open

My first published Wikipedia article

A few weeks ago I wrote my very first Wikipedia article. Today I checked and saw that the article was published.

Well, okay, it’s not an actual article. Technically it is a stub.

Shortly after Canadian author Farly Mowat passed away last month I found myself (as I often do on Wikipedia) wandering around from article to article, this time exploring the entries for various classic Canadian authors and books. In my poking around, I noticed a glaring absence – there was no article for the Canadian novel Who Has Seen The Wind by W.O. Mitchell. There is a Wikipedia entry on Mitchell, but nothing about his best known novel. So, I created one.

If you are not Canadian, you might not know this book. But for many Canadian kids (of my generation at least), it was required middle school reading. A coming of age novel set on the Canadian prairies during the 1930’s depression.

That’s pretty well the extent of the article I wrote.  It’s basic, but it is there. Maybe some intrepid middle school teacher who teaches this book can make it an assignment for their students to flesh out the plot of the book as it has been many years since I actually read it and the details of the plot are too fuzzy for me to do any justice to the entry.

Over the years I have edited many Wikipedia articles, but never authored one from scratch. If you have edited an article before and are used to Wikipedia’s interface and writing standards, creating a new article isn’t that difficult. For this, being that it was my first article, I decided to use the Wikipedia tutorial and follow along with it t write the article, er, stub.

writeAnArticleI saw that Wikipedia has an article wizard, so I thought I’d give that a shot to see how easy it might be for someone who has never used Wikipedia before to create an article. I was (pleasantly) surprised to see that Wikipedia has an option to live chat to another volunteer as you go through the process of creating your article. I never used the feature, but love that they have this to make it even easier for people to contribute content to the platform.

WizardWikipedia has broken the process down into 6 basic steps, represented by the tabs along the top: Introduction (which includes the very pragmatic tip: before you create an article, try editing a few first), Subject, Notability, Sources, Content and End.

Subject prompts the author with a Wikipedia search box and asks the author to search Wikipedia to make sure the topic isn’t already covered elsewhere. Once you are sure the topic isn’t in Wikipedia, you are taken to the Notability screen where you are given a brief overview of the criteria Wikipedia uses to decide whether an entry makes it into Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia says at this point that you should not submit articles that are about:

This is the bit I wanted to make sure I covered in detail to make sure the article would be accepted. I was a bit worried because. Who Has Seen The Wind is an important regional book in Canada, and I wanted to be sure that I could make the argument to whatever Wikipedian would be reviewing this article that this was, indeed, a notable book worthy of a Wikipedia article.  If a Wikipedian in Japan was reviewing, I wanted them to be able to see, with references, that this was a notable book. Indeed, Wikipedia makes this point directly.

Be sure that by the time the reader finishes reading your article, they will understand why the subject is notable.

Here is how Wikipedia defines notable articles:

A topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject itself and of each other. All topics must meet a minimum threshold of notability in order for an article on that topic to be included in Wikipedia. This requirement ensures that there exists enough source material to write a verifiable, encyclopedic article about the topic.

This is the spot that took the most time. Even thought the article is a stub, I needed to do some research to find information that would support that this was a notable entry. So, I gathered some references (including the IMDB entry about the 1977 movie version of the book which starred Gordon Pinsent. Hey, if they make a movie of it, it has to be somewhat notable, right?)  In the end, I found a few references that supported the notion that this book was, indeed, notable.

Wikipedia also uses this page to remind authors of the neutral point of view policy, and has a warning not to engage in “puffery”

Puffery is when an article attempts to exaggerate the notability of its subject. Puffery only serves to reduce the neutrality of the article and so it should be avoided. The most common type of puffery is the use of peacock terms.

Pickaboo with a Peacock

Finally, you write the article and submit it. At which point, I got a surprising message.

reviewwaitingPeople: Wikipedia needs you.

As it turns out, I don’t think the wait was that long. I started writing the article on May 7 and it looks like it was reviewed and published a week later on the 14th. Not bad at all. I wonder if that was because it was a stub and, therefore, fairly easy to review? Low hanging fruit for some Wikipedian?

I love the fact that the day it was published someone went in and used the info I added about it being adapted into a film to add it to a Wikipedia list on Canadian novels that have been adapted into films.

CanNovelsAll in all, it wasn’t that difficult to do. In about an hour I had written and submitted the article. But that was probably because I have spent the past 5 or so years editing the occasional article so I am comfortable with the interface and with how Wikipedia works. But following the wizard, I think it is a doable project for those with fairly basic Wikipedia skills. And you get the nice feeling that you have contributed something to the world of open learning.

Photo: Pickaboo with a Peacock by Susanne Neilson used under CC-BY-SA

 

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Teaching & Learning, Textbooks

The BC Open Textbook Sprint – the afterglow

Note: This is a cross-post from our BCcampus Open Education blog.

48,420 words. 8 chapters.

Day 1

The first BC open textbook sprint wrapped up late Thursday night after 4 long days of collaborative writing, researching, editing and reviewing. We’ll have a more thorough debrief of the event in the coming days. For now, here is what is happening with the book.

Mapping!

Over the next 2 weeks, we will be moving the book into PressBooks Textbooks, the platform we are using as our primary book creation platform. For the sprint, we did not use PressBooks but instead used a collaborative writing platform called PubSweet, created by the BookSprints team. After discussing whether to use the BookSprints platform or our platform, we decided to use PubSweet as the authoring platform for the sprint because the facilitators were familiar with the platform. And, given the mammoth task ahead of us to create a 1st year Geography textbook in 4 days, we decided that rather than add a level of complexity onto the process, we would stick with what our facilitators were familiar with working with. So, our first task post-sprint is to transfer the book from PubSweet to PressBooks Textbooks.

This should not be a huge issue as PubSweet exports the book in ePub and PressBooks Textbooks (thanks to the work of programmer Brad Payne) can import ePub files. We had a few moments of concern with our first attempts to import the book into PressBooks due to the way that PubSweet packages ePub files, but a few emails back and forth to the PubSweet developer by Barbara our facilitators and we think the issue is fixed. So, task one is to get the book into PressBooks.

IMG_1175

After that, I’ll be undertaking a thorough review of the book looking closely at how the resources we used are attributed. During the sprint, attribution of resources was often noting more than a link to where we found it (after we reviewed to ensure that we could use them under the open license we wished to publish with). But these resources are not attributed correctly, so that needs to be reviewed and corrected.

We will also have copy editors review the entire book. We are still working on the details of the contracts with our copy editors so that has added a bit of a delay in the release of the book. But, with some luck, we should have the copy editing underway in July and completed early August.

Finally, we will release the book. It will be available for download and reuse immediately after it is copy edited (we hope this will be done in August). Once it is publicly released, we will be soliciting peer reviews from Geography faculty from around the province, like we are currently doing with all the books in our collection.

There are many people to thank for making the past week possible. First and foremost, the 5 Geography faculty who were brave enough to commit to locking themselves in a room with a bunch of strangers to write a book in an incredibly short amount of time. The first to sign on was Arthur Green of Okanagan College, followed by Britta Ricker (SFU), Siobhan McPhee (UBC), Aviv Ettya (UFV), and Cristina Temenos (SFU). These people worked incredibly hard, putting in 12-14 hour days, to create the book. Barbara  Ruehling from BookSprints facilitated the entire event, assisted for the first 2 days by Faith Bosworth. UBC librarian Jon Strang was a priceless resource. The BCcampus support crew of Amanda Coolidge, Hilda Anggraeni (who was our illustrator and created & contributed dozens of maps and graphs during the sprint), Brad Payne and Christy Foote. Each of these people gave tirelessly to see the book created in 4 days and make this project happen.

See photos of the 4 day sprint on the BCcampus and BookSprint Flickr accounts. We also tweeted about it using the #bcbooksprint hashtag.

Day 1

All photos from BCCampus_news used under CC-BY-SA license

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

Opportunity lost when government content isn't openly licensed

tl:dr  Publicly funded materials should be openly licensed materials

It is day 2 of the BC open Geography textbook sprint (follow along via blog, Twitter or Flickr). I’m hunkered down with some Geography faculty who are working extremely hard to create a first-year open Geography textbook in 4 days.

The book is very regional, using British Columbia specific case studies, and I’ve been working with our librarian and the faculty to source openly licensed BC specific Geography resources to use in our openly licensed textbook (it will be released with a CC-BY license). The problem is we keep finding useable materials on our own provincial government websites that are protected by copyright and not openly licensed.

Why is this a problem? Well, we can’t use it. We have made a commitment to release anything we create under a Creative Commons license to make it as reusable and shareable as possible.

Now, we could go through the hoops and hurdles and fill out forms and ask the government for permission to use the resources. And we just might get permission to use them for the context of this one book. But anyone who would want to reuse the book down the line would have to go back to the copyright holder (the provincial government), most likely fill out those same forms, wait, and then renegotiate the rights to reuse those resources. It’s not impossible, but a significant barrier to reuse.

Or, we could negotiate to use them in the book with the caveat that anyone down the road would need to remove the copyrighted content, which means that the book is not as complete as it could be. Again, doable, but a barrier for reuse that weakens the book.

We could ask the government to release the content under a Creative Commons license. They may or may not do that. But that will take time and there is no guarantee that it will happen. We need to make a decision about what resources we want to use now. 4 days.

But what bothers me the most is that here we have a project that would benefit the citizens of British Columbia by giving them access to a free learning resource and we cannot use resources that those same citizens have paid for. We have paid to create resources like the charts and graphs in this report, or this historical image from the BC Archives, or this one. And there is this map and this one – resources that would be useful for our Geography textbook. Yet these resources are virtually unusable because they were not released with an open license.

How much more bang for our buck could the taxpayers of BC get if these resources were allowed to be used in other contexts that benefited the citizens of BC?

So, what is the final result? The content is not being used. It is being passed over in favour of openly licensed content. The barriers worked, and that feels like such an unfortunate and unnecessary waste.

The opposite case: Government of Canada

For every frustration I have had with trying to use BC government resources, I have had nothing but success with the federal government. Every resource we have looked at using in the textbook has been openly licensed. We are able to use data, graphs and charts from Stats Canada, and maps from the Atlas of Canada, all openly licensed for reuse. There is a wealth of primary source information that our Geography faculty are using as the basis for the textbook. It has been hugely encouraging to see how much data and information our federal government is releasing and allowing reuse of.

Now obviously, there are important open government initiatives underway in this province, like, uh, well, you know – this little open project that I am working on and DataBC. But I hope that these open initiatives are just the start in British Columbia and that someday in the near future when we are creating more open educational resources that will benefit the citizens of BC, we’ll have the ability to freely use, reuse and redistribute content from our own provincial government.

Image: Day 1 by BCCampus released under a CC-BY-SA 2 license

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

The #otsummit in Vancouver next week

Busy week next week. We are hosting the 2nd annual Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver. Last year I had been on the job for only a few weeks when this event rolled around & remember feeling very n00b-ish in a room full of people from well established projects like OpenStax, Siyavula, CCCOER, and Open Course Library (along with others like Creative Commons & student advocates). There were about 30 participants and it proved to be a great introduction to the open textbook community.

Me in full gesticulation at the 2013 Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver. Image from Creative Commons & used under CC-BY license.

This years event has scaled up. There are over 130 people registered. Many are from those same projects & groups, but there are also many new people in attendance. We have more faculty attending. Librarians will be well represented, as will senior post-sec administration. Students will again make up a good portion of the crowd, including some from Saskatchewan, where that province (along with Alberta) have recently announced their own open textbook initiatives. There has been a provincial agreement (pdf) signed between the 3 western provinces to work collaboratively together on OER projects, which is a really wonderful development in terms of encouraging further use and development of open educational resources in Canada. Because of that agreement, there will be some pretty high level government officials from BC and Saskatchewan in attendance.

That is a lot of people representing different stakeholders in one room talking open education.

Brad and I will be speaking for about 20 minutes on some of the technology we are using for the Open Textbook project. Much of my short piece will be built around some of what I have written about before about the decisions we made when architecting our sites to reach some specific goals, like findability of the resources (a long standing complaint of many faculty that we wanted to try to alleviate with our project as much as possible), the public display of reviews of the books, and the ability to enable choice of format for students. Brad is going to dig into PressBooks and the work he has done extending it for open textbook authoring (and I am happy to see that Hugh McGuire, the developer of PressBooks is going to be attending)

This year, I am heading into the 2 days with some clearer conversations in mind, and the biggest one that I am looking forward to is with David Wiley & Bill Fitzgerald around their work developing a new OER publishing platform called Candela. This is very exciting because Candela is being developed on WordPress, which is the same DNA that PressBooks has. I am eager to find out about their roadmap and see where the connections between Candela and PressBooks Textbooks may intersect.

I am also eager to connect with some of the faculty members who will be participating in our open textbook sprint in June as I know they will be in attendance. So far, I have only conversed with this group of faculty via email, and I know some will be in attendance.

I am also looking forward to conversing with faculty in general around a very specific issue we continue to grapple with – enabling customization (or remix or adaptation – pick your term). As we head into this phase of the open textbook project, we need to start making some very deliberate development choices to enable adaptation. So I want to take this opportunity to ask faculty questions about the best way to enable customization to happen. I am fleshing out some thinking around the ways we can enable customization of open textbooks to happen, depending on a number of factors. But much like the conversations I want to have with institutional IT staff when I am at BCnet in a few weeks, I want to hear from those that are on the ground what we can do to enable them to do the types of adaptations they need to do in order to adopt the material.

Registration is closed, but we will be live streaming if you want to join in virtually. Twitter hashtag is #otsummit.

See you in Vancouver next week.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Teaching & Learning

OER, teacher proofing and writing blog posts close to lunch means food analogies

Senidal®: Acciones rurales

About 8 years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a face to face course in web development through the continuing studies department at a local community college. The course was developed by the head of the certificate program that the course was part of.  As I started talking to him about the course & the content to cover, he handed me a massive paper textbook that he created and said “here is the course I want you to teach.” Well, never having taught this course before, I was grateful to have the resource. Here was the entire course. All I had to do was deliver the content in the book and all would be good.

As I went through the course the first time, I noticed a number of problems. I made notes of things I wanted to change the next time I taught it, concepts I thought were missing or needed to be enhanced or dropped. I also received a number of constructive comments from the students after the course finished on ways that the course could be improved.

Post-course I went back to the original developer with the changes I had that I thought would make the course better. I asked him for the source file for the textbook (students could only buy a print copy of the textbook at the time) so I could both modify the content & make it available electronically for the students. His answer was an emphatic no. This was his content, he didn’t want it changed and he certainly didn’t want to “give away” the textbook to the students.

The course WAS the textbook, and, for him, the value of the course was the content (ironic since it covered web development which, even at that time, there were no shortage of great free resources available on the web). I taught the course for a couple of years and, despite the insistence on teaching from the book, I found ways to incorporate the things I wanted to do into the course. I could have rebuilt my own book from scratch, but there were really good pieces from his book that I wanted to use. Gradually my enthusiasm for teaching his content his way waned. I wasn’t passionate about teaching someone else’s way with someone else’s content. And I wasn’t making much headway into changing that core book, although he did eventually relent and let me post a PDF version of the book online. Everything I did on my own was peripheral to that book – it still formed the core of the material – and eventually I grew bored & quit.

I didn’t know the term “teacher proofing” at the time. In fact, until this week I had never heard the term (thanks Mary & David). But I now realize that my personal experience was “teacher proofing” in action.

Teacher proofing is a very curriculum centered approach to education where the content IS the course and designed generically enough that (in theory) anyone could teach the course & have the same outcomes. The teacher is interchangeable. Their input is not needed. Anyone can deliver the course.

It’s an old, long-discarded industrial model that considers students as products and teachers as replaceable parts, far more suitable for building cars than educating children. Dr. Richard Curwin

You can see the danger here, for not only students, but for the teacher.

Not only do students suffer from scripted programs, teachers suffer, too. Teachers lose their creativity, their enthusiasm and their love of teaching. They lose their desire to be teachers. Many quit. Dr. Richard Curwin

Not only is this disillusionment possible (as I experienced through my example above), but teacher proofing can also lead to a deskilling of teachers by distancing them from the act of designing curriculum, which means that teachers lose those key skills and become nothing more than the deliverers of content.

When a school decides to adopt OER, on the other hand, this policy requires teachers to identify resources, judge their quality, align them to standards, aggregate them in meaningful collections, and choose or design accompanying activities and assessments. Teachers and staff also become involved in ongoing processes of evaluation and continuous quality improvement. Where “teacher-proof” curriculum assumes few or no skills on the part of the local teacher, adopting OER is the ultimate expression of confidence, empowering teachers to bring all their expertise to bear in the classroom. Tonks, Weston, Wiley & Barbour, 2013

OER’s can help counter teacher proofing because they give educators control over the learning resources. Because they are openly licensed, educators can modify, customize and personalize the content to fit THEIR style to meet THEIR learning needs.

While OER’s may appear the same as copyright materials in that they are often built by others, the difference is that the open license gives educators the legal ability to modify the content. It puts the control of curriculum back into the educators hand and encourages a deeper connection to the material. You become personally invested in something that you create. It then becomes something unique to you, something you become passionate about because of that personal investment you have to the material.

Teacher proofing leads to generic plug and play courses. The McDonaldization of higher education where someone (paid at $8 an hour) delivers a generic meal to you that tastes the same as every other meal. That $8 an hour person doesn’t really care about the meal they are putting down in front of you. They’ve followed the recipe. They know that it will be good enough. Beyond the final steps of heating the food, they have no idea how the food is actually made. Chances are, they really don’t care. They are completely divested of any involvement in the actual quality of the food. They are more concerned about filling orders and pushing bodies through the door. Feed and move on. Feed and move on. For $8 an hour.

The university system has turned into a “cookie-cutter” system. One can expect to find the same courses being taught, the same teaching system being utilized, the same textbooks being used, and the same type of examinations in just about every university. Because of this, a unique college experience is difficult to find. The McDonaldization of Higher Education

Using OER’s and, crucially, developing the digital skills to modify and adapt OER’s to meet specific learning needs, helps fight against this McDonaldization of education. It helps create better learning experiences by empowering educators to connect deeply with their learning resources because they are creating those resources. They are connected to the “food” in the same way that a good chef is, picking and choosing what they think the best ingredients are and then turning that into something delicious and wonderful. And along the way, by using their skills on a regular basis they are improving their skills and becoming better chefs.

But what makes a truly great chef, like a truly great educator, is passion. For me, what I’ve learned  from my own experience that when I am teaching using content I have had a hand in creating and adapting based on what I am seeing happen in my classroom, I become a more passionate educator. I am doing the course the way that I think it should be done to meet the needs of my learners, and not the way that Pearson or McGraw-Hill think it should be done.

Photo: Senidal®: Acciones rurales by Left Hand Rotation used under CC-BY-NC license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Textbooks, WordPress

How BCcampus PressBooks is different than PressBooks.com

I met with Dr. Tony Bates a few weeks back to talk about open textbook publishing. Tony is looking to self-publish an open textbook and was looking for some advice on how to technically go about publishing.

I mentioned to him that we are using PressBooks as our primary publishing platform and began to explain to him a few of the differences between our version of PressBooks and the hosted version of PressBooks.com as we have been customizing the WordPress plugin quite a bit to meet the specific needs of our project and of open textbook development.

First off, when thinking about PressBooks, you have 2 options, much like with it’s parent project WordPress. There is PressBooks.com, which is the hosted version of the software. Sign up for an account and you can start writing your book in a few minutes with a minimum of technical fuss. While you can create books for free on PressBooks.com, when you output the final PDF or ePub version, there is some PressBooks.com branding and watermarking, as you can see here in this small book I created at PressBooks.com.

And then there is the open source PressBooks plugin. Use this plugin on a vanilla install of WordPress and you have an (almost) fully functioning version of PressBooks.com. I say almost because there is a dependency that costs money (if you are an academic institution – there is a free license for Prince that inserts a Prince logo into the output) . In order to output PDF versions of your book, you will (if you are an institution) need to purchase and install a tool called Prince XML to do the output rendering into PDF format. The developers of the PressBooks plugin felt that this was a better PDF output engine than some open source alternatives to output PDF documents. And it is certainly a robust product that does a great job of turning your PressBooks powered WordPress site into a PDF document suitable for print or digital distribution. But the institutional licensing cost might be a limitation for those interested in fully open source digital publishing, and a barrier for others who wish to use the open source plugin.

That said, there is no additional charge for the ePub rendering engine in PressBooks and really, when we talk about digital publishing, ePub is the format we are really interested in. Add in that you get a very nicely formatted website version of the book (really a tricked out WordPress theme that strips away a lot of the WordPress widgets and extras and puts the focus on readability) and you have a very functional “publishing” platform for most books.

However, our needs are a bit specific as we are publishing open textbooks and those have some special needs. So, along the way we (well, very little me, a lot BCcampus developer Brad Payne) have been making modifications and adding plugins to make PressBooks work for us for the BC Open Textbook project.

Recently, we have begun pulling all of these changes together and are working on developing a second plugin that is open textbook specific. This plugin is not a replacement of the PressBooks plugin, but would work with the PressBooks plugin and hopefully make it a bit easier for someone who wants to mimic our setup do so locally (and as an aside, my head is swimming these days of what that might mean & if we should work towards getting to a distro where we could distribute not only a BCcampus-like textbook PressBooks plugin, but also an entire collection of textbooks made in PressBooks, ready to be installed locally at an institution. A repository and editing tool completely seeded with 40 open textbooks ready to be customized and edited with PressBooks. But that is still in the early thinking stages.

So, what have we been doing to our local version of PressBooks that makes it different than PressBooks.com. Specifically, here are the changes we have made, and the plugins we are using.

Plugins

  • The Creative Commons Configurator, which adds a CC license to the bottom of each webpage in the HTML version of the book and adds in CC metadata to each webpage so that it can be correctly indexed by search engines as CC content (it also enables tools like OpenAttribute to work). Brad has actually been working on customizing this plugin to allow us to input & display information when the content is a derivative and based on someone elses work.
  • Relevansi, a search engine plugin for the website version of the book, reducing the need to generate a traditional index.
  • LaTex for WordPress allows us to use this popular science & math markup language Actually, not what we are using anymore. We’re using a modified version of WP Latex, which has been committed to PressBooks core
  • MCE Table Buttons to add tables because, you know, textbooks have tables.
  • Brad also built another MCE plugin called MCE Textbook Buttons which adds 3 new buttons to the TinyMCE toolbar that create styled fields for Learning Outcomes, Key Terms, and Exercises. These buttons add some visual styling and create coloured boxes for al the different output types. There isn’t any special metadata associated with the boxes that the buttons create that might define them as Learning Outcomes, Key Terms, etc. It is simply a visual style difference.

Code Changes

  • We’ve altered the theme to flips the table of contents and description fields on the book homepage so that the ToC appears above the description. For most users of the book (students) the ToC will be more important than the description as they will have probably be sent directly to the site by their instructor.
  • Added in the Relevansi search box. (Brad noted that Relevansi is still not fully incorporated into the new plugin. The search box is there, but the Relevansi plugin integration is still being worked on).
  • We’ve disabled comments. This is a tough one, and one we had to make a decision about based on logistics. Ideally, these books would be used by students. Faculty using the book would send them to the book. But these books have no instructor “owner” per se. There is no subject matter expert ready to respond to potential questions a student may have about the content they are reading. In other words, there is no one watching the comment shop. So, you can imagine a scenario where a student comes to a page, has a question about the content, posts their question in the comment field and then…..gets no response because no one see their question. Discouraging and not very useful. So, we’ve disabled comments on the site. But this is one that we may fire up again in the future. I just don’t know if the potential benefit is worth the potential risk just yet. If there was a dedicated instructor monitoring the resource, then great. But I worry about the instructor who uses the book getting slammed by their student for not answering their question because they didn’t even know that the student asked the question.
  • Added a footer line to the PDF and ePub outputs that says “This book is available for free from open.bccampus.ca” This is a tip I picked up from David Harris & the OpenStax project as a way to combat the selling of the textbook by third parties. Not that it is wrong to sell the books released with a full CC-BY license, but if someone does buy the book, they should know that there is and always will be a free version of that book available from the open site. It’s not perfect and discovery would happen after the fact, but maybe someone who buys the book might use the information to contact us and tell us that someone is selling copies of the book so at least we know.
  • In the admin area, we’ve also changed the Feedback link that floats to the right of the admin screen to send us at the project a message asking for help. In vanilla PB the Feedback remarks go to PB.

There are also a number of customizations that Brad has made that have been contributed back to the PB project, including Brad’s import engine, which imports Word, ODT and ePub files into PressBooks. This is our preferred method of changing the plugin – contribute back bits to PressBooks first and let the project decide if they want to merge the code into vanilla PressBooks. But there are some bits that might be of no interest to the PB developers that we would like to have, hence our own custom development.

Our goal is to have the infrastructure in place to begin recruiting other developers to participate in the development of more open textbook specific features by April. We have a couple of events happening, including the Open Textbook Summit and the annual BCNet conference where we want to talk in more detail about the project and our changes to PB. So, if you have some WP chops and are looking for an open source open ed project, consider yourself invited to come & contribute. Especially if you have some knowledge of ePub3 as getting ePub3 output is a big goal in the near future (see https://github.com/unit29868/pressbooks)

Here are a few screenshots of the differences.

Example of the Key Takeaway & Exercises callout boxes

 

What our book homepage looks like. Slightly different than vanilla PB in that it flips the Book Description with the Table of Contents at the bottom of the page. It also removes the default PB branding.

 

Example of a book search results page from the Relevansi search engine. Notice the search box in the top right, which we have added to each book.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Textbooks

A sprinting we will go!

Sprint Board

Ok, I am pretty pumped about this. I’ve been working on this for the past few months and am very happy to see it coming to fruition. Earlier this week I got budget approval to go ahead with a textbook sprint.

In a nutshell, a textbook sprint is an intense 3-5 day event that brings together 6-8 authors to write a book. I wrote a post in November about our preliminary thinking around having a textbook sprint and last month posted some notes from a conversation I had with Erika Pearson about her textbook sprint at University of Otago in New Zealand last fall.

Now, coming out of a textbook sprint with a full textbook is the primary goal. But I have another equally important goal for the event, one that relates directly to the sustainability of an open textbook. I am hoping that the faculty who take part in the co-creation of the textbook emerge feeling a sense of ownership around what they have created in this intense burst of activity, and that this feeling of ownership translates into the beginnings of a community of practice going forward. Having this intense event act as the impetus which leads to stewardship of the textbook.

I’ll be writing more about the logistics of the event, but for now I am happy to say that Adam Hyde will be coming to facilitate the event. Adam has developed a methodology for book sprints & has completed over 70 book sprints resulting in a finished book every time. It’s an impressive track record.

Originally I gave a thought to facilitating the event myself. But after reading this article (PDF) from Phil Barker, Lorna M. Campbell and Martin Hawksey at Cetis in the U.K. who, along with Amber Thomas at the University of Warwick, worked with Adam on an OER-oriented book sprint I changed my mind. Specifically, this quote stuck in my head:

“It is my belief that Book Sprints succeed or fail based primarily on facilitation. I have seen sprints fail because of inexperienced facilitation by people who do not really understand what the process is and how all the issues come into play”

So I contacted Adam, and I am very happy I did. After speaking to Adam I was quite impressed with his thinking around what it takes to have a successful book sprint, and his thinking about the crucial role that an impartial facilitator plays in making sure the project gets done in the limited time allotted. He also understands the importance of positive group dynamics and creating an atmosphere of true collaboration in order to reach that goal we have of developing a community moving forward. And he seems like an interesting guy who I’d like to hang out with for a few days. I am really looking forward to learning from him.

The idea is we will bring together 6 faculty for 4 days in June, hunker down at SFU Burnaby UBC Vancouver & bang out a credible, useable open textbook.

The dates we have are June 9-12 and the subject area we are going to concentrate on is 1st year Geography.

Geography is a broad discipline, so to help narrow the scope I spoke with with the head of the Geography articulation committee here in BC, Jim Bowers at Langara, to get a better sense as to where we should focus our efforts. After a bit of brainstorming, I think we are going to look at developing a regional Geography of Canada textbook. There are a couple of reasons for this focus.

  1. Regional Geography is a common 1st year course across institutions in B.C. so it would have broad appeal.
  2. Being that it is a Geography of Canada book, the textbook would have appeal outside of B.C. so we could create something that had value for other jurisdictions as well.
  3. We have an opportunity with the B.C. Open Textbook project to create something that is needed in our province (Geography is one of the top 40 subject areas identified in our early textbook needs analysis), but will probably not be picked up as a development project by any of the other major open textbook initiatives currently underway, such as OpenStax College or SUNY Open Textbooks.  Those projects are primarily U.S. based projects and the development of a textbook so Canada specific will be of little interest to them. Unfortunately, the downside of choosing such a Canada specific project for the book sprint means that we are creating something that will probably have little interest for those projects in return, but I am confident that there are many other areas where our work will compliment each others.
  4. There are existing open Geography resources that I think we can draw on to help seed the book with content. When I look in SOLR (our repository of open content here in BC) I can find over 30 Geography resources listed there, including many full first year open Geography courses. This is content that has been created over the years by B.C. faculty funded by provincial OPDF funds, and I see this as an incredible opportunity for us to build and reuse open content that has already been created by B.C. Faculty.

Next steps now that the funding & logistics are in place is finding game faculty. If you know of any faculty who teach Geography in B.C. who might be game for a challenge, please direct them to this page on the open.bccampus.ca website, or have them contact me directly at clalonde@bccampus.ca.

Photo: Sprint Board by Rool Paap used under CC/ CC-BY license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open

Building knowledge tools for the public good

Like many of you, my interest in learning extends beyond the teaching & learning that occurs within formalized educational institutions, which is why I am so interested in Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is, arguably, the greatest knowledge repository human beings have ever built. Which is why I get so excited when I see projects from academics that make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia. Making Wikipedia better is making the world better by making knowledge more accessible to everyone. Projects like Visualizing Complex Science (found via this Read-only access is not enough blog post on Creative Commons).

The Visualizing Complex Science project was done by Dr. Daniel Mietchen, a Berlin based Researcher & Biophysicist. Dr. Mietchen created a bot that crawls open access science journals looking for multimedia content. When the bot find an image, video or audio clip, it extracts the content & uploads it to the Wikimedia Commons where it can be used by Wikimedia authors to enhance articles.

The bot has uploaded more than 13,000 files to Wikimedia Commons and has been used in more than 135 English Wikipedia articles that together garnered more than three million views.

In addition to the actual project itself, what I find interesting about this project is deconstructing all the conditions that had to exist in order for this project to happen. For me, the recipe for this specific project breaks down to this:

Academic Researcher + Wikipedia + Open Access + hackathon + structured data = jackpot win for human knowledge.

Dissecting this equation a bit, we have an academic researcher who “gets” Wikipedia on a couple of levels. First, he feels it has enough value and importance as a knowledge repository that he is willing to put time into making it better. Second, he understands the technical aspects of the platform well enough that he can build something that massively improves the collection. Finally, he understands that Wikipedia has a massive reach & is a great tool to disseminate complex scientific research in a manner that makes it accessible to everyone. Wikipedia needs more academics like Dr. Mietchen.

Then we have Wikipedia itself, imbued with the value of open on a number of levels. First, open to contributions from anyone. Without allowing anyone to contribute, Dr. Mietchen might very well have had to jump through many bureaucratic layers to make a contribution. Also, those who built the software for Wikipedia made the platform open enough so that people like Dr. Mietchen could build bots capable of doing projects like this.

The next critical piece is Open Access. Without having openly licensed and openly accessible research articles, the bot wouldn’t have any data to mine. And, even if technically it could mine proprietary research journals, they could not legally be shared to the Wikimedia Commons because they would be protected from reuse by copyright.

Now, there are a few things in that equation that seem especially interesting. First, the hackathon. What role did a hackathon have in the success of this project? Well, when you listen to Dr. Mietchen talk about the project, you’ll hear him explain how he was inspired to create the automated Wikipedia bot after attending hackathons and seeing what programmers could do in a short period of time.

The other bit I find interesting is the role that structured data (everybody’s favorite sexy topic) played in making this happen. Without structured metadata explaining to the machines what that content is, whether it is in the correct technical format, and categorizing it correctly in the Wikimedia Commons, the bot just wouldn’t work.

Generativity

I think it is important to point out that these conditions were not put in place to make this project happened; the project happened because these conditions were already in place. It’s a crucial distinction, and a common story worth repeating when it comes to working with technology. It points to the importance of generativity in both Wikipedia and Open Access.

Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. Jonathon Zittrain, The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It 

Both Wikipedia and Open Access have high degrees of generativity. And because of that generativity, Dr. Mietchen was able to build a tool that neither could have anticipated when they were created. I am sure that the architects of both Wikipedia and Open Access hoped that projects like this would happen. But neither knew that they would. Instead, they built in the capacity to enable projects like this to emerge from the community. And, as a result, improve knowledge for all. 

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Textbooks

The architecture of our open textbook site

I’ve needed to document the technical architecture of the open textbook project, so thought that I’d post it here as well in case this info is useful for anyone. At the very least, it will make for a good read if you are suffering from insomnia late one night.

The virtual hub for our open textbook project in BC is open.bccampus.ca, and I thought I would share a bit about the different technologies & syndication strategies at work on the site. It feels like we have a lot going on under the hood, and this is by no means an exhaustive description of everything. But at 1400 words, it’s plenty long enough.

Almost all the work on the site has been done by one of our developer, Brad Payne, who I cannot give enough kudos to. I have an idea and the next day it’s done. If we had to rely on my hackery I am sure the entire system would have crumbled like a virtual house of cards months ago.

Here is a diagram I made trying to visually represent the architecture of the sites. It follows no prescribed network or system mapping framework other than Clint’s messy mind method.

What the hell was I thinking?

I’ll try to explain what is going on.

Fundamentally, there are three different technologies in play with the site; WordPress, Equella (our digital repository – I almost wrote Learning Object Repository <slap slap>) and a survey tool called LimeSurvey.

WordPress

We actually have 3 separate WordPress instances running, each taking on a slightly different role on the site.

WordPress instance #1: open.bccampus.ca

First, the entire open site is running on WordPress. It is the hub that we use to pull in a lot of information from the other sites. On this main site, we post stories, news, tutorials and other communicative types of content. We also have a couple of plugins handling some other functions on the site. I won’t go thru the entire list, but two that are quite important are BB Press and Wisyjja Newsletter.

BB Press powers the open textbook faculty forums. We use the forums to support faculty who are reviewing or modifying an open textbook.

Wisyja Newsletters is used to handle our textbook change notification mailing list. Every textbook in our collection has an associated mailing list which faculty can sign up for. We use these lists to send out notifications of textbook changes, or to send out information about ancillary resources that we might find which support the textbook.

Equella

However, as important as forums, mailing lists and communication are, the main function of open.bccampus.ca is to provide a user-friendly front end for faculty and students to access open textbooks in our repository. It is the hub, and this is where things get a bit more complicated as the books that appear on the open site are actually not stored on the open site. We store the actually textbook information in Equella, our digital repository, and use the Equella API to pull the information we need about each textbook out of Equella and onto the open.bccampus.ca site.

Within Equella (we have branded our version of Equella as SOLR) we have created a collection called Open Textbooks to house the resources that are specific to the open textbook project. But the user interface for Equella is not the most friendly. So rather than send faculty & students to Equella to find the textbooks, we instead utilized the Equella API to pull the information about each textbook out of Equella and into the open.bccampus.ca website. We choose this approach not only because we felt that WordPress gave us a friendlier interface, but because we thought that there may be instances when we want to expose our textbook collection to other services and sites (think institutional libraries or centres for teaching and learning, which could have a curated collection of our textbooks housed on their branded website). Using the Equella API gives us that flexibility.

So, here is what a textbook looks like in Equella and that same textbook information looks like on the open site. Same information, different interface. Using the Equella API means we have had to make some compromises with the way the textbook information appears on the open site. For example, none of the url’s on open are active links; a limitation of the API.

Now each textbook can appear in a number of formats; PDF, ePub, website, LaTex, etc. One of our goals is to make the same book available in as many different formats as possible, and we store each of the different formats in Equella. For PDF and ePub, this means storing the files in Equella. For the website, this can mean either a zipped archive of HTML files, or a link to a website. And this is where our second WordPress install comes into play.

WordPress instance #2: PressBooks

For some of the books in our collection, the website version of the book is a WordPress site. But not any old WordPress site. We are using a WordPress plugin called PressBooks that turns WordPress into a book publishing platform. So, the website version of the textbook is actually a Pressbooks site, and we store the link to that Pressbooks site in Equella with the textbook record. That link is pulled into open.bccampus.ca and appears alongside the textbook record as a link that people can click to see the website version of the book.

You can see how this works with this Modern Philosophy textbook. Faculty & students using this book can come to this page on the open site and decide what format they want to get the book in and, if they click on the “Read Online” link, they will be taken to the PressBooks version of the textbook. With any lucky, this will be seamless for them; the only site they will need to come to find any version of the book is the open.bccampus.ca site, which will take them to where they need to go.

WordPress instance #3: WooCommerce

A third instance of WordPress is being used for our print on demand service at SFU. The version of WordPress being used by SFU Document Solutions (our print on demand partner) is running WooCommerce, another WordPress plugin that turns a WordPress site into an e-commerce site. The same process is at work with the printed version as for the website version. We store the link to the appropriate page on the SFU WOCommerce site in Equella and pull that into the open site using the Equella API. When a student clicks on the “Buy a copy of this book” link, they are taken to the correct page on the SFU WooCommerce site to purchase the book.

WordPress – it ain’t just for blogging anymore. But you already knew that.

LimeSurvey

The last bit of technology in use on open.bccampus.ca is an instance of LimeSurvey. Some of the open textbooks in our collection have been reviewed by faculty here in BC. We are using LimeSurvey to capture that review data and (again through the magic of Brad Payne & API’s) are pulling the review information for each book collected in LimeSurvey into the open.bccampus.ca site so that the review appears alongside the textbook. Again, for faculty coming to the site, it should look seamless, like all this data is part of the same textbook. You can see how the LimeSurvey data from the API looks by checking out the reviews of this Calculus textbook at the bottom of the page.

So, as you can see, we have a lot of stuff going on with this one simple site. Our hope is that we will take the complexity of navigating out of the hands of students and faculty and make it as simple and easy for them to find the resources they need by centralizing all the information in one spot – open.bccampus.ca.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open

Bing's Creative Commons filter country specific

I rarely use Bing. Ok, I never use Bing, but a Twitter conversation with Laura Gibbs earlier today had me checking out the search engine.

Laura sent a tweet responding to a conversation I had earlier in the day with Dave Cormier about finding OER science images (as an aside, Dave ended up aggregating the tweets recommending possible sources of OER science images using Storify; a nifty way to use Twitter & Storify to crowdsource, aggregate and archive on the fly).

One of the suggestions I had for Dave was to use the Google advanced license search to filter image results by open license.

Laura saw that tweet and responded that you could also use Bing

I didn’t realize Bing also let you filter by license type, so I followed Laura’s link and saw a collection of images in Bing, but there was no way that was obvious to me on how to filter my license. This is what I saw:

Chem1No license filter. So, thinking that there is another place where this is set, I start rooting around the Bing settings, but find nothing to filter on license types. So I ask Laura, who responds with a screen shot of what she sees.

Wait, what is that license dropdown on her menu? Why don’t I see it on mine?

Turns out, the license filter was not appearing for me because my country settings were set to Canada. If I changed my country settings to US, the license filter appears.

Chem2

So it appears that Bing’s license filter only works if you have your country settings set to US. Which strikes me as odd. Why not just make it default for all geographical locations? t first I thought that maybe there was some legal reason why they restrict filtering on license by country, but then though if that was the case, why would they let users so easily override it by switching their country settings? Wouldn’t they have some more sophisticated geo-location mechanism in place if that was a serious concern?

At any rate, if you use Bing and want to use it to search for Creative Commons licensed material, you need to change your Worldwide settings to US.

Oh, and as was pointed out on the conversation thread by Pat Lockley…

You do sometimes find images that are not correctly licensed. If you get the feeling that the CC-BY licensed image might not be, do a bit more digging to find the source of the image. TinEye is a good tool that might help you track down the source of the image.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

Exactly what we hoped would happen with open textbooks

I’m really happy right now, and it is all Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani’s fault.

Dr. Jhangiani is an instructor at Capilano University who I first connected with this summer when we were looking for faculty reviewers of open textbooks as part of the BC open textbook project. Dr. Jhangiani came to us with a Research Methods textbook that we didn’t know about and asked if he could review it as part of the project. At the time I thought it was fantastic that we had faculty bringing us open resources that we were not aware of. Really that was just the beginning of Dr. Jhangiani’s awesomeness.

A few weeks ago I was presenting on open textbooks at a conference in Vancouver where I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Jhangiani in person. We had a brief chat and he told me that he had adopted the textbook this fall. Awesome moment #2 from Dr. Jhangiani.

But today…today he took it to another level.

This morning I read an email he sent to me pointing me to his personal website where he has posted his revised version of the open Research Methods textbook that he reviewed. Seeing that completely made my week.

Dr. Jhangiani took an existing open textbook and did exactly what we hoped an instructor would do; revise it to meet his needs and then release it back to the commons under an open license for others to use and reuse.

And I suspect that the changes he made to the open research methods textbook will become valuable for others in the system as he has taken a textbook that was written with an American perspective and Canadianized it, removing American examples and replacing them with Canadian examples. He also modified the book to make sure that Canadian laws and perspectives on research were included, and added a table of contents, which the original textbook was missing. Heck, he even nailed the Creative Commons licensing.

Here is an instructor who has taken an existing open resource that was 80% of the way there and instead of going “this doesn’t meet my needs so I am not going to use it” took full advantage of the open license on the book and modified it to work for him. Not only has he saved his students money by making a free, open textbook available to them, but he has also made a valuable resource that others will no doubt use and benefit from.

This is the EXACT use case we have been hoping to see with the open textbook project. I have dreamed of seeing this happen and I am freakin’ PUMPED to see a vision realized. Thank you, Dr. Jhangiani! You have no idea how happy I am right now.

Okay, off to do a happy dance, Big Lebowski style

Ok, that might be a bit intense. Maybe more like John Candy style

Or….really…just take your own pick and join me in my happy dance.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open

Building a better web for all

Jim Groom has been on a tear lately, clearly articulating some of the fundamental principles of the web & open learning that many of us attempt to bring into practice.

His Open, Public Education Platforms #4life post last week resonated quite deeply with the educational technologist in me as Jim connects the role of EdTech with something much larger than simply being the person helping faculty shovel content into pre-built LMS templates. As Jim points out, as educational technologists, we can do so much more (emphasis mine);

I should be building communities that are premised upon openly sharing the work we’re doing as public institutions. I understand the need for the LMS, I just don’t understand its value. This field should be pushing to make the work faculty and students are doing part and parcel of the web in order to bridge the understanding for hundreds of thousands of people on the web.

Jim situates the open work being done at UMW within a larger societal context, and along the way has really asked a bigger question than what is the role of an EdTech in an institution, but what is the role of our public institutions within society? Is the role of our public educational institutions only to educate the few select who manage to meet the entrance requirements, or is there a larger,  much more fundamental role in educating ALL people, regardless of whether they have been “allowed” in?

What Jim writes about is making our work transparent and available to be found; to set up the conditions for curious people to serendipitously discover the knowledge that, for so long, has been hoarded behind our institutional walls.

It’s about just-in-timing learning where we can be the providers of information at the precise moment that someone who is curious about a topic is looking for them. It is about making our knowledge findable on the tools people use everyday to find information, like Google.

His latest post continues on the theme of opening the institution and brings in one of my favorite topics: authentic learning, and the role that open education has in creating authentic learning opportunities for students.  Jim talks about a history project where students are collaboratively working side by side with the faculty to develop a website of learning resources associated with the Taiping Civil War.

Think about it, fifteen newly decalred history majors drilling into a focused topic alongside a faculty member who’s guiding them in the collaborative construction of an intellectual resource designed specifcially for the web.

Now THAT is an open education resource! And what can be more motivating for a student than knowing the work you are doing might actually be used as a source by someone who happens to search for the Taiping Civil War in the future?

And all because a professor simply said, “Why not?” Why can’t UMW undergrads do this? Why can’t we work together to build a resource for a broader public rather than remain a slave to the individually produced research papers that two people will ever read? Why can’t a course have a domain that becomes the ongoing record of the thinking about a topic that anyone can access?

It reminds me of some of the more exciting open textbook projects I have seen, like Project Management for Instructional Designers  and the Chemwiki project at UC Davis, both of which began life as faculty led student created open projects. The Chemwiki project now generates over 2 million visitors each month, making it one of the most visited domains in the entire UC Davis online world.

Now, I can almost hear the drool dripping from the institutional marketing mouths right now, but this goes so much more deeper than providing Google juice to an institutional web presence. This is about providing authentic learning experiences for students to contribute to their chosen domain in real and meaningful ways while being guided by experts in the field; their instructor. The final result of which makes the open web a vastly better place by providing something of authority and substance in a web content world that is feeling more vacuous and hollow.

Higher education can make the web so much more than Buzzfeed, Perez Hilton and TMZ. We can contribute in ways that are much more real, authentic and valuable. But it all starts from the place of making the work we do open outside the confines of restricted publishing platforms. Because if it can’t be found, it doesn’t exist. And content that is locked away inside institutional content management systems is content that can’t be found except by a privileged few who have figured out how to jump the hoops needed to get access.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Multimedia Tools, Open, Social Networks

Social Annotation with Hypothes.is

Following David’s lead (and thanks to some great WordPress plugin work by Tim Owens),  I’ve installed a social annotation tool called Hypothes.is on this site. Actually, it looks like much more than a social annotation tool, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Hypothes.is is a non-profit funded by (among others) the Shuttleworth Foundation (who are funding some very innovative work right now in the education/web space, including the OERPub project and Siyavula). It is a social web annotation platform being developed around web standards proposed by the W3C Open Annotation community group.

A WordPress plugin is just one of the Hypothes.is tools. There is also a Chrome browser plugin and (soon) a plugin for Firefox. These plugins allow you to annotate and highlight across the web. So, annotation works in 2 ways, either on the user side via the browser plugins, or on the site builder side via a WordPress plugin.

If you highlight and right-click any text on the page, you should see a little balloon/pen icon pop up. Click on the icon and a panel will slide out from the right of the page. You need a Hypothes.is account to highlight and annotate. If you don’t have one, you can create one quickly from the fly out.

If you want to see the comments that are on the page, there are 2 prompts on the page that show you there are comments. First, you can click on the icon in the top right hand corner of the page that looks like this:

Hypo

Hover over the icon and you’ll see some other icons appear that allow you see the annotations & highlights on the page, or to highlight and annotate yourself.

The second prompt that shows you there are comments are the icons on the right of the page that look like directional arrows:

down

This one appears in the bottom right corner of the page on posts that have comments on them (like the one you will see on this post if you are viewing the post itself. For some reason, Hypothes.is doesn’t seem to be working on the home page of the blog). Click on the icon and you are taken to the exact spot in the post that has been highlighted or annotated.

This is still very much an alpha project, but looks promising as a collaborative annotation tool. One of the concepts that I really like about it is that you have the ability to aggregate all of your annotations and comments under one account, something I tried to do many years ago, but gave up on in frustration as the tools that were around at the time were frustrating to use. I want to be able to have a central place that shows me all of my conversations on the web, and this might be a good option.

There are a few things I like about Hypothes.is the project as well. Reading their principles, it looks like they are committed to creating a tool that remains non-profit, free and that works anywhere – important qualities if they hope to garner enough critical mass to make the project a success. The rest of the principles are equally important and you should take a read through.

As more and more websites turn off comments, I can see services like Hypothes.is (and existing tools like the Diigo, which is often forgotten as an annotation tool and used by many only as a social bookmarking tools) are going to be important tools to keep the conversation flowing.

As for the more than a social annotation tool bit I hinted at in the lead, Hypothes.is appears to be framing itself as a tool for discussion and collaboration rather than simple highlighting and annotating.

Hypothes.is will be an open platform for the collaborative evaluation of knowledge. It will combine sentence-level critique with community peer-review to provide commentary, references, and insight on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more.

I am not exactly sure how this bit works yet. But as I play with Hypothes.is I am eager to find out.

Something I learned about the history of the web from the Hypothes.is promotional video. Annotations were an original feature of Mosaic, but disabled at the last minute when the browser first shipped. Which makes you wonder what the web would be like today if comments were enabled from the start through the browser right from the get go.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Teaching & Learning

Coursera and Udacity are NOT Open Courseware

Baywatch The MOOC

For a guy who says he doesn’t blog about MOOC’s much, 2 in a week might be a record. But there is something about this Exporting Education article that really bugs me. It is the way that the article implies that Coursera and Udacity are the same as Open Courseware and they clearly are not.

At the heart of the difference is the way the content is licensed in the different courses. OCW courses use open licenses, meaning the content can be modified. Courses from Coursera and Udacity are not openly licensed; they cannot be modified for local contexts. In the context of the article, this is a vitally important distinction to make since the article states that:

MOOCs are being welcomed as a free resource and adapted to local contexts

Well, not if they are Coursera or Udacity courses since most of the content is copyright by those corporations (unless the participating institution negotiates to releases their Coursera MOOC material intentionally with open licenses, like, I believe, UBC has with their Coursera offerings).

This is the fundamental problem many in the open movement have with Coursera and Udacity – they are not open resources. But yet they are getting connected by association to the open resource movement. And this is wrong. Not only does it undermine the many years of hard work done by open education advocates to make sure educational resources are openly licensed resources, it is a vitally important pedagogical difference, especially when examined through the lens of this article.

The article makes the point that, MOOC’s as they are being implemented and used in developing countries have the potential to reduce local capacities and lead to the Americanization of education in the developing world. The MacDonald’s version of higher ed. Or, as the author puts it with a better metaphor, the “Baywatch” of learning.

It’s easy to imagine a future in which the educational equivalent of reruns of Baywatch—a limited menu of glossy American fare—comes to dominate the cultural landscape in developing countries around the world, making it more difficult for cash-starved universities in those countries to pursue scholarship relevant to local contexts

One of the ways to keep this from happening is by making sure the courses are openly licensed so that they can be legally adapted to a local context. If developing worlds end up relying on corporations like Coursera and Udacity who tightly control courses using copyright as their enforcement hammer, then developing worlds will end up with a corporate one size fits all educational model. Education outsourced to America. Whereas if those developing countries are free to take and modify courses & educational resources to fit their local context – like they are with OCW materials – then they will have a distributed, highly contextual model of education that better fits their community.

Coursera vs OCW are fundamentally different in this regard. Open Courseware material empowers educators whereas Coursera material creates dependency. Or a market, depending on how cynical your perspective is.

Photo: Baywatch The MOOC is released by me under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. It is a modified version of the following images:

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

How Canada will benefit from U.S. open textbook legislation

Al Franken

United States Senators Dick Durban and Al Franken (above) have introduced legislation into the US Senate called The Affordable College Textbook Act.  SPARC has a good post on the proposed legislation, stating that the legislation will “help expand the use of open educational resources to more colleges in more states, and provide a framework for sharing educational materials and best practices” through:

  • Grants for colleges. The bill directs the Department of Education to create a competitive grant program for higher education institutions (or groups of higher education institutions) to establish pilot programs that use open educational resources to reduce textbook costs for students. Grant amounts are not specified, but appropriations in such sums as are necessary are authorized for five fiscal years.
  • Pilot programs. Pilot program activities can include any combination of the following: professional development for faculty and staff, development or improvement of educational materials, creation of informational resources, or efficacy research. Grant funds can also go toward partnerships with other entities to fulfill these activities.
  • Open educational resources. Any educational materials developed or improved through the grants will be posted online and licensed to allow everyone – including other colleges, students and faculty – to use the materials freely. The bill specifies that the license will be the Creative Commons Attribution License, or an equivalent, which grants full use rights with author attribution as the only condition.
  • Sharing outcomes. Grantees are required to submit a report evaluating the impact their respective pilot programs and to submit a plan for disseminating this information to other institutions. The bill also commissions a GAO report on textbook costs and the impact of open educational resources in 2017.

Reading these bullet points, I can see two obvious ways that this proposed legislation can benefit BC, Canada and, indeed, the rest of the world.

First, the legislation is clear that all materials created be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning that anyone will be able to use and modify the textbooks. So, if this legislation becomes law, we can expect that the number of textbooks that are available in the worldwide commons of open textbooks to substantially increase. Any textbook created with funding from the grants associated with this legislation become textbooks we can use and modify.

Second, the provision around sharing outcomes will provide much needed data that can be used to support the continued development and adoption of open textbooks. I see many case studies coming out of the projects associated with this legislation. With luck, this will also mean academic researchers will be able to tap into funding to conduct empirical research on the effectiveness of Open Educational Resources. This type of research knows no borders. Indeed, much of the empirical research that we currently have on the effectiveness of OER and open textbooks comes from the US & the UK. We need more, and while I would advocate for the importance of Canadian-based research, all research is incredibly useful and important.

I don’t know how the US system of government works in enough detail to know if this legislation has a chance of passing or not. But if it does become law, it has the potential to greatly increase the awareness of open textbooks, the available pool of open textbooks, and the body of knowledge about the effectiveness of open textbooks not only in the U.S., but everywhere, including us in British Columbia working on open textbooks.

Okay, and because it’s a blog post mentioning Al Franken (which I might never get to do again) I have an excuse to link to some classic SNL – Stuart Smalley with Michael Jordan

Photo: Al Franken by Aaron Landry used under CC-BY-NC-SA license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

Who is watching me? Shedding some light(beam) on my browsing habits

Last week, Mozilla announced the release of Lightbeam, a Firefox plugin that allows users to see not only the sites they visit, but also the third party sites that are tracking them on the web. Here is a screen shot of the last 10 sites I have visited and all the site those sites are connected to.

Lightbeam visualization

I love this tool for a number of reasons.

First, the obvious. It helps to make transparent all the sites I am actually “visiting” when I visit a website. In this day and age where privacy online is becoming more of an issue than ever before, it is important for people to know just how extensive the tracking of their behaviours is online. From what I have seen, Lightbeam doesn’t actually show you what information about you is being transmitted or tracked by those third party sites, just that there is tracking going on and with whom. But it is an important first step in understanding just how connected the web really is.

I’ll make the point, too, that just because you are unknowingly accessing third party websites while you view the web, it isn’t always to be tracked. As the development team suggests;

Third parties are an integral part of the way the Internet works today. However, when we’re unable to understand the value these companies provide and make informed choices about their data collection practices, the result is a steady erosion of trust for all stakeholders.

A tool like Lightbeam helps to make conversations about privacy and sharing of data more nuanced. Rather than painting all the third party connections with the same negative brush, I think it is important for us to have more specific conversations around the idea that maybe there are positives to having these invisible connections occurring behind the scenes. For example, many of the interactive features of the modern web require code libraries pulled from third-party sites. Is that Google connection to track you for advertising purposes, or is it to pull a font from the Google fonts collection to make the site you are on work better for you? These are important distinctions.

The second thing I love about Lightbeam is that it is a great web literacy educational tool, and extends the excellent work Mozilla is doing around web literacy by helping people understand how the web works. As building the web becomes more complicated, and the mechanisms of how the web gets built gets more obfuscated under the guise of “user-friendly” or “easy” (by no means are those neccesarily bad qualities, but obscuring qualities nonetheless), it is important that we don’t surrender the control we have over the web for the sake of convenience. Lightbeam represents a deeper dive for Mozilla into digital and web literacy than X-Ray Goggles or Thimble, but like those Webmaker tools Lightbeam exposes the inner workings of the web. Lightbeam, like the Webmaker initiative, are powerful tools to help educate people on how the web works.

Third, Lightbeam is an excellent example of an authentic learning exercise. Authentic learning (Educause PDF) exercises place a great deal of emphasis on having students work on real-world, complex problems and solutions, and I cannot think of anything more complex than the world of online privacy these days. Lightbeam was developed as a partnership between Mozilla and a research team at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver that was made up primarily of students. They have created an important (and beautiful) tool that is relevant, timely, and has real world applications.

Finally, Lightbeam is another reminder of how powerful the iterative web enabled by open licenses can be. I’ve been jazzed lately by the idea of generativity and the generative web, and just how critical open licenses are for driving iterative, collaborative development.  Lightbeam was based on a previous FF plugin called Collusion developed by Atul Varma. It was first released as an independent project by Varma (who now works at Mozilla). Because it was released with an open source license, Mozilla and Emily Carr were able to pick up the project and build upon the excellent work of the original plugin. Open licenses made the refinement of Collusion possible.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

Saving students money with OER IRL

There are many advantages to incorporating and using OER’s in education, but perhaps one of the most obviously compelling is that using OER’s saves money for students. Today, another reminder of just how substantial those savings can be as David Wiley posted on the first year anniversary of Lumen Learning, showing that the work Lumen is doing has saved post-secondary students $700,000 in textbook costs.

This spring, OpenStax College released some stats from their first year in operation that showed their textbooks have saved students $2.3 million dollars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgeA9h2c7ag&list=PLCF-Lie6gOORxRklqFJT2N865aXv_KiQB

Here in BC, we are still early on with regards to adoption so we don’t have the same kind of aggregate numbers that Lumen or OpenStax has. But I do want to give an example of the kind of scale of savings we can achieve in BC by focusing on one adoption.

This fall, Takashi Sato, physics instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, adopted the free OpenStax College Physics textbook to use in his Physics class.  What that press release doesn’t note for some reason, is the savings to students taking Tak’s Physics class. he textbook Tak was using cost students $187 dollars. His class has 60 students. Do the math and you can see that moving to the OpenStax free textbook and Tak has saved students $11,220.

1 class at 1 institution for 1 term. $11,220 savings.

Let’s do a bit of math here. 25 institutions in BC. If all we have is 1 instructor like Tak with a similar class load and expensive textbook adopt an open textbook, it would save students in BC $280, 500 EACH TERM.

Saving students over a quarter of a million dollars each term is significant.

One instructor.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Textbooks

What I like about Siyavula

siyavula

I first came across the Siyavula project in the spring of this year when I met Siyavula’s Megan Beckett at the BC Open Textbook Summit in Vancouver. Siyavula is a South Africa based open textbook project (originally funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation)  that has produced a number of open textbooks to support k-12 curriculum in South Africa.

There are a couple of things I like about the project.

First, building on what I was talking about in my last blog post about developing a community centered around an open educational resource, Siyavula textbooks are authored in a unique way; through a series of teacher hack-a-thons or textbook sprints. These events organized by Siyavula bring together groups of educators & technicians to create a textbook in a weekend. Over this summer, another textbook sprint to develop Physics and Chemistry open textbooks (remixing both the Siyavula and OpenStax Physics and Chemistry resources) was organized with the assistance of Siyavula. In his wrapup blog post, Siyavula’s CEO Mark Horner emphasizes that the aim of these textbook sprints is to “seed Communities of Practice (CoP)” for the textbook, and speaks to one of the challenges of getting educators to participate – the fear of sharing:

Sharing is scary (at first anyway), because it involves making something available for public scrutiny, something that is actually an investment of your time and energy, and people may be critical. People may also be very positive, but we tend to worry more about what might go wrong than right.

Mark then goes on to point out that, even though sharing may be scary for some, there are benefits to sharing resources and expertise.

The long-term benefit of sharing, in my opinion, is that even if people are constructively critical, the material improves and a community of practice with a shared knowledge base and best practise can emerge.

So, even though there are challenges with developing the community of practice and getting educators to share resources, Mark believe the challenges are worth it because in the end, better resources and a stronger community will emerge.

In my experience, the fear of sharing is often more in my head than the reality. Most of the resources I have ever developed and shared have been received graciously, and criticism has been positive and collegial.

The second thing I really like about Siyavula is how they are sharing their textbooks, and appear to be committed to making the books available in remixable formats. For example, if you look at their Physical Science Grade 10 textbook, you’ll see that students have a lot of choice as to how they want to interact with the textbook. There is a website, a downloadable PDF file, or students can order a printed copy (it doesn’t look like an ePub version is available, which is the only other format I would add). But in addition to those formats aimed at students, they also have the source formats available for download, in this case the original Open Document and TeX files. This allows other teachers or open textbook projects to be able to edit or remix the textbook in the native technical format that the book was written in, which increases the likelihood that this open educational resource will be remixed and customized.

Finally, the textbooks also contain a Teachers Guide, which educators find a valuable additional resource that will increase the likelihood of adoption by other educators. And the source files for that are also available for download so it can be easily customized.

The development of a community of practice, remixable formats, and supplying additional teacher resources. Three things that make the Siyavula project stand out for me.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Social Networks, Textbooks

Can the GitHub community be a sustainability model for Open textbooks?

tl:dr Like open source software, it takes a community to maintain an open textbook.

Anyone watching my Twitter feed this week knows I’ve got GitHub on my mind.

gitonmind

Part of the interest lies in the fact that there are some technical projects in development that I want to follow. But another part of me is interested in exploring the ideas of community & collaborative authorship and how individuals come together & contribute to create and maintain a shared resource.

On GitHub, the resource is usually software, but as I pointed out a few days ago, there are a number of academic projects popping up on GiTHub that are taking me down this path this week.

One of the non-technical questions we spend time thinking about on the open textbook project (and there are many) is around sustainability, and I think there is a model in the GitHub community that could be applied to open textbooks as a sustainability model.

GitHub is not only a code repository, but also a community for developers. At the centre of the community is the software; it is the tangible artifact that the community develops around. Members of the community take on the collective responsibility to maintain and develop the software, contributing code, fixing bugs, developing documentation, etc.

Outside of the big open textbook projects (which are currently being supported primarily by grant & foundation money), some of the more successful, small scale open textbook projects I see are starting to use this community-as-resource-steward model to maintain and improve their resource.

One small example of this is the Stitz-Zeager Open Source Mathematics Textbook site where the textbook authors set up some community forums over the summer. I see setting up a discussion forum for those who have adopted the book as a good way to begin to develop a community around the resource & begin to engender a feeling of community stewardship around that textbook.

Scaling up from that example, I was also struck this week by the story of Joe Moxley, an English professor who wrote a commercial textbook published by Pearson. In 2008, he received the copyright work to his textbook back from Pearson (I’d love to hear the story about how that happened). At that point, Joe had a few options for what to do with his book. In the end, he licensed it with a CC license & released it online as Writing Commons. In Joe’s words (emphasis mine):

In 2008, when I received copyright back from Pearson for College Writing Online, a textbook I’d published online in 2003, I decided to self-publish the work. Rather than pursuing a for-profit model, I opted to give the book away for free, first at http://collegewriting.org and later at http://writingcommons.org. With hopes of developing a community around my project, I established a distinguished editorial board and review board, and I invited my colleagues to submit “web texts”— that is, texts designed for web-based publication—for the project. Since then, rather than helping merely a handful of students, the work has been viewed by over half a million people, and we’ve been able to publish original, peer-reviewed web texts.

Since then, dozens of authors have contributed resources to the Writing Commons, and the project continues to encourage contributions from the community to further develop and improve the resource. This benefits not only the project,  but, as Joe points out, also the contributors.

From my experiencing directing the Writing Program at USF, I’ve found that graduate students, adjuncts, and university faculty take pleasure in developing collaboratively-authored pedagogical materials. Additionally, developing online teaching and learning spaces via collaborative tools energizes colleagues as well as students, giving them an opportunity to extend their learning, to talk with one another, and to produce relevant texts—texts that other Internet-users may read. Engaging colleagues and students in a collaborative effort to build a viable textbook creates energy and focus for courses. Rather than importing the values of a book editor from Boston or New York, faculty can customize their contributions to meet the special needs of their students and colleagues.

and (again emphasis mine)

Ultimately, from my perspective as an academic author, by crowdsourcing what had been a single-authored work, I’ve gained communal agency while losing some individual agency. I may no longer be able to do exactly what I want, yet from a team effort I can do more than I’d ever imagined.

Now, I am not sure if the team of contributors who are contributing to the success of Writing Commons are the people who actually use the open resource in class & suggest improvements based upon their direct experience with the resource, but I suspect it is.

Which is the point I am trying to make – those who use a resource are more often than not the ones in the best position to maintain that resource. And the best way to maintain that resource is not a single author being responsible for the maintainance and upkeep of the textbook, but an entire community of engaged users iteratively adding improvements and developments to the textbook over time.

Kinda like the communities of developers who cluster around code projects on GitHub. Those that cluster and contribute are generally those who stand to gain the most from the success of the project. They might use the software on a daily basis for their projects, or it mind underpin an important piece of their work. So they have some motivation to contribute and maintain the project. Just like faculty who adopt an open textbook .

Now, this community development model is not something that is exclusive to GitHub, which is just the latest flavour in a long line of success stories in open source collaborative software development (in edu you don’t have to look much farther than Moodle to see a perfect example of a successful open source community development model in action). But there are some feature of GitHub that I think parallel a community open textbook development model.

First, GitHub allows for various levels of engagement with a project. For newbies in the community (those lurkers on the edge watching for little pieces of low hanging fruit that can bring them in deeper in the community), they can contribute in small ways to improving a project. Find a spelling error? You have the power to fix it in a fairly low risk operation that would bring some recognition from those deeper inside the community.

Moving up the scale, you could contribute a new chapter, or revise a section of text , add images and graphics, charts and tables. Build supplemental resources and easily contribute all of this back to the original project to iteratively improve it.

Finally, the OER holy grail, a full on derivative remixed version of the project is one click away with GitHub. Fork, and you have a complete clone of a project ready for you to begin your own fully developed derivative version of the work. And, if it was a particularly active project, branch another community who might be interested in your derivative version of the project.

This isn’t new stuff. The roots of Open Educational Resources lie in the Open Source Software (pdf) movement. Which is maybe why I find myself this week so enamoured with the GitHub community. It grounds me and connects me to the roots of where we come from. I don’t know if any practical application of my playing and exploring of GitHub this week will lead to something concrete with the open textbook project, but at a theoretical level it has connected me back to the roots of OER. And even if GitHub plays no part in open textbooks, I suspect this won’t be the last time I think openly about community supported open textbooks.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks, WordPress

I really need to write some posts about PressBooks

This thought has run thru my head almost daily for the past few months, ever since I arrived at BCcampus and started playing with PressBooks as part of the open textbook project .  I need to take a page from CogDog’s book and get better at documenting process and practice, like he does with posts like this on building TRU’s rMOOC site.

So, here we go. The first of what I hope will be a few posts about PressBooks.

First off, PressBooks is a WordPress plugin designed for creating ebooks. The brainchild of Hugh McGuire, PressBooks was released as an open source project earlier this year (there is also a hosted version at PressBooks.com).

Interest in PressBooks as a platform for creating open textbooks began last year with my predecessor Scott Leslie. Last year, BCcampus supported the creation of a couple of small scale open textbook projects using the hosted PressBooks service (earlier this summer we migrated the books to our own self-hosted PressBooks server, which we are still configuring and customizing). You can see the books Database Design and Project Management, created by Adrienne Watt.

Over the summer, one of our developers, Brad Payne, has been active with the PressBooks development community, writing code to extend the plugin, concentrating on adding more input formats to PressBooks so we can import existing open textbooks and use the platform as a textbook remix tool. Brad’s excellent coding on Open Document Type and ePub importers were accepted into core PressBooks this summer, meaning that we can now import existing open textbooks that are in those formats into PressBooks. Brad is currently working on a Word importer. Last week I imported and ePub version of an existing Philosophy open textbook into PressBooks and was quite happy with the results here (a blog post about this process is coming).

So, why are we so interested in PressBooks?  As you would expect with this project, we had a number of requirements, both core and optional. And we looked at a number of authoring/remix platforms (and continue to do so, watching closely the development work that both Connexions and OERPub are doing in this space). But for now, we have decided to focus on PressBooks.

For one, the authoring platform is built on WordPress which has proven time and again to be both powerful and flexible as exemplified by solid edu projects like ds106, edublogs and UBC blogs. The PressBooks UI authoring experience for faculty should not be a big hurdle, especially if they have worked in WordPress before.

PressBooks allows us to create a well structured website for each book, as well as publish that same content to ePub, PDF and mobi (Amazon Kindle) formats. Create once, publish many times using transformations gives students and faculty maximum flexibility as to how they want their textbook content delivered. A caveat about PDF publishing. It does require additional software that is not open source – Prince XML – to produce the PDF outputs.

However, other than Prince, the project is open source. We felt this was particularly important considering that this is an open textbook project. Not only philosophically, but because it enables us to become part of a development community and contribute to the development of the plugin.

The web version produces a very nice, mobile and tablet friendly user experience. Not a lot of flash here, but very useable on a number of platforms.

It is web-based, meaning that there is no software download & install for authors.

Those are some of the reasons why we are working with PressBooks. But, as with all software, there are challenges. Perhaps the biggest is that it is a platform designed for ebooks and not etextbooks, and there is a difference. ebooks (particularly works of fiction) are written to be read in a linear fashion and a great deal of emphasis is placed on the written word. Textbooks, on the other hand, don’t always have the same linear narrative and often include additional pedagogically oriented content types like sidebars, indexes, q&a’s and other such material to hep students really understand the content.

There is also no search feature for the website versions of the book (you do get search capabilities if you use the ePub or PDF versions of the book as search is baked into both ePub and PDF reading software). But the website version of the book does not have a search engine, which we think is important for electronic resources that are often used as reference resources by students.

There are more pros and cons, which I will get into more detail in the future. But for now I wanted to get the “I’ve got to blog about PressBooks” monkey off my back and start the conversation as I know there is interest in BC about the platform.