Open

by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

The Generative Open Textbook

IMG_1826.JPG

I am 3 chapters into Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it) and have spent the past week viewing so many things around me through a “generative” lens.

Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.

Generative systems are built on the notion that they are never fully complete, that they have many uses yet to be conceived of, and that the public can be trusted to invent and share good uses.

Zittrain uses the term “generative” specifically talking about technology. He is fundamentally speaking to the nature of the PC and the underlying technologies that power the internet, and the design decisions made by the early architects and engineers of both the PC and the internet to focus on flexibility over predetermined function.

Both PC’s and the internet are generative systems. In the case of the internet, the original architects and engineers didn’t much care about what the network was used for – they just wanted to create a system that would connect systems together with as much flexibility as possible. From that flexibility, purpose would be born; that flexibility would “generate” uses. And, indeed, this has been the case with the internet. The generative nature of the internet born out of its flexible design has made a whole whack of applications possible that the early developers did not necessarily envision; e-commerce, social networking, video streaming, email, all these applications arose from the same flexible, generative system – the internet.

The same is true of the PC. The PC did not have a single purpose when it was being developed in the garages of the early enthusiasts and hobbyists. It was designed as a generative system, flexible enough that the end-user could decide how to use it to fix whatever problem they were having. This gave rise to a myriad of uses for a PC, from gaming to word processing, accounting to photo editing. All made possible by the generative nature of the PC.

I love this term – generative, and since reading it in Zittrain’s book have been thinking of how perfectly it encapsulates the spirit of open textbooks (and, indeed all Open Educational Resources).  OER’s are generative in that their future use is not bound by their current use. They can be adapted and modified, recontextualized and used to solve problems that the original authors didn’t even know were problems, let alone something that needed to be solved.

Of course, this is the optimistic view of both OER’s and generativity. The generativity of the internet which gave rise to the convenience of online banking also has given rise to new ways for bad guys to access our money. And OER’s are only potentially generative. If they are never adapted, modified or reused, then their generative nature is squandered.

And there is evidence that the generative nature of open textbooks is not being used. In research conducted between the fall of 2009 and summer of 2011, John Hilton III and David Wiley examined how often the (then open) textbooks from Flat World Knowledge were actually being adapted and remixed to create custom textbooks. Of the 3,304 adoptions of FWK textbooks, they discovered 247 (or 7.5%) books that were different from the original FWK textbook. Of those 247 books, by far the most popular customization was faculty deleting chapters (60.32%).

I suppose I can look at the research and go, “Wow. Almost 250 faculty adapted an OER! That’s great!” But instead the pragmatist (who has a project that is relying on faculty adaptation for success) looks at the 92.5% of faculty who didn’t modify a lick. The overwhelming majority of faculty who adopt open textbooks are looking for fully finished solutions.

Which makes me question whether OER’s are really generative. After all, a generative technology based on Zittrains definition, is grounded in the assumption that:

…the public can be trusted to invent and share good uses

But the research shows that, in this case, not many are.

All this is rolling around inside my head as we move towards the second (and potentially most complicated and challenging) phase of the BCcampus open textbook project; remixing and adapting existing open textbooks (watch for a call for proposals later this fall). Phase 1 had BC post-secondary faculty reviewing a number of existing open textbooks, and it has given us some extremely useful information about the textbooks in the open textbook collection. There have been a few adoptions, but most of the reviews point the way towards revision work.

The prospect of building on existing OER’s is both exciting and terrifying for me. Terrifying because I know that so many have tried hard for years to encourage remix and reuse with little (7.5%) luck. But exciting because there have already been faculty who took part in the review phase approaching us with questions about adapting and modifying the textbooks, and (anecdotal at least) it feels like there are some positive vibes in the air around adaptation.

Are we final ready to fully realize the generative potential of OER’s? I don’t know. But I am feeling energized and enthused heading into phase 2, and am hopeful that we will come out the other end with something of value. And a few strong case studies that sees that 7.5% mark rise.

Photo credit: IMG_1826 by vlidi released under CC-BY-SA license

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Textbooks

The business of textbooks or why do students prefer print?

Students prefer print.

Julie K. Bartley, an associate professor of geology and chair of the geology department at Gustavus Adolphus College, hears the sentiment from her undergraduates. “Our students don’t really want to have e-books,” Ms. Bartley says.  Chronicle of Higher Ed

I hear this a lot, with some (industry) research suggesting that 75% of students prefer print over electronic textbooks. A 2010 study from Woody et al (E-books or textbooks Students prefer textbooks) supports the notion that students prefer print to electronic.

It is becoming quite clear that, despite the ubiquity of computers and interactive technology in their lives, students preferred textbooks over e-books for learning

But why is that? Why do students seem to prefer printed textbooks to electronic ones? Says Ms. Bartley:

“What I hear from them a lot of times is that they feel some sort of comfort in being able to hold the thing in their hands.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

and

Based on these results, we argue that at this time the medium itself may not be as comfortable as a textbook experience for readers (Woody et al)

I don’t want to minimize the tactile experience of reading a physical book, and I do acknowledge that there are some pedagogical qualities of a physical book things that are easier to do in print than electronic, like flip back and forth quickly between pages to help connect concepts located at different parts of the book. But I sometimes think this reason is given far too much importance when we examine student format preferences and we are missing out on an equal, if not more, important factor biasing student format preference.

Economics.

Most of the studies that have looked at student textbook format preferences have compared a publishers resource to itself; a publishers printed textbook versus the same publishers electronic offering. And when you look at the economics behind this choice, it’s easy to see why students might pick print over electronic. As Kent Anderson’s points out, from a student perspective, the economics of e-text vs print just does not make sense when it comes to publishers textbooks.

For the vast majority of students, print textbooks are economically superior to e-books simply because there’s a robust used book market for expensive print textbooks. Buy them new, sell them back. Want them cheaper? Buy them used. The market is much more favorable and robust.

As an example, would I buy a $52 e-book when I can buy a $115 print book that has, as its low offer, a used price of $84? With print, I can essentially “rent” a textbook for a semester for $31, an economic edge of $21 over the e-book — and with no upfront cost of an e-reader.

In other words, it is cheaper for a student to buy a textbook and sell that used textbook to recoup costs. There is a market for used textbooks. There is no market for a used e-text version.

Not that you could sell your e-text version even if there was a market because students don’t actually own the e version of the publishers textbook. The publishers don’t “sell” e-texts – they lease access to them, usually for 180 days. Even if a student wants to keep the textbook, they cannot. After 4-6 months, they lose access to the e-textbook.

But yet this fall, students will feel an even stronger push from publishers to choose e-text over print even though they are not buying them.Why would publishers continue to push formats that students don’t want?

Simply put – to undercut the used textbook market. Publishers don’t make money from the sale of used textbooks, so they are eager to see the print market dry up and for students to adopt e-text. So there is an economic incentive for publishers to kill off physical textbooks and push e-texts on students, who are balking at the terms they are offering and rejecting their expensive e-text. Plus, e-text versions make collecting data about students use of the textbooks possible, something they can’t do with print versions of the textbook. And there is gold in that there data.

Yet, offer a free and open text and then it is a vastly different story – students will choose the free and open electronic version of a textbook over low cost printed version.

Lindshield & Adhikari created an electronic textbook (they called it a flexbook) for a Human Nutrition course and found that, even though low cost print on demand versions of the book were available, students (whether on campus or online) overwhelmingly chose the electronic version.

Campus
(n = 93)
Online
 (n = 102)
Primary way of using the flexbook
   Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account
23 (24.7%)
20 (19.6%)
   Web version (accessed through link)
24 (25.8%)
14 (13.7%)*
   PDF (downloaded)
43 (46.2%)
51 (50.0%)
   Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)
3 (3.2%)
17 (16.7%)**
Second most common way of using the flexbook
   Google Docs version shared to Gmail or K-State Google account
13 (14.0%)
20 (19.6%)
   Web version (accessed through link)
23 (24.7%)
13 (12.7%)*
   PDF (downloaded)
21 (22.6%)
20 (19.6%)
   Hard copy (self-printed or purchased from vendor)
3 (3.2%)
5 (4.9%)
   Flexbook used in only one way
33 (35.5%)
44 (43.1%)

Research from Hilton & Laman (2012 paywall) shows a similar student preference for electronic vs print, with 62% of students choosing a free online version of the textbook compared to a low cost print on demand version of the same textbook (n=307). Incidentally, the Hilton & Laman research, like previous research, showed that students who used the free open textbook scored higher on departmental final examinations, had higher grade point averages in the class and had higher retention rates than those students who used a traditional text).

Now, there is a certain “d’uh” quality to this – free wins is kind of a no-brainer. But, for me, it shows just how powerful the economic argument is when it comes to student format preference. Which is why I think that when it comes to discussions as to whether students prefer one format over the other, we need to look closely at the economic terms being offered to students for those electronic resources and see whether the students are rejecting the format, or the terms being offered to them to use that format.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open

PDF is where OER's go to die

I really dislike PDF. No, really. Dislike is too measured a term. I hate it. I want to declare war on the tyranny of PDF for content that has been licensed for modification and remixing.

We WANT to reuse!

As part of the BC Open Textbook project, we want to start from the point of building on what others have done before; to realize the promise and potential of OER reuse. It only makes sense that we try to reuse what already exists in the commons and avoid recreating the wheel?  Why create a Calculus textbook when a half dozen already exist that can be modified?

There is no shortage of OER material

It doesn’t take a deep immersion into the world of OER to see that there is no lack of OER material. The OER movement has been around for over a decade and in that time, vast repositories of openly licensed content have been created and collected and sit in repositories (including BC’s own SOLR where 10 years worth of Online Program Development Fund projects are stored). Developing resources from scratch isn’t an issue. But reusing those objects or improving those resources? Um, well….

Okay, we have pretty well solved the legal issues around modification

In the early days of the web,there were very few mechanisms that would allow people to legally copy, reuse and modify material found on the web. Copyright was rigid and worked against the principle of reuse. Well, that environment has changed immensely in the past decade with the rise of licenses like Creative Commons, which allows content authors to specify up front how their content can be used. We now have a large body of work licensed in a way that allows for reuse. That legal impediment to reuse has been dealt with, and we have content that authors have legally given others the right to remix and modify. We have crossed that hurdle.

Now it is a technical hurdle

And this is a massive problem (at least for me right now), as anyone who has spent any amount of time trying to convert documents from one format to another knows. I am finding some great CC-BY licensed resources locked away in technical formats that, for all practical purposes, makes reuse near impossible (yes, I am looking squarely at you, PDF. Flash, you are not far behind).

In other words, I can legally modify and reuse this material because the license says I can, but in practical real terms, I cannot because the content is locked in an unmixable format.

Content that is made available in a legal format for modifying, but is not made technically available for modifying seems so self-defeating. Sure, go ahead and use my content, you have my permission, here is my PDF file <insert pin into balloon>.

It feels like we are crossing one cultural hurdle around reuse (ownership, licensing, etc) only to be faced with another in that we cannot technically modify what we have been given the legal right to.

It can be done, but…

Content can be liberated from PDF documents, but it is a difficult, expensive, nit-picky process that requires a lot of manual work by people with some tech chops. To expect an average user to be able to liberate content in a PDF and make it into a reusable format that can then be output to a number of different formats cleanly is just not going to happen.

It doesn’t have to be this way

So, I make a bit of a plea. If you are creating content and have made the decision to license with a CC license that allows others to modify (and good on ya!), please consider making that content available in technical formats that can be remixed and modified. Even Word documents are preferable to PDF. Make the source files available.

A deliverable for the open textbook project I hope to achieve

This is my own personal goal for our project. To make available open textbooks in as many remixable formats as we can so that what we create can not only be legally modified, but technically. I want to make our source files available so that other can use what we have done.

And I want to take that a step further. If we convert a locked PDF document that is released under a CC-BY license into another format for reuse, then I want to make those source files available. It seems like we should be able to do that as it will be part of our normal workflow anyway. So, hopefully, in addition to creating new content as part of this project, we will be able to make available other existing open textbook materials that are locked away in PDF documents available for others to reuse. If we could do that as a natural byproduct of our work, that would be a victory in the ongoing battle to end the tyranny of PDF.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Remix my words

opennessteachtheweb.003

A tweet from Emma (@sunnydeveloper) just made my day.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/334675937461415937″]

The backstory

A few months ago I wrote a blog post titled Open is an attitude in which I used a project that Emma and I worked on (Mozilla HackJam) to illustrate some of the ways in which “open” influenced how that event unfolded. Last week, that blog post was remixed by students participating in the #teachtheweb MOOC (Mozilla Open Online Collaboration) event currently underway. The students have the following as an assignment:

MAKE Project this week: Find someone to collaborate with and create a make about why being open is important to you.

So, a group of learners in the MOOC got together and decided to use my Creative Commons licensed blog post (that allows for remixing) as the basis for their project. Among the artifacts they created includes a series of visuals that have been released on Flickr under a Creative Commons license for others to now take and use/adapt, and a CC-BY YouTube video that can also be used and adapted by others.

Needless to say, seeing my work used, reused and remixed in this way makes this open educator very happy.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

You don't have to wait for BCcampus

I’ve been on the road for the past 3 weeks speaking to educators in this province about the BC open textbook project attending & presenting at a number of BCCAT articulation committee meetings and various institutional and provincial faculty professional development events. There was also a trip to Houston, Texas in there to attend the 2013 Connexions conference and code sprint at Rice University, which I will write more about now that I am getting my head above water.

Generally, the reception to the open textbook project has been positive (again, I need to write some reflective debriefing posts about what I have learned in the past few weeks beyond the advice to never do a flight transfer to Victoria through Vegas). But the one point I want to make to any faculty who might read this blog post:

You don’t have to wait for BCcampus.

Sure, there is an “official” project underway in this province, and there are timelines and deliverables and all the other stuff that goes along with a project like this. But adopting an open textbook doesn’t have to happen within the confines of a formal project.

Open textbooks are open educational resources – openly licensed with Creative Commons licenses and openly available to any faculty who wishes to use them.

Go. Evaluate them. Adapt them. Adopt them. Use them.

Now, if you are faculty and want to evaluate and adopt an open textbook, you certainly can do it as part of the BCcampus open textbook project (and we are looking for reviewers of textbooks right now), but you don’t have to wait for this or for any other project to make it happen. If you are a Physics instructor and take a look at an open resource like the OpenStax College Physics textbook, for example, and find it useful – go ahead and use it. In fact, we have already heard of 2 Physics instructors in the province who are seriously considering adopting this textbook for this fall, well ahead of the timelines for adoption that we have for our project. Awesome.

That is the beauty of open textbooks and open educational resources in general. You do not have to work within structures of “official” projects. If you – as a faculty – review the resources and are happy they meet your quality criteria, use it. This is how open works. Yes, there is a bit more work involved in finding quality open textbooks – there is no wine and cheese reception hosted by open textbook authors showing off all the latest new releases. But if you find an openly licensed resource with a Creative Commons license and want to adapt and adopt, do it.

This may sound obvious to some, but over the past few weeks talking to faculty, I have noticed that this basic point is not always obvious to those coming at open educational resources for the first time. OER’s are free to use, adapt, remix, adopt. There is no barrier between faculty and resource. No copyright holders to ask permission from. No gatekeepers. These resources are meant to be used by you in your classroom right now.

This is the beauty of open.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

OER and Open Textbooks presentation to Douglas College

I was invited to speak on OER and open textbooks to the Science faculty at Douglas College. This is the first time I have presented in my new role at BCcampus, and the first time I have spoken directly with a group of faculty at any institution about the open textbook project so I was very curious as to the types of questions I would get.

Overall, I think it went well, especially when I got to the bits about what students think about textbooks & the cost of textbooks for students. There were many nods of agreement and acknowledgment. And as I spoke about OpenStax College and their excellent open Physics textbook, a Physics instructor was busy downloading the textbook to check it out and declared at the end of the session that it looked “really good.” Positive stuff.

There were also some critical questions. While I was showing off some of the available textbooks, there was a question from an instructor about the sustainability of the textbook. She said that, while these textbooks may be good now, what guarantees are there that it will be good in the future? Who will update the textbooks, and how will a faculty know that the updates are legitimate and valid? I think this question was brought on because I showed an example of a Wikibooks textbook and the discussion page that included a plea from someone who had adopted the textbook asking editors to take care when editing the contents of the textbook because it was an authoritative text. While I saw that as a quality indicator sign for faculty (someone at another institution has adopted this and made it known to the community), it came across as a red flag for those in the audience because it underscored the point that the wiki can, technically, be edited by anyone. And if you are going to build your course around this wiki-based textbook, the fact that someone can edit it at anytime is a concern.

I didn’t have time to delve into the intricicies of wiki’s and how you can mitigate this. Or get into how an instructor who adopts a Wikibook as a text can actually take an active ownership role in the stewardship of that resource. But I think if I am presenting to faculty on this again, it might just be easier to remove the Wikibooks reference and concentrate on projects like OpenStax College and Open Textbook Catalog out of the University of Minnesota.

Another question came from a Geography instructor who was concerned about an American-centric perspective in the textbooks since most of the open textbooks I was showing were created by U.S. based foundations and organizations. My response to both was that these were examples of the beauty of open licenses – that we can take an American open textbook and Canadianize it. That we can update and maintain our own textbooks without waiting for a publisher to do it. That we can take ownership of these resources.

I don’t know if I got that point across really well. Something to improve upon for next time.

Here are the slides for the presentation.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Changing my CC license

This blog used to be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license (CC-BY-NC-SA). That changed today when I decided to remove the NC and SA clauses and just make it CC-BY.

As part of the BCcampus open textbook project, I’ve been digging deep into researching the various types of CC licenses. After seeing this chart on the CC website outlining compatibility of CC licenses with each other, I realized that the chances of someone being able to reuse my stuff is virtually nil because of the restrictions I had in place.

cc_compatibility

The problem is the Share-Alike attribution. When I chose the option to force people to “Share-Alike” (SA) I imagined that this would require people to use ANY CC license for anything they created using my material. I thought this would be a good way to prompt the adoption of CC licenses if someone wanted to use things I create.

What I didn’t realize was that, in fact, what I was forcing them to do was adopt a CC-BY-NC-SA license.  The SA license doesn’t mean Share-Alike with any other of the CC licenses – it means that the license of the adapted work has to match my license exactly.  Therefore, if someone wanted to use my work to create a derivative work (say translate this blog into another language) , they could not license that work with any other license other than a CC BY-NC-SA license and by forcing people to adopt a restrictive CC license, I am actually limiting the reuse of my material. My original good intention of adopting a Share-Alike license to try to promote the use of ANY CC license doesn’t make sense.

As for the NC (Non-Commercial) clause. When I first choose the NC clause, I picked it for 2 reasons. First, I didn’t want people taking my content and selling it – somehow make money off it. Really, I could care less about that anymore. I mean, you’ve read what I write. To think someone would actually pay for this stuff. Heh. I am more than a little embarrassed by the hubris of the 10 year younger me. Besides, I can’t see why people would pay for something they get for free right here.

The second was that I wanted to have SOME kind of recourse (however naive this belief was) that I could use against someone who republished the content of this site to drive traffic to another, unrelated site. It is not an uncommon practice for unscrupulous websites to republish content harvested from sites to drive traffic to another site – a practice known as blog scraping. or splogging (spam blog). I thought that by adopting an NC license that might somehow someday protect me by giving me some kind of legal recourse. Well, truth is, my content gets splogged all the time, and I don’t have the energy or time to try to chase the shadows to even attempt to identify who is doing it. And, again, quite frankly I could care less anymore. In the 10+ years of publishing content on the web, that fear I may have once had has left the station aboard a trainload of meh.

Go ahead. Use and reuse.

CC license compatibility chart from Creative Commons used under Creative Commons Attribution license

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Royal Roads University is open!

open 19

A couple of tweets came my way today that alerted me to something that I am so happy to see come alive:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/grantpotter/status/302151989217873920″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/marksmithers/status/302210924385820672″]

Open.RoyalRoads.ca is open.

The brainchild (as so many good ideas are) of my Royal Roads University colleague Emma Irwin (@sunnydeveloper – don’t worry. I’ll wait while you go follow her…okay…) open. royalroads.ca is a one stop shop where the RRU community can share the work they do.

When people have asked me about my move from RRU to BCcampus (where I am at the end of a wonderful, mind blowing first week), I have been saying that one of the things I am sorry about is that I won’t be there to see the fruition of projects that have been in the works for awhile. This project was one of them.

Open started about a year ago when Emma came to me with an idea that she was trying to get buy-in for. At Royal Roads, we developed quite a bit of custom code for our Moodle installation. RRU is also a Drupal shop and there was some custom code that was written to extend Drupal as well.

Emma wanted to find a way to share this code, not only with the Moodle and Drupal communities, but with the wider world. She suggested setting up a code repository on GitHub, a very popular and active code community.  I told her I would weigh in with whatever institutional support I could give her to help her set it up because I thought the idea of setting up a GitHub repository to share our code was brilliant. After all, if you are going to adopt “free” open source software and use it to support your operations, you should be prepared to contribute back to the wider community. That is how open source works. You can’t just take – you participate and give as well. Which is why the word free above is in italics.

There is a very practical benefit from sharing your work because sharing is reciprocal. It builds goodwill. What you share will come back to you. In the case of open source software, you can see this in the communities that spring up around projects. Those that help and those who give have a level of status in the community. They become known. And when those people need help to solve a particular problem, it is there in buckets. The community supports those who support the community. In the case of sharing Moodle & Drupal code, Emma can find developers who can help her solve the problems she is working on. In the education circles I travel, you can see no better example of this type of reciprocal effect than with the work of  Dr. Alec Couros, who’s willingness to help out the network is legendary, and whose calls for help generate a massive response. People want to help Alec because he helps people.

But there is another reason why I think we should be sharing – something that gets to the very core of what we do as educators. As David Wiley points out, sharing is a critically important piece of learning:

In fact, those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem successful. Does every single student come out of a class in possession of the knowledge and skills the teacher tried to share? In other words, is the teacher a successful sharer? If so, then the teacher is a successful educator. If attempts at sharing fail, then the teacher is a poor educator. Education is sharing. Education is about being open.

As an institution that has learning as their core purpose for existing, it only makes sense to me that we share the work we do with as many people as we can. Because education is sharing.

As Emma and I talked about the importance of sharing with our respective communities, Emma asked me about the open educational resources in CTET. RRU has an open Moodle instance where (thanks to the work of Mary Burgess and funded by a grant from my current organization, BCcampus a few years ago) we were sharing some OER’s we had developed that focused primarily on faculty development. Over the years, the collection has grown to include OER’s developed by RRU faculty, and other open initiatives. As we talked, Emma said she had this vision, inspired by Open Michigan, where we could gather all of our open institutional resources and share them in one place. I told her I had a similar vision, inspired by Open UBC.

And then I left RRU to go and work on other open stuff.  But Emma, like she does, kept on working and plugging away. And yesterday, open.royalroads.ca went live. And I am very happy for Emma because I know how hard she has worked to make that happen. And what benefits not only she, but the wider Moodle & Drupal communities, and RRU itself will reap from her efforts.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/302152514327965696″]

Photo: open 19 by loop_oh used under Creative Commons license

 

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

The ds106 snowflake

I love this ds106 data visualization put together by Martin Hawksey at JISC. This video is a representation of the community activity that occurred in ds106 – the unMOOC MOOC developed by Alan Levine, Jim Groom and the rest of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at U Mary Washington (whose innovative work I have gushed over before).

With each white circle representing a blog post, and circles clustered around individual blogs, you can quickly see just how much activity occured during ds106, and how much this beautiful visualization represents a model of learning that reflects the qualities of the internet itself – distributed, networked, nodal, autonomous yet connected. It’s no accident that this visualization looks like the internet itself.  As Alan points out, ds106 was specifically designed this way.

The very essence of ds106 is that it is made of the same stuff that the web is made of, a distributed, open, decentralized connected network managed by participants in the space it inhabits. You will hear people talk about their organizations or projects being on the web. but there is more than a shade of difference of ds106 being of the web.

In an environment that has proven its resilience, growth, and capability, should we not emulate the very ideals of the internet in the learning experiences we create? For the most part, while being on the web, the majority of MOOCs are operating via a structure that is not built by nor cared for by its learners. The truly open, syndicated model of ds106 works because it acts like the web itself.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Academic Paywalls or It Costs HOW Much?

Open Access – unrestricted access to peer-reviewed academic research – has been popping up on my radar lately, brought on by the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. Sad that it takes the death of a brilliant young man to shine a light on the absurdity of heavy-handed copyright enforcement and the right of the public to have access to research that, in most cases, they have bought and paid for.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/dlnorman/status/298096900287115264″]

Knowledge that teachers need to educate our children, locked away and inaccessible.

And this Journal of Comparative Neurology annual subscription price for this peer-reviewed medical journal? $30,860 per year. This is the institutional price….FOR ONE JOURNAL!

How much does that academic journal cost?

Madness.

Remember, this is the amount that institutional libraries pay – publicly funded institutions. This is our money going to pay private corporations for access to research that, in most cases, WE THE TAXPAYERS HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR! We fund most of this research, and then give it to these publishers who lock away access to the research & force us all to buy the results back. It’s insane.

I have no idea what a similar Canadian institution pays, but Harvard alone pays close to $4 million dollars per year in access fees to publishers (aside: this article above contains some real and practical advice for academic researchers who wish to support open knowledge).

I understand that this isn’t an easy issue. That academics feel under intense pressure to publish in prestige journals in order to secure more funding, jobs, etc. And it was heartening to see the #pdftribute hashtag emerge on Twitter. But, as Berkley Associate Professor Michael Eisen says, academics can do more:

Posting our PDFs is all fine and good, but the real way to honor Aaron Swartz is to combat this pervasive institutional fecklessness and do everything in our power to make sure no papers ever end up behind pay walls again. We have to demand that our universities alter their policies to reward, rather than punish, free scholarly publishing, and that they stop cutting the checks that keep this immoral system afloat.

Can do more…need to do more, as Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior points out in her excellent Al Jazera article The Political Consequences of Academic Paywalls.

When an activist needs information about the political conditions of her country, she should be able to read it. When a lawyer needs ammunition against a corrupt regime, she should be able to find it. When a journalist is struggling to cover a foreign conflict, she should have access to research on that country.

Meanwhile, 15 year old Vancouver high school student Jack Andraka uses free, open access journals and comes up with a new test for pancreatic cancer.

“I used them religiously,” Andraka said, “Just because, in most online databases, articles cost about [US]$35, and there are only about 10 pages.”

“The public funds a lot of this research. Shouldn’t the public have access to it?”

The case for open access – open to use and open to reuse – couldn’t be more clear in my mind.

 

 

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

The power of audience as student art project goes viral

Just listening to an interview on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Jian interviewed visual artist & Capilano U student Rosea Lake (aka rosea posey). Rosea’s story is a testament to the positive things that can occur when students work on the open web.

Last year, Rosea created this wonderful work as a high school project. (aside: I only wish I could embed the image here for you to see directly, but Rosea has copyrighted the image instead of releasing it under a Creative Commons license, a decision I fully understand after reading what happened below). The work sat for a year before Rosea made a decision that is likely going to change her life.

On January 5th, Rosea posted her high school art project on Tumblr. On the open web.

3 weeks later, it has gone viral.

This high school project posted on the open web has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, sparked debates and discourse (as all good art does), and has garnered Rosea much mainsteam media coverage. There has even been a controversy around intellectual property and copyright when the lingerie company Curvy Kate created an ad that was eerily similar to Rosea’s work. Rosea credits the internet to helping her find out about this unauthorized commercial use of her work.

Now, I acknowledge that “post your final project to the web” probably wasn’t an explicitly stated learning outcome in her high school art course, but why couldn’t it be? I mean, asking students to work for an audience – a potential worldwide audience – changes the nature of the work learners do. It is real. Authentic. It creates possibilities. It matters in a way that doing work just for the eyes of their teacher does not. As Alan November (via David Truss) notes:

“Students will work harder for an authentic audience than for a grade”…”Students will do more if they leave a legacy beyond a grade.”

Which is a point that Stephen Downes (speaking specifically about blogging)  also makes:

blogging gives students a genuine and potentially worldwide audience for their work. Having such an audience can result in feedback and and greatly increase student motivation to do their best work.

Or this take on having students working on the open web as part of their learning. This quote is from UBC’s Jon Beasley-Murray who, in 2008, assigned his UBC students the mammoth task of collaborating on a Wikipedia article to get it to featured article status. Reflecting on the project (which has put his students work in front of thousands of people) Jon says:

And their final product is to be a professional piece of work that will be viewed by many thousands of people, a resource that is in most cases the first port of call for future researchers, whether students like themselves or any of the many millions from all over the world who visit Wikipedia. Most of these articles are, after all, the top hit (or very close to it) in any internet search of the topic.

By comparison, the usual essays and exams that we assign our students really are rather pointless busywork.

Pointless busywork. How many of you who have attended university or college have stacks of pointless busywork sitting in drawers and desks (or have gone to recycling & garbage bins years ago) unread by anyone except the person who passed judgement on them?

Remind me again why we set up barriers (both real and perceived) that prevent our students from succeeding like this? Why are we not encouraging our learners each and every day to participate in the open web? To engage with the world in the most real and authentic learning space available to us? Why do we ask our learners to hide their work away in places where the only person who may ever see that work is their instructor?

It takes courage to post your work onto the open web for the world to see. To comment on. Critique. Discuss. Judge. Rosea took that chance, and I suspect she will be reaping the rewards of that decision for many years to come.  We all will because Judgments is a brilliant, thought-provoking piece that is making us talk about uncomfortable things.

A high school art project has the world talking right now because Rosea Lake took the simple step of posting her work out in the open, on the web, for all of us to see and talk about.

Brilliant.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Open

What we can learn about copyright from fashionistas

I have a whole new respect for the fashion industry after viewing this brilliant TED talk from Johanna Blakely called “Lessons from fashion’s free culture.”

In a nutshell, Blakely’s argument is that an entire creative ecosystem and industry has developed around fashion because fashion cannot be copyright. Indeed, without the ability for one designer to copy (or be “inspired”) by the work of another, there would be no fashion industry as we know it today.

Under the law, fashion designs are exempt from copyright. You cannot copyright a design because lawmakers view clothing as a “utilitarian” product. The common good of clothing humanity overrode the rights of fashion designers to profit from their clothing. But because there is no copyright, designers have been able to freely elevate that utilitarian product (clothing)  into something that is now considered art.

It is a compelling argument in support of copying as a model of ownership that encourages innovation as copying allows for the the free flow of ideas, and this free flow of ideas drives innovation. It forces those who are being copied to continually “up their game” and create unique designs. Copying forces innovation and creativity.

But this lack of copyright isn’t limited to fashion. Cars, food, furniture – these are all utilitarian items that cannot be controlled by copyright (which begs the question in my mind, when does something like a smartphone or computing device become a utilitarian device so that the silly litigation wars from Apple and Samsung?)

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

And without doing anything, I created an Open Educational Resource

Last week I let loose a rant against Turnitin and a poster they sent me which painted the acts of remixing, mashups, aggregation and retweeting as plagiaristic.

Tonight I receive a pingback notification from a blog being used in an open online high school Philosophy 12 course being offered by Bryan Jackson. Bryan has included my blog post as a suggested reading for his unit this week on Ethics in his open online class for students interested in discussing the ethics of intellectual property.

I don’t know where Bryan saw this post. He might be subscribed to my blog, a colleague might have passed it to him, or he might have caught it on Twitter as we are connected there (and I have a pretty good idea where he did see it). But he would have never seen it at all if I had confined my rant to my office colleagues and not decided to put fingers to blog and post something in the open space of the web – something that another educator could find and link back to.

Which goes to underscore a point that Scott Leslie has been making for years about sharing and serendipity:

Much of the sharing that happens in my learning network happens through serendipity. People publish a blog post, bookmark a delicious link, etc, as a normal part of their own workflow,and whether through syndication or the “All seeing eye of Google,” it comes my way, as John Krutsch would say, “Right On Time.”

A normal part of my workflow is writing blog posts and publishing on the open web, then disseminating that via Twitter, Facebook, & (increasingly) G+. All that backroom posting to those networks happens behind the scenes. I’ve spent some time setting up this blog to post to those networks, where it was picked up by another educator, who then decided to use it as a resource in one of his classes.

Without doing anything extra, I managed to create an educational resource for another educator.

Okay, maybe it isn’t entirely true that I have done nothing. I did have to do a few things to make that happen. I had to create the ecosystem to make sharing possible. But that work was done years ago when I made the concious decision to publish on the open web with a Creative Commons license that allowed for reuse (which didn’t even need to be in place for Bryan’s case as he has just simply linked back to the blog post and not actually copied or reused it). But that’s it. That’s all I had to do. The simple choice of deciding to post on the open web with a license that allows for reuse means that something I create (whether I think it is useful or valuable or not) can be used by another educator.

With those 2 conditions in place – open and licensed for reuse – everything I create and publish here becomes an open educational resource, free for any other educator to link to, copy, use and modify as they see fit.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open, Teaching & Learning

Open Education Matters Why it is important to share

Earlier this year, the US Departments of Education held a video contest asking for videos that answered the question “why does open education matter?” The top three videos are located on the Department of Education website.

All the videos are well done, but the third place video caught my eye as it really emphasizes what can happen when content is shared and reused, and how it could then benefit the original creator of the content, creating the type of virtuous cycle that is possible when resources are shared.

This is open education. Knowledge as a public good.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Open

Buzzkill (or these are not simple times we live in)

Yesterday was Black Friday. But yesterday was also Buy Nothing Day, and this post in in the spirit of Buy Nothing day.

This video keeps popping up on my Facebook feed. You might have seen it.

At first blush, this is the kind of video I love. Showing that people are basically good and altruistic.

But there was something that bothered me. I watched the video again. Then I zoomed in on the final shot where one guy passes a beverage to another. A Coke.

It’s a Coke commercial.

And then I got angry. Not that it was a commercial riding on the feel-good factor – commercials have always done that. Just don’t try to fool me and hide your message. It’s deceptive and dangerous. When people find out, they become angry and cynical and that beautiful message that the world is a great place completely gets blown out of the water and is replace by the message that the world is full of deception. Had there been a simple logo shot at the end of the commercial saying it was sponsored by Coke, I would not have felt so duped. So stupid. So cynical.

I was tempted to go back to FB and start commenting on everyone’s feed, “Nice, but it’s a damn Coke commercial.” But, you know. Buzzkill. No one likes to be the one to pop the feelgood balloon. Who likes to have it pointed out that they have been duped?

But wait a sec. Who have I been duped by?

I started to dig around and look into the organization that had their logo tagged on the end of the video, Love Everybody (where I am seeing comments that others are suspecting the same thing I am about the Coke product placement). I was certain I would find out that they were funded by Coke somehow. But if they are, it is not obvious from their website.

And then as I continued my research to try to uncover whether this was really a Coke commercial or not, I came across this version of the ad on YouTube:

Now in this version, there is a very definite Coke logo and product shot at the end. It is obvious in this version that this IS a Coke commercial and the message was sponsored by Coke. I see this version and I am okay with this. Coke has been explicit.

So, why did Love Everybody edit the video to remove the Coke logo at the end that clearly showed that it was a Coke commercial? What was their motivation to do this? Did they want to use the video as a vehicle for their own organization? Try to re-edit in such a way that they would get the feel good factor out of it? Or are they really funded by Coke and have re-edited the video to make the Coke message obscure and almost subliminal? Or are they engaging in some form of culture jamming and it is actually a sophisticated ploy to use the message of a corporation to provoke exactly the kind of negative reaction and backlash to a mega-corp that I felt? Or perhaps they are funded by the state and are trying to soften the perception that constant public surveillance is a good thing?

And here in lies the problem. Going down this road has made me start questioning what this simple little message that seemed so sincere and earnest really means. The message that the world is a good place has been replaced, and that pisses me off because I want to believe that the world is a good place and people are basically good. That may be a naieve attitude, but as a father trying to raise engaged kids who don’t end up living a cynical life steeped in fear, I NEED to believe that.

I like to think of myself as fairly media literate. I worked in that world, on both the commercial and alternative media sides and feel I have a good bullshit detector. But it reminds me that we are living in complicated media times where messages and media can easily be manipulated. For me, this is another indicator of the importance radical transparency in everything we do. We need transparency as a core value in our society today or risk creating a cynical society that lives in fear, uncertainty and doubt. We need to push at our governments, corporations, institutions, and ourselves, and believe that being open and transparent and making our motives & actions visible and explicit is the only option.

Cross posted from my other blog.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Open

Open is a noun, verb, adjective…and an attitude

Open (noun)

  1. Open or unobstructed space; an exposed location.
    I can’t believe you left the lawnmower out in the open when you knew it was going to rain this afternoon!
  2. Public knowledge or scrutiny; full view.
    We have got to bring this company’s corrupt business practices into the open.

Open (verb)

  1. To make something accessible or removing an obstacle to something being accessible.

Open (adjective)

  1. Which is not closed; accessible; unimpeded; as, an open gate.
    Turn left after the second open door.
  2. Receptive.
    I am open to new ideas.
  3. Public; as, an open letter, an open declaration.
    He published an open letter to the governor on a full page of the New York Times.

(an edited list of open definitions from Wiktionary list)

I’ve been thinking about how we define “open” in education. For some (like Coursera, Udacity and other MOOC providers) the “open” in Massive Open Online Courses is primarily about open registration. Anyone can register to take these MOOC’s, but after that the open door shuts pretty fast and solid.

Another way the word “open” is used in education revolves around sharing resources, as in Open Educational Resources (OER’s) – discrete pieces of content (courses, learning objects, media, etc) made available with licenses that allow for reuse and remixing.

For some in education, “open” is sometimes (wrongly) equated with free, as in open source software, like Moodle.

But the word “open” can be something more; something broader than these definitions. As Gardner Campbell pointed out in his (updated with link to archive), open is an attitude.

Open is a way of thinking and being that runs deeper than these three examples. Open is a  willingness to share, not only resources, but processes, ideas, thoughts, ways of thinking and operating. Open means working in spaces and places that are transparent and allow others to see what you are doing and how you are doing it, giving rise to opportunities for people who could help you to connect with you, jump in and offer that help. And where you can reciprocate and do the same.

Thanks to a prompt from Brian Lamb, I went back to do a bit of reflection  on the HackJam event I was involved in earlier this spring and look at it through this “open” lens to see if I could identify specific instances where “open” may have lent a hand with the event and subsequent event echo.

This spring, my colleague Emma Irwin and I were chatting at work one day about our kids, and how we could prepare our kids to become engaged and thoughtful digital citizens. Emma asked me if I had ever heard of Hackasaurus, and an event was born. We quickly decided we wanted to do a HackJam event for kids age 9-14 that would teach kids the basics of web programming, while introducing them to digital concepts like remix and reuse.

So, what role did “open” play in our HackJam?

  • Open Win #1. Mozilla freely shared the tools the developed (X-Ray Goggles, Thimble), tools which make it easy to tinker with the code of a website.  If they didn’t do that, our little event would have probably been over before it began.
  • Open Win #2. Mozilla shared the Hacakasuarus curriculum and event planning guide. We used and customized this quite a bit as we developed our event.
  • Open Win #3. On their branding site, Mozilla shared images with a Creative Commons license that allowed for remix. I was able to take that image and make a jigsaw puzzle out of it, which we used as an icebreaker for the event (more on this in a couple bullet points)
  • Open Win #4. Twitter is an open space. Conversations on Twitter are transparent and visible to anyone on the web. A  Twitter conversation between Emma and myself trying to find space to host the event was “overheard” in that Twitter open space by Dr. Valarie Irvine of the TIE lab at UVic. She contacted me on Twitter with an offer to use some of her computer lab space for the event. Open got us a venue.
  • Open Win #5. We took photos of the event (with signed consent forms from the parents of the kids involved) & shared those on Flickr with a CC license. One photo I took was of the jigsaw puzzle I created. Doug Belshaw in the UK saw the photo, contacted me & used the jigsaw in his own Hacksaurus event in London.
  • Open Win #6. Scott, Emma and myself wrote blog posts about event. Because these were published to the open space of the web, they were found easily by Mozilla. The day after we wrote our posts, Mozilla highlighted our event on their Facebook page and on a number of Mozilla blogs, complete with pictures of our event from our Flickr feed, putting our event in front of thousand of people.
  • Open Win #7. Because our event became known to Mozilla (partly through the open blog posts and photos of the event we shared), Emma has been invited to speak at the upcoming Mozilla Festival in London. Mozilla is flying her out to London to do a presentation about our event (so well deserved because Emma is really the driving force behind our small #yyj Webmaker community).
  • Open Win #8. Our (open) blog posts were passed on to someone at our provincial Ministry of Education, who then sent a rep to the second HackJam event we hosted this fall to see if there was anything that we were doing that might translate to the k-12 classroom.
  • Open Win #9. One of our open volunteer calls brought me Helen, someone who I later hired in our department as an elearning tech, based in large part on her work organizing the HackJam. Open got her a job :).
  • Open Win #10. We opened up higher ed to the community and broke down the ivory tower just a little bit. We invited kids into our physical space. For some, it was the first time they were in a University and, with any luck, they went away from our event with a feeling that University is a fun place to be; that all those buildings at that end of the city are places for everyone in our community.

At every turn in this project, open exerted its influence. Sometimes in small ways, but there nonetheless.

Now, open alone isn’t the only factor in making all the things on this list possible. I hired Helen because she is a highly skilled person. Valerie offered the room to us because she knows who I am from other professional interactions (often interactions we have on Twitter). However, without open pulsing along in the background, this list would be a lot smaller, or non-existent.

Open is a noun, verb and adjective. But above all, open is an attitude. Where sharing and transparency are the default; deeply embedded in our actions, where open becomes automatic and part of who we are, not just a handy vowel to complete the acronym. By adopting an open attitude, we enable wonderful things to happen in our networked world.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Open, Teaching & Learning

BC to offer free, open textbooks for 40 higher ed courses

Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap's announcement at #opened12
More to come on this as the announcement was made just hours ago at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, but BC Advanced Education Minister John Yap has just announced that BC will fund the creation of 40 free and open textbooks.

This is very exciting news, for both students – who will save hundreds of dollars each year in textbook costs (it is estimated students spend between $900 and $1,500 per academic year on textbooks. Open textbooks reduce this to around $300 or less when printed books are needed – or $0 for e-copies) – and the open education movement in BC.

Some highlights from the press release:

British Columbia is set to become the first province in Canada to offer students free online, open textbooks for the 40 most popular post-secondary courses.

Because the open textbooks are digital and open, they can be modified and adapted by instructors to fit different classes.

Wonderful as these will be true open textbooks that will be released with licenses that not only allow reuses, but also remixing.

Sounds like there is an aggressive timeline to get these open textbooks created and in the hands of students:

Government will work with post-secondary institutions in implementing an open textbook policy in anticipation they could be in use at B.C. institutions as early as 2013-14.

There will be more on this in the coming weeks, but this is fantastic news for higher ed in BC.

Photo: Visual Notes of Honourable John Yapp’s announcement at #opened12 by giulia.forsythe Used under Creative Commons license