Since this site went live, we have released our blog posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Recently, however, we have seen several spam sites using our content to support click-through ad sales. As part of our efforts to combat this misuse of our content, we are changing to the Non-Commercial license.

We are open to people using our content in any way they see fit; part of the reason we are open source developers is that we believe in the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. However, ad-driven spam platforms are a parasitic form of web site; we don't want any association with that type of business practice.

See our About Our Documentation page for more details.

The OER Handbook is currently featured on the homepage of the Creative Commons site (you can also access the OER Handbook story directly via the CC blog). Kudos to everyone involved!

As reported on Ars Technica, a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision has given some legal teeth to open licenses:

The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Maybe this will finally quiet the “confused” people out there who think that those of us who support open licenses are anti-copyright. As pointed out by this case, open licenses depend heavily on copyright law to provide “incentives” for users to comply with the license and (as a last resort) enforcement mechanisms.

Much discussion on the internet concerning the AP's new Pay By The Word policy. Gary Stager had this comment on Will Richardson's blog:

Why shouldn’t journalists and publishers get paid for their work?

Here’s a suggestion for edubloggers who believe that all intellectual property should be free - let’s stop paying teachers.

They just deliver content that is freely available elsewhere, right? Why is hard earned public money being given to teachers? They’re so 1.0!

I don't usually pass these things on.

Particularly in the case of videos -- but this, created by Tony Hirst, was too good not to share.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for posting about this.

From an Op-Ed in the June 1 online edition of the NY Times by Brian Greene: Put a Little Science in Your Life

The entire piece is worth the read. If you are pressed for time and need to choose between reading this blog post and the article, choose the article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ShareThis

I have been meaning to write about just how easy it was to include the eight Flickr images I used for the In Jim’s Chair post. Tan Tan Noodles’ Flickr Photo Gallery plugin for WordPress (and WPMu) is often associated with the awesome Photo Gallery it can integrate into your WordPress site, see an example of this here.

But another sick feature of this plugin that I rarely use, but now know I should, is the seamless integration it offers for bringing both your own images on Flickr, as well as everyone else’s, easily into your blog posts In order to get the eight images tagged with “jimschair” on the UMW DTLT Flickr site into the post I already mentioned, I simply added the tag “jimschair” and clicked on the everyone’s photo radio button, viola, here are the results and placing them in the post is as easy as a click, which gives you all the size options you could want.

Andy Rush has a nice tutorial that takes you through the features of this plugin in less than three minutes, because he’s a professional.




Now, add to this the slick, Creative Commons friendly plugin PhotoDropper that CogDog blogged about a little while ago, and you have a pretty compelling argument for recommending Flickr and WordPress as small pieces not too loosely joined.

Share This

I just came across this tool for Mediawiki: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki

This extends the possibilities for using mediawiki as a remixing engine for open content repositories that are otherwise closed. I particularly like the pdf to wiki functionality.

A tool like Send2wiki, combined with the WikiArticleFeeds Extension to generate RSS feeds for republishing/reorganizing in an open content repository would allow a great de

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I’ve been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/464