FLOSS In School - Open Source Software in the Education System

Stephen Carson is announcing that MIT OCW has won an award from American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). From the announcement:

The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) was designed to promote exceptional online materials that are available free of charge to science educators. The acronym SPORE refers to a reproductive element adapted to develop, often in less than ideal conditions, into something new.

Thanks to Suzuki Takao for the link.

Dave Cormier has posted a list of the lessons he’s learned from his participation in open learning. Open Learning – what I have learned includes statements like:

• Hypothesis 1 – Making work public makes it better
• Hypothesis 2 – Some students like to work
• Hypothesis 3 – The community can be the curriculum

Dave provides longer explanations for each of his eight hypotheses. Head over to the blog and see if your experience agrees with his.

Steve Carson reports that MIT OCW is partnering with OpenStudy to provide an opportunity for people to participate in informal study groups around MIT OCW material:

MIT OpenCourseWare has paired up with OpenStudy to offer study groups in association with three OCW courses. Developed by researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory, and funded by the NSF and NIH, OpenStudy is a unique platform for collaborative learning. Try it out yourself:

• 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• 21F.101 Chinese I (Regular)
• 18.01 Single Variable Calculus

David Wiley points out that MIT OCW has tried social software before. Here’s to hoping it works better this time.

The Center for History and New Media at GMU’s One Week, One Tool initiative has released Anthologize:

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

ePUB support means that, among other things, Anthologize is a drop-dead simple way to collate openly licensed content from blogs around the web, remix it, and push out to iBooks on the iPad. Many congrats to Dan’s group for another awesome tool.

A new Chronicle of Higher Education article, Lawmakers Hear Arguments for and Against Open Access to Research:

Advocates for public access to federally funded research made their case before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Thursday, while publishers’ representatives urged lawmakers to proceed with caution for fear of putting U.S. intellectual property—and publishers’ livelihoods—at risk.

The article provides a good (if brief) summary of some of the arguments on both sides of the debate about open access to publicly-funded research.

The New York Times has published a piece on the state of textbooks called, $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math. One choice quote from the article:

Ms. Colby of Houghton Mifflin puts the state of affairs politely: “I think the open-source movement is opening a whole new conversation, and that is what is exciting to us.”

I suppose the feral fight-or-flight response the textbook industry feels as it stares at the growing open textbook movement could be called “exciting.” The story focuses mostly on Scott McNealy, formerly of Sun, and his contributions to the Curriki project.

OEN writer Seth Gurell got married over the weekend! Congratulations to Seth and Cassie, and best wishes and God bless them in their new life together.

The CAS-IP blog has a new post expressing hope that the new Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) will push for open access. From the post:

The timing is perfect. If the new CGIAR can embrace Open Access as a policy we can start to get somewhere.

Simon Thomson posted an OER Staff Guide back in May, but some readers may be unaware of it.

Various authors have posted on WikiEducator their thoughts about open educational resource quality. From one post:

As a general rule, I would say that I do not have any major concerns about the quality of educational resources using the open authoring approach, as long as the community involved in the development of the resources is active and involved. As instructors and researchers, we should all be comfortable with collaboration in our work, and the development of learning materials seems like one area in which an open collaborative approach will improve quality of resources.

Thanks to Daniel Mietchen for the link.

Mike Caulfield has a new post on Flattr, a micropayment service. From the post:

Here’s the neat part though — hopefully the vast middle is a bunch of people that are both consumers and producers, and those that write smaller blogs use their Flattr to support those that write the bigger blogs, or those that write the music they listen to while writing their blogs, or those making OER, etc., etc.

Tanika Cooper recaps recent textbook legislation and includes quotes from professors on textbook affordability. From the post:

White did not have to worry about new editions because he could simply adopt the new version from online. Through the publisher he used, which operates under the creative common license, White customized textbooks for his classes.

Cameron Parkins notes a post by Joi Ito on license proliferation. From Ito’s post:

Creative Commons is not just a single license “option”. We are a global conversation among lawyers, judges, academics, users and companies in over a hundred countries with extremely rigorous compatible license ports in more than 50 jurisdictions.

Richard Hall has a new post on open education as a critique. From the post:

Open education is a critique of our formal, institutionalised systems of education. Or it should be. It should help us to critique what we do as educators in a formal system and why. It reflects back to us how our work enables the people who experience our formal systems, to exist, to innovate, to succeed, to be(come).

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

Last week OEN reported that ASCAP declined a challenge to debate Larry Lessig over recently made remarks by ASCAP. Mike Linksvayer has a new post responding on ASCAP’s decision not to debate:

Every bit of this is incorrect. To the extent there is a single movement the ASCAP president is attempting to criticize, it would be called the free culture movement. Presumably the ASCAP president thinks “copyleft” sounds more threatening than “free culture”.

Last week OEN reported on a post regarding the option to keep a blog private. Stephen Downes responds. D’Arcy Norman responds to Stephen’s response. From Norman’s response:

What I was trying to point out is that these forms of performance aren’t public, and are not permanently archived by third parties. They are also not primarily exercises in content production.

The British Library has collected thoughts on whether copyright is a help or hindrance.

Kelly Truong is reporting that Princeton U. will be shutting down its University Channel, which was a collection of videos about public policy. The web site is licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

Anya Kamenetz has a new post suggesting print textbooks should be eliminated.

Jennifer Howard has a new post notes that the U.S. Copyright Office has announced exemptions for professors circumventing digital rights management protection under certain circumstances. From the U.S. Copyright Office’s text:

Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

Stephen Downes has a related post on related ruling.