A site about the ramifications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with news, discussion forums and other information on the DMCA.
Invent. Design. Discover. Share. This is the future of education today.
The Big Ideas Fest is the starting point for a movement that supports innovation in education at a time when the need to accelerate high-quality learning is truly essential for our country and our future. The goal of this unique three-day meeting of experts and creative doers and thinkers is to spotlight, challenge and change the ways in which education can be made relevant to learning in the post-industrial world. The goal is to increase relevance beyond the sidelines of society and within the unique classrooms of the world, while placing learning at the front and center of all that we do.
A group of educators will meet at Foothill College this week to begin studying how to encourage widespread adoption of free online textbooks.
Funded by a $530,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources hopes to ease the burden on students who routinely pay $150 for clunky, hard-bound books, according to Judy Baker, dean of Foothill Global Access, an online-learning program.
The majority of grant money will go to the consortium's new Open Textbook Project, a collaboration with other schools and educational groups already using Web-based books to study the long-term feasibility of switching to online books, she said.
Brewster Kahle is on a mission. He wants the whole planet to have access to human knowledge. All human knowledge. And he's striving to make that possible--one byte at a time.
Ten years ago, Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive, with the goal of preserving the hitherto ephemeral pleasures of the Net for posterity. But, unsatisfied with limiting himself to the saving of Web sites, Kahle decided to broaden his scope and include existing collections of books, television programs, movies and music in the archive's massive digital repository.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today (May 7, 2009) launched an initiative to make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students. The Governor directed his Secretary of Education Glen Thomas to ensure these resources are available for use in high school math and science classes by fall 2009, a critical first step in helping ensure digital textbooks are widely available to all California students.
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration arises from a small but lively meeting convened in Cape Town in September 2007. The aim of this meeting was to accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education.
The first concrete outcome of this meeting is the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow.
"This blog was created to keep our expanding audience informed about what is going on in the world of Open Textbooks and related topics. Please read and enjoy the posts. You are encouraged to add any comments that add to the discussion."
WikiEducator has received a donation of 100 Math and English lessons from the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, BC. These learning materials will be freely available under a Creative Commons license.
The 1st international workshop "D4PL Designing for participatory learning - Building from open source success to develop free ways to share and learn" will take place co-located with the OSS2009, 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems, on June 6, 2009, Skövde, Sweden (http://oss2009.org).
The Open Source world shows how volunteer collaboration can lead to great products and to great learning. We want to further explore at this workshop what happens using approaches from that community to break barriers between teachers and learners for today's Internet-savvy young people to design and co-construct sites for participatory learning.
The aim of this workshop is to explore the barriers for this type of learning in higher education settings. Content creation, knowledge exchange, community dynamics, and the impact on the boundary between formal and informal education are key subjects of this workshop!
Martha Kanter, chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and a nationally known champion of open educational resources, has been nominated by President Obama this month to be under secretary of education, the top postsecondary job at the U.S. Department of Education.
This week I ventured to explore a number of OER projects and conduct a preliminary assessment of the reusability and remixability of the OER hosted in each. Based on earlier (albeit shallow) familiarity with some of these OER initiatives I am able to presume that the structure and technology of a selected sample OER from each is generally representative of all or most OER in the given project.
I undertook this task as Rogue Quest 1 for David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course. The Rogue character class that I’ve adopted focuses on content production with an emphasis on finding and releasing or untrapping "open" content to allow for reuse and remix. I have only theoretical experience with remixing OER, and so it is fitting that I begin at experience level 1.
Reuse/Remix Estimates
As I purview each of seven different OER projects I will give each collection a reuse/remix value rating based on my initial impressions and observations. These estimates may change as I move forward to release, reuse, or remix some of these OER.
My reuse/remix rating is a scale of 1 - 5, where "1" is extremely difficult or low value, and "5" is extremely easy or high value, referring to the act of taking CC content and reusing or remixing it on a separate server.
This Monthly Insight to Interoperability reports on the European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) meeting that took place in Brussels on 23 March 2006.
A "Christian Science Monitor" article about the OpenCourseWare movement, initiated by MIT in 2002.
Creative Commons interviews ISKME Founder and OER Commons Creator Lisa Petrides. The interview covers open educational resources and current policy issues.
Insight is a service focusing on e-learning in schools in Europe. It is provided by European Schoolnet (EUN) in collaboration with its consortium members. We publish news and analysis on e-learning policies, school innovation and information communication technology (ICT) in education.
A C-Net news article on an open content initiative by the South Korean government in order to bring a homegrown open-source platform to 10,000 schools in the country.
We wanted to let the OER community know that Smarthistory.org, the Webby-award winning, free and open educational resource for the study of art history has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create needed content and as part of its sustainability strategy.
We urge those of you who support our project to offer a free and open alternative to the expensive art history textbook to donate to our Kickstarter campaign. Small donations ($5-$10) and larger ones too (!) are most welcome. We need to keep up the early momentum on Kickstarter to continue to be a featured site for them and although we raised more than 40% of our goal the first week, yesterday, donations have lagged.
Help prove crowd-funding can work for OERs!
Many thanks in advance.
The building blocks provided by the Open Educational Resources movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.
A new company called Academic Earth offers free online videos of lectures from universities participating in the Opencourseware project. Can a for-profit company do this? Read the story from the Chronicle of Higher Education and discussion posts that follow.
Can the University of the People, a new online institution, add teaching components to the growing body of free online materials and social-networking tools so that students get college credits? Read the story from the Chronicle of Higher Education and the discussion posts that follow.
