So, this is kind of exciting for me. I’ve been mentioned in some articles and blog posts, and even interviewed!

First, as a result of my presentation at the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

Most recently, there was a writeup of my research on peer feedback on writing, on the BCcampus website.

And then there was an article about the three Faculty Fellows (including me) with the BCcampus Open Textbook program for 2014-2015.

So it’s not the New York Times or even the CBC, but hey, it’s a start.

I have been waiting to make this post, because like last year, all the sessions this year were videorecorded, and I was going to wait until the recordings were posted on Youtube so I could embed mine here. But the conference was in November of 2014, and it’s now February of 2015, and the Open Education Conference Youtube channel still just has the keynotes from the 2014 conference up. So I’m going to at least post my slides here.

This presentation is from the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC. It was about UBC’s Policy 81, and my fears that it may have lead to enough bad feelings among some people at UBC that they are no longer willing to share teaching materials with an open license. I did a small survey (28 people responded) of faculty members at UBC who had opted out of Policy 81 by signing up on a registry to do so, and found that that was indeed the case for some.

Now, just this week a revised Policy 81 has come out, and the university is asking for comments. I have a blog post about that too.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

Finally, as a result of this presentation, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

Governance at UBC

At the presentation at the conference, some people asked about whether or not there was shared governance at UBC–how could it be that the administration and the faculty union were so at odds on this issue? A good question. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how governance works at UBC, but here’s what I do know.

The policy was passed by the Board of Governors, which consists of (according to the University Act of BC)

• the UBC Chancellor
• the UBC President
• 11 people appointed by the lieutenant governor, two of whom should be from a list of nominees from the alumni association
• 3 students (undergrad or grad)
• 3 faculty members
• 2 UBC employees who are not faculty members

So there are just three faculty members out of 21 people on the board, and 11 out of those 21 are not currently at UBC (though two of those 11 are probably alumni, from what I can tell). The faculty voice, then, is pretty small.

There is also the Senate of UBC, which is part of the overall governance. The membership of the Senate is pretty complicated, so I’ll just copy here from the University Act, part 7:

(a) the chancellor;

(b) the president, who is the senate’s chair;

(c) the academic vice president who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1 or equivalent;

(d) the deans of faculties who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1;

(e) the chief librarian or a person designated for the purpose by the chief librarian;

(f) the director of continuing education or a person designated for the purpose by the director;

(g) a number of faculty members equal to twice the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), to consist of 2 members of each faculty elected by the members of that faculty, and the remainder elected by the faculty members in the manner that they, in joint meeting, determine, but only faculty members employed through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(h) a number of students, equal to the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), elected from the students who are members of an undergraduate student society or a graduate student society, in a manner that ensures that at least one student from each faculty is elected, but only students studying through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(i) 4 persons who are not faculty members, elected by and from the convocation;

(j) one member to be elected by the governing body of each affiliated college of the university;

(k) additional members, determined by the senate, without altering the ratio set out in paragraphs (g) and (h).

So clearly, the Senate has a much greater representation of the faculty than the Board of Governors. But which body does what?

The Board of Governors website lays out the different responsibilities of the two. Briefly, according to that site:

The Board of Governors is responsible for the business of the University – its administration, finances, operations, assets and place in the community – and the integrity of such.

The Senates have a more focused responsibility for the academic integrity of the University, subject to the Board’s involvement where academic matters interface with matters of business and the larger community.

According to the longer list on the site, the Board of Governors has a say in most of the activities and policies of the university. The things that the Senate determines on its own are mostly to do with academic matters, such as academic discipline, final exams, admit students, grant degrees, and manage the library.

The procedure for adopting policies by the Board of Governors, such as Policy 81, seems to be that the policy is proposed, then there is a comment period, and then a vote is held among the Board. The UBC Faculty Association (our faculty union) expressed serious concerns about Policy 81 in February 2014, but the policy was passed anyway.

A revised policy

In February 2015, a revised policy 81 was put forward for comment. Please see a later blog post for information on that.

I am trying to keep a record of all my presentations here on this blog, because otherwise I forget about them! Which I did; there are two presentations from 2013 that I gave at UBC on open education and MOOCs. The slides for these have been on Slideshare for awhile, but I’m not posting them here so I have a record of everything in one place.

However, these presentations are not terribly self-explanatory on their own (lots of pictures sometimes w/o a lot of text), and I no longer have my notes for them, unfortunately. So really, this is just as a record that I did them, for myself.

Here’s one I gave at the CTLT Institute at UBC in May of 2013, on open education and connectivist MOOCs. I talked about the difference between “xMOOCs” and “cMOOCs,” gave some examples of cMOOCs, and used my recent experience with ETMOOC as an example to illustrate the cMOOC model.

And here’s a similar one I gave during Open UBC week in October of 2013, but this time talking about what I myself am doing in terms of open education. I talked about two open online courses that I was part of designing and facilitating: OOE13 and Why Open?. I also talked about what aspects of my on-campus courses I was making openly available, including in Philosophy 102 and through the Arts One Open site.

Some totem pics. Emailing multiple pictures from Picasa to my blog.

Testing the post by email feature of WordPress. Hopefully if you are reading this you’ll see a lovely photo of our puppy, Tanner somewhere in this post.

For the past couple of years I’ve made it a point during this season to try to provide some financial support to the web tools and services I use that are open. And by open, I mean that are free to use, and who do not make money off of my data or advertising.

In 2012, I supported Wikipedia, Mozilla, Creative Commons and the work of Audrey Watters. Last year it was The Internet Archive, Bad Science Watch, MediaSmarts and OpenMedia. All these projects and organizations make a difference to my online life and I am appreciative of the work they do.

This year, I have returned to Wikipedia and Creative Commons. CC is becoming especially important in my professional life as it is a major component of the Open Textbook Project I am working on.

In addition to those two organizations,  I am also supporting three other open products and services that I use.

I have been spending a lot of time this year converting documents, and have come to rely on Pandoc, created by John McFarlane. This open source software package is the Swiss Army knife of document conversion, and has made my work life easier. So, a monetary nod goes to Pandoc.

Finally, there are two streaming music services that I use almost everyday. If you see me hunkered over a keyboard with my headphones on, then chances are I am plugged into either Radio Paradise  or Soma FM. Both are longtime streaming music service that are listener supported, ad free, and provide a great diverse soundtrack to my life.

I write and publish these posts because I want to encourage you to do the same, and support the open services and tools that you use. The open source software that makes your life a bit easier, the single person journalist or blogger trying to stay independent and free from the influence of chasing advertising dollars, the web service you use that isn’t mining your data as a business model. I know that, at this time of the year, there are many competing interests for your hard earned dollars. But if you have the means, I encourage you to put a few dollars to supporting the open sites, services and tools that you use.

I’m participating in a quick, five-day workshop on OER from Dec. 5-10 called Ed Tech Open, and one of the things for the first day (which I’m now two days behind on!) was to look over some resources on creative commons and create something about CC licenses that is itself CC licensed. I thought about making an image, a poster, something like that, but I just don’t have time in this lightning-speed workshop! So I decided to take a look at a few charts/infographics/posters and make a few comments about those. I was wondering what some of the effective ways might be to explain CC licenses visually.

I found the first one, below, from the OER workshop itself, and the others through various web searches. I’ll just saw a few things about how effective I think each one is. BUT, I recognize that such things are quite subjective; what makes sense, seems easy and clear, is going to differ amongst persons I expect.

The following chart, from CC Australia, gives a kind of decision tree for determining which license to use. Here’s the link to the source. This chart is licensed CC BY 2.5 Australia.

The questions on this poster are very helpful, I think–they’re simple and clear. The colours are what confuse me. The explanation on the left says that the pink boxes refer to remixing, the blue ones refer to commercial uses, and the purple boxes are the licenses. That makes sense, but then if you go that route then the first couple of boxes (the green “start” and the red “all rights reserved” boxes have to be different colours, of course. And the effect of all that just feels a bit confusing to me.

I do like the use of red for the “all rights reserved” box, though. It visually indicates that others can’t do things with your work w/o your permission, and it also subtly suggests that maybe one shouldn’t just jump to go that route–red can indicate, to me, a kind of warning, a danger.

One thing I’d like to see in flowcharts like this is some indication of the implications of one’s choices that one might not be aware of. Sure, I may think I don’t want anyone to change and adapt my content, but would I still think so if I knew that meant that people couldn’t even translate it into a different language, that I thereby make it such that my content will be unlikely to be used in many educational contexts, where adaptation to particular circumstances and learning needs is common?

The following poster (link to the original source) comes from Creative Commons Poland, and was designed by Piotrek Chuchla.

CC Polska CC license poster,by Piotrek Chuchla,licensed CC BY 3.0 Poland

I think the strength of this poster lies in the fact that it emphasizes images over text. The text is there, of course, but it’s deemphasized. This might work for those who really gravitate towards images. But for me, it’s really no less confusing because I have to make sense of the images themselves. It’s like it’s adding a new visual “code” that I’m unfamiliar with, and that I have learn to recognize (with the text) before I can decipher the meaning. For me, this is a bit off-putting and makes things more complicated. I feel like I’m being hit with a wall of images on each row that I have to spend a great deal of time figuring out.

A company called Xplore created a chart that is embedded at the following link:

http://www.xplore.net/web_smart/index.htm?articleId=568

But as they don’t clear give a CC license for this chart, and the copyright notice at the bottom of their site says “All Rights Reserved,” I don’t think I can re-post it here.

I find the format of this one easier to read and clearer, myself. The colour-coded checks under various columns let me know at a glance which licenses allow for commercial use, revision, etc., and which don’t. I also like the brief explanation of each column that follows the chart.

The only thing that’s confusing, though I’m glad they included it, is the row for copyright. There are two problems with this:

1. The original creator retains copyright in their works when using any CC license. One doesn’t give up copyright.
2. Everything depends on what permissions the original creator allows for use of the work when asked. The things that are “x” under each column may actually be allowed by the author/creator. It’s just that you have to ask permission first.
3. The row for “copyright” is under the title “Creative Commons Licenses,” which suggest that there is some CC license called “copyright.”

So I find the “copyright” row problematic. But I’m glad they included the “public domain” row, which many charts leave out. It’s just that they suggest that it’s only for those works whose copyright has expired or forfeited. It doesn’t let people know that they can choose to use CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark.

Finally, there is a comprehensive infographic on CC licenses by foter.com, here. It’s quite long and detailed, so I’ll just include a couple of screen shots here.

Part of How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter, licensed CC BY SA 3.0

This image is quite similar to that linked to from Xplore, above. It is of course fine if they based their graphic on the one from Foter (which was published earlier), except that since the one from Foter is licensed CC-BY-SA, then the one from Xplore should be licensed similarly (and the original should be attributed).

Be that as it may, this original from Foter doesn’t have the confusing bit about copyright, and doesn’t suggest that public domain is restricted to works whose copyright has expired, been forfeited, or is otherwise inapplicable.

It’s interesting how they order the licenses from most permissive (top) to least permissive (bottom) even though one might have considered putting the SA’s together and the ND’s together. It’s not that BY-ND is more permissive than BY-NC, though; or is it? That’s actually what this infographic suggests in another part:

Part of How to attribute Creative Commons photos, by Foter, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0

This suggests that there is a range from most to least permissive, with each license occupying a clear place in that step-wise range. I like the idea here of including the permissiveness/restrictiveness of the licenses in the graphic, but I think the particular order is not exactly clear. Why is ND more permissive than NC? I suppose it is, if one is emphasizing where/how the work may be used, but for OER at least, I think ND is more problematic than NC because to actually be useful in educational contexts one must be able to revise the work.

And of course, why not include CC0 in this list, which would be above CC-BY? I find that CC0 often gets left behind in discussions of CC licenses, with people thinking that the most permissive thing they can do is use CC-BY. But if one doesn’t particularly care about being attributed, then why not use CC0? Some may indeed care, and so then of course CC-BY is the right one to use.

I don’t have any big conclusions to draw from all this, except that I personally find the one from Foter the best in terms of presenting the information accurately, clearly and simply. I’d be curious to hear if others have different reactions!

It was all about OpenEd 2014 last week in Washington, DC. Brad and I presented on the work he has been doing to add an api to PressBooks. Amanda and Lauri also presented on managing an Open Textbook adaptation and how we have been doing things here in BC.

David announced that OpenEd 2015 will be held in Vancouver, BC next year & we (BCcampus) will be helping to host the event, so I was taking lots of notes on logistics organizing an event for 500+ people.

I wrote a blog post about OER efficacy after seeing John Hilton’s presentation on OER research.

I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with some people as I had hoped to, but am grateful to have finally met folks like Audrey Watters, David Kernohan, Vivien Rolfe, Tim Owens, Pat Lockley, Rob Farrow, Bea de los Arcos, Mikhail Gersovich, Nate Otto, Mike Caufield, Rolin Moe and so many others in person after connecting online for many, many years.

And such a great representation from BC at OpenEd with excellent presentations from UBC’s Will Engle & Novak Rogic, BCcampus faculty fellow & UBC faculty Christina Hendricks, RRU’s George Veletsianos., and JIBC’s Tannis Morgan (who’s 11 year old daughter wins the award for best graphic illustration of a presentation with this beauty of Brad from our session)

@bdolor @clintlalonde My daughter's notes from your excellent presentation #opened14 pic.twitter.com/XqGTefxX8O

— Tannis Morgan (@tanbob) November 20, 2014

While I was deep into conference networking mode for the majority of the week, Brad & I did get a chance to see some of Washington & spent a day playing tourist.

The backside of the White House with Washington Monument in bg

Flight of beer at Churchkey at the end of a long day playing tourist