Like many of you, my interest in learning extends beyond the teaching & learning that occurs within formalized educational institutions, which is why I am so interested in Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is, arguably, the greatest knowledge repository human beings have ever built. Which is why I get so excited when I see projects from academics that make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia. Making Wikipedia better is making the world better by making knowledge more accessible to everyone. Projects like Visualizing Complex Science (found via this Read-only access is not enough blog post on Creative Commons).

The Visualizing Complex Science project was done by Dr. Daniel Mietchen, a Berlin based Researcher & Biophysicist. Dr. Mietchen created a bot that crawls open access science journals looking for multimedia content. When the bot find an image, video or audio clip, it extracts the content & uploads it to the Wikimedia Commons where it can be used by Wikimedia authors to enhance articles.

The bot has uploaded more than 13,000 files to Wikimedia Commons and has been used in more than 135 English Wikipedia articles that together garnered more than three million views.

In addition to the actual project itself, what I find interesting about this project is deconstructing all the conditions that had to exist in order for this project to happen. For me, the recipe for this specific project breaks down to this:

Academic Researcher + Wikipedia + Open Access + hackathon + structured data = jackpot win for human knowledge.

Dissecting this equation a bit, we have an academic researcher who “gets” Wikipedia on a couple of levels. First, he feels it has enough value and importance as a knowledge repository that he is willing to put time into making it better. Second, he understands the technical aspects of the platform well enough that he can build something that massively improves the collection. Finally, he understands that Wikipedia has a massive reach & is a great tool to disseminate complex scientific research in a manner that makes it accessible to everyone. Wikipedia needs more academics like Dr. Mietchen.

Then we have Wikipedia itself, imbued with the value of open on a number of levels. First, open to contributions from anyone. Without allowing anyone to contribute, Dr. Mietchen might very well have had to jump through many bureaucratic layers to make a contribution. Also, those who built the software for Wikipedia made the platform open enough so that people like Dr. Mietchen could build bots capable of doing projects like this.

The next critical piece is Open Access. Without having openly licensed and openly accessible research articles, the bot wouldn’t have any data to mine. And, even if technically it could mine proprietary research journals, they could not legally be shared to the Wikimedia Commons because they would be protected from reuse by copyright.

Now, there are a few things in that equation that seem especially interesting. First, the hackathon. What role did a hackathon have in the success of this project? Well, when you listen to Dr. Mietchen talk about the project, you’ll hear him explain how he was inspired to create the automated Wikipedia bot after attending hackathons and seeing what programmers could do in a short period of time.

The other bit I find interesting is the role that structured data (everybody’s favorite sexy topic) played in making this happen. Without structured metadata explaining to the machines what that content is, whether it is in the correct technical format, and categorizing it correctly in the Wikimedia Commons, the bot just wouldn’t work.

Generativity

I think it is important to point out that these conditions were not put in place to make this project happened; the project happened because these conditions were already in place. It’s a crucial distinction, and a common story worth repeating when it comes to working with technology. It points to the importance of generativity in both Wikipedia and Open Access.

Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. Jonathon Zittrain, The Future of the Internet — And How To Stop It 

Both Wikipedia and Open Access have high degrees of generativity. And because of that generativity, Dr. Mietchen was able to build a tool that neither could have anticipated when they were created. I am sure that the architects of both Wikipedia and Open Access hoped that projects like this would happen. But neither knew that they would. Instead, they built in the capacity to enable projects like this to emerge from the community. And, as a result, improve knowledge for all. 

Words fail me when I try to capture the depth of my admiration for Grant Potter. A creative and profoundly thoughtful educator. A brilliant technologist, tinkerer, hauler of bootstraps. A webhead of the highest and most ethical order. An astonishing and versatile musician. An ambassador of almost every form of Canadiana worth feeling proud of. A riotous and abiding jokester. A stomper of terra. A generous and gregarious soul. That doesn’t even begin to cover it…

So I was thrilled to see that Grant is being recognised by his home institution at the University of Northern British Columbia, and will be delivering this year’s Robert W. Tait Annual Lecture on Implementing Teaching Excellence at UNBC. The talk is this Friday, January 10th at 2:00 PM PST. It is being livestreamed at https://bluejeans.com/405228030/browser I’m looking forward to hosting a little viewing party here at TRU.

More on the talk Grant will be doing:

“Connections, Community and Open Educational Practice”

The term “open”, in traditional terms means, positively, being open to ideas, experience, evidence, argument, discussion, persuasion, method and reason. In a more contemporary way, it has meant shared, free of copyright, or with a copyright model that allows sharing, it has meant collaborative and free to modify, and/or distribute. In educational institutions the idea of “open” starts with two things: visibility and persistence. What you do must be visible, with no constraints. And some part of it must produce artifacts that are persistent – they can be found over time. But to me open also implies a philosophy or value system – a belief that having activity out in the open yields multiple positive benefits and a commitment to continually work on becoming more accessible and inclusive. The people I know who continue to experiment with open learning and open resources have this philosophy as their underlying motivation: society benefits from sharing ideas and data but there remains a good deal of work to be done to find ways to put this vision into operation. This presentation will explore innovative, impactful examples of open educational practice and pathways to adoption for educators.

I wanted to finish up this post with an artefact of prime Potter. But what? There’s the ongoing wonder of DS106 Radio. His jaw-dropping short intro video he did for the first open iteration of DS106, “Until that Moment”. His fantastic talk at UMW Faculty Academy on “Tinkering, Learning, and The Adjacent Possible”.

Instead, I thought I would share one of the peak moments of my life, one of many that I owe to Grant. This video was shot on the Open Ed 2012 Conference jam, on a boat somewhere off the coast of Vancouver. It’s one of the participatory musical miracles for which Grant has been the ringleader over the years. And I always thought this clip (filmed so well by Novak Rogic) captured some sort of truth about open educational experiences for me. This particular group of musicians had never played together before, and maybe it’s a little too obvious that this song had never been rehearsed. David Wiley has said “content is infrastructure” in open ed, and here the “content” (the old song “Money”) is the shared knowledge that allows the band to improvise together with a sense of purpose and direction. But really, what makes this happen is energy and attitude. Watch Grant in this video, in it he embodies all the attributes of a stellar open educator. When Gardner Campbell calls out “Money” as the next song (I remember thinking at that moment with confusion that he meant the Pink Floyd song, and wondering how the hell we were going to pull that off), Grant adds that wonderful affirmative energy of his, and away we go. Throughout the song, besides demonstrating his considerable skills, he is actively watching and listening to the other musicians, and with his body language plays an invaluable role in holding the whole crazy thing together.

Can’t wait to hear Grant’s talk this Friday. And here’s to heaps more Potter-style adventures in the months and years ahead.

I rarely use Bing. Ok, I never use Bing, but a Twitter conversation with Laura Gibbs earlier today had me checking out the search engine.

Laura sent a tweet responding to a conversation I had earlier in the day with Dave Cormier about finding OER science images (as an aside, Dave ended up aggregating the tweets recommending possible sources of OER science images using Storify; a nifty way to use Twitter & Storify to crowdsource, aggregate and archive on the fly).

One of the suggestions I had for Dave was to use the Google advanced license search to filter image results by open license.

@davecormier @stevecontip @patlockley Also advanced Google Image search for CC material http://t.co/LhhU3uV0Lr

— Clint Lalonde (@clintlalonde) January 7, 2014

Laura saw that tweet and responded that you could also use Bing

@clintlalonde @davecormier @stevecontip @patlockley Even Bing has surprisingly convenient license filter: http://t.co/rzLkxw6qUs

— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) January 7, 2014

I didn’t realize Bing also let you filter by license type, so I followed Laura’s link and saw a collection of images in Bing, but there was no way that was obvious to me on how to filter my license. This is what I saw:

No license filter. So, thinking that there is another place where this is set, I start rooting around the Bing settings, but find nothing to filter on license types. So I ask Laura, who responds with a screen shot of what she sees.

Wait, what is that license dropdown on her menu? Why don’t I see it on mine?

Turns out, the license filter was not appearing for me because my country settings were set to Canada. If I changed my country settings to US, the license filter appears.

So it appears that Bing’s license filter only works if you have your country settings set to US. Which strikes me as odd. Why not just make it default for all geographical locations? t first I thought that maybe there was some legal reason why they restrict filtering on license by country, but then though if that was the case, why would they let users so easily override it by switching their country settings? Wouldn’t they have some more sophisticated geo-location mechanism in place if that was a serious concern?

At any rate, if you use Bing and want to use it to search for Creative Commons licensed material, you need to change your Worldwide settings to US.

Oh, and as was pointed out on the conversation thread by Pat Lockley…

@clintlalonde @davecormier @stevecontip I never trusted google search, saw too many falsely attributed pics

— patlockley (@patlockley) January 7, 2014

You do sometimes find images that are not correctly licensed. If you get the feeling that the CC-BY licensed image might not be, do a bit more digging to find the source of the image. TinEye is a good tool that might help you track down the source of the image.

Happened to look in on a blog for a course on Philosophy and Pop Culture at TRU. Saw a post that I thought was remarkable for a couple reasons.

A student had just posted some fresh reflections, though the course was over. He wrote: “I know that I no longer need to create new posts, but it seemed like this is the perfect place to post my current thoughts.”

This in itself is remarkable, though not so unusual. I suppose some would find it trite to observe this would rarely occur in an LMS, even if the student was not locked out of the course environment as a matter of university policy at course’s end. Here, even in a shared course blog on an institutional WordPress install, this student felt a stake in this space, understood that it was a place for continued reflection and growth.

The student was exploring, in part, his ongoing responses to Andrew Wildman’s graphic novel Horizon. Educational bloggers will not be so surprised to see that Wildman offered a comment on the blog in response. Again, would that happen in an LMS?  If mediums communicate messages, this exchange illustrates that the student’s thoughts and words have value. The student is not merely engaging in a simulation of intellectual discourse, but taking their thoughts into the world.

I couldn’t resist Tweeting this exchange when I saw it. Which again, not so surprisingly elicited yet another comment from the most thoughtful and engaged commenter I have ever known.

These sorts of things happen all the time over on UMW Blogs, but we are still building out our infrastructure and culture of open online learning here at TRU. I hope these stories become commonplace here soon.

Another common manifestation of open learning went down in my personal network yesterday. That it happened without really seeming all that remarkable at the time is hitting me as amazing right now. (Was there something in those brownies I just ate?)

I’m doing a little bit of preparation for next Monday’s VideoCamp here at TRU. Since I am an utter neophyte at video work (thankfully we have a cohort of other facilitators lined up), the only “teaching” I might do is work through Popcorn Maker with any participants who just want a simple tool for basic augmentation and remixing of online video. I remembered that Clint Lalonde had organized workshops using Popcorn, and then remembered that I am lazy and shameless, so I fired Clint a Twitter DM asking if there were any tutorials he would recommend.

Because Clint is a better open educator than me, he responded publicly in case his pointer would be of use to somebody else.

This is a good how-to tutorial on Mozilla Popcorn. CC licensed for sharing & reuse http://t.co/g4rBo4Qvce @brlamb

— Clint Lalonde (@clintlalonde) December 5, 2013

Then he widened the scope.

Wondering if @acoolidge @heli_tomato @sunnydeveloper or @remixmanifesto know of any other good Popcorn tutorials for @brlamb

— Clint Lalonde (@clintlalonde) December 5, 2013

An aforementioned open educational hero caught wind of the discussion and interjected with important cautions that probably saved me and the VideoCamp participants some pain…

@clintlalonde @brlamb But don't think of Popcorn as video editor, it chokes once past 2 clips. Think of it as remix/augment platform

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013

@brlamb @clintlalonde I made the video mistake when I made this assignment http://t.co/3OZquiuq5U

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013

…and also shared a cool use case.

@clintlalonde @brlamb Met some dudes at mozfest using popcorn to remix GIF w/ audio from youtube clip for audioGIF http://t.co/9S43mJ1Lc1

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) December 5, 2013

Chris Lott brought another vital contributor into the discussion, …

https://twitter.com/lottruminates/status/408686049682944000

…and wasn’t I happy to make Christen’s acquaintance:

@lottruminates @brlamb @clintlalonde @cogdog Are we talking PopcornMaker or Popcorn HTML5 framework? The latter has way more flexibility.

— Christen Bouffard (@iconolith) December 5, 2013

Popcorn HTML5 framework? I didn’t even know what that was. Whoa.

@lottruminates @brlamb @clintlalonde @cogdog I don't have much for PopcornMaker but Webmaker Tumblr has good examples http://t.co/cBPZwFlVKN

— Christen Bouffard (@iconolith) December 5, 2013

Then some more of the people Clint flagged earlier started to chime in:

@clintlalonde @acoolidge @sunnydeveloper @remixmanifesto @brlamb past tutorial resources at http://t.co/OTtAirgudl following blog post

— Helen Lee (@heli_tomato) December 5, 2013

@heli_tomato @clintlalonde @acoolidge @sunnydeveloper @brlamb yeah you can find popcorn tutorial on https://t.co/ISolW24BOH

— Brett Gaylor (@remixmanifesto) December 5, 2013

@brlamb @cogdog @clintlalonde Brian, happy to do a tutorial for anyone in your hood! We can do it virtually. FYI

— Amanda Coolidge (@acoolidge) December 5, 2013

Among the tutorials these exchanges turned up was this brilliant overview from Miriam Posner. Licensed CC, so I think I will incorporate it into the VideoCamp site. I thought should give Miriam a huzzah and a heads-up on my intention to pilfer (she’s cool with it), and was not entirely surprised to see that CogDog had beat me to the comments field.

Again, these things happen all the time in open online learning circles. But I still get asked “how do you find the time to engage social media”? It repays the time investment so many times over — in this case with great resources, pointers to new experts for me to follow, and a reminder that I am part of a collaborative community full of generous and gifted people. So before I dive into the VideoCamp site to build on all these wonderful contributions, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate just how amazingly unremarkable these sorts of interactions can be.

I’m really happy right now, and it is all Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani’s fault.

Dr. Jhangiani is an instructor at Capilano University who I first connected with this summer when we were looking for faculty reviewers of open textbooks as part of the BC open textbook project. Dr. Jhangiani came to us with a Research Methods textbook that we didn’t know about and asked if he could review it as part of the project. At the time I thought it was fantastic that we had faculty bringing us open resources that we were not aware of. Really that was just the beginning of Dr. Jhangiani’s awesomeness.

A few weeks ago I was presenting on open textbooks at a conference in Vancouver where I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Jhangiani in person. We had a brief chat and he told me that he had adopted the textbook this fall. Awesome moment #2 from Dr. Jhangiani.

But today…today he took it to another level.

This morning I read an email he sent to me pointing me to his personal website where he has posted his revised version of the open Research Methods textbook that he reviewed. Seeing that completely made my week.

Dr. Jhangiani took an existing open textbook and did exactly what we hoped an instructor would do; revise it to meet his needs and then release it back to the commons under an open license for others to use and reuse.

And I suspect that the changes he made to the open research methods textbook will become valuable for others in the system as he has taken a textbook that was written with an American perspective and Canadianized it, removing American examples and replacing them with Canadian examples. He also modified the book to make sure that Canadian laws and perspectives on research were included, and added a table of contents, which the original textbook was missing. Heck, he even nailed the Creative Commons licensing.

Here is an instructor who has taken an existing open resource that was 80% of the way there and instead of going “this doesn’t meet my needs so I am not going to use it” took full advantage of the open license on the book and modified it to work for him. Not only has he saved his students money by making a free, open textbook available to them, but he has also made a valuable resource that others will no doubt use and benefit from.

This is the EXACT use case we have been hoping to see with the open textbook project. I have dreamed of seeing this happen and I am freakin’ PUMPED to see a vision realized. Thank you, Dr. Jhangiani! You have no idea how happy I am right now.

Okay, off to do a happy dance, Big Lebowski style

Ok, that might be a bit intense. Maybe more like John Candy style

Or….really…just take your own pick and join me in my happy dance.

Jim Groom has been on a tear lately, clearly articulating some of the fundamental principles of the web & open learning that many of us attempt to bring into practice.

His Open, Public Education Platforms #4life post last week resonated quite deeply with the educational technologist in me as Jim connects the role of EdTech with something much larger than simply being the person helping faculty shovel content into pre-built LMS templates. As Jim points out, as educational technologists, we can do so much more (emphasis mine);

I should be building communities that are premised upon openly sharing the work we’re doing as public institutions. I understand the need for the LMS, I just don’t understand its value. This field should be pushing to make the work faculty and students are doing part and parcel of the web in order to bridge the understanding for hundreds of thousands of people on the web.

Jim situates the open work being done at UMW within a larger societal context, and along the way has really asked a bigger question than what is the role of an EdTech in an institution, but what is the role of our public institutions within society? Is the role of our public educational institutions only to educate the few select who manage to meet the entrance requirements, or is there a larger,  much more fundamental role in educating ALL people, regardless of whether they have been “allowed” in?

What Jim writes about is making our work transparent and available to be found; to set up the conditions for curious people to serendipitously discover the knowledge that, for so long, has been hoarded behind our institutional walls.

It’s about just-in-timing learning where we can be the providers of information at the precise moment that someone who is curious about a topic is looking for them. It is about making our knowledge findable on the tools people use everyday to find information, like Google.

His latest post continues on the theme of opening the institution and brings in one of my favorite topics: authentic learning, and the role that open education has in creating authentic learning opportunities for students.  Jim talks about a history project where students are collaboratively working side by side with the faculty to develop a website of learning resources associated with the Taiping Civil War.

Think about it, fifteen newly decalred history majors drilling into a focused topic alongside a faculty member who’s guiding them in the collaborative construction of an intellectual resource designed specifcially for the web.

Now THAT is an open education resource! And what can be more motivating for a student than knowing the work you are doing might actually be used as a source by someone who happens to search for the Taiping Civil War in the future?

And all because a professor simply said, “Why not?” Why can’t UMW undergrads do this? Why can’t we work together to build a resource for a broader public rather than remain a slave to the individually produced research papers that two people will ever read? Why can’t a course have a domain that becomes the ongoing record of the thinking about a topic that anyone can access?

It reminds me of some of the more exciting open textbook projects I have seen, like Project Management for Instructional Designers  and the Chemwiki project at UC Davis, both of which began life as faculty led student created open projects. The Chemwiki project now generates over 2 million visitors each month, making it one of the most visited domains in the entire UC Davis online world.

Now, I can almost hear the drool dripping from the institutional marketing mouths right now, but this goes so much more deeper than providing Google juice to an institutional web presence. This is about providing authentic learning experiences for students to contribute to their chosen domain in real and meaningful ways while being guided by experts in the field; their instructor. The final result of which makes the open web a vastly better place by providing something of authority and substance in a web content world that is feeling more vacuous and hollow.

Higher education can make the web so much more than Buzzfeed, Perez Hilton and TMZ. We can contribute in ways that are much more real, authentic and valuable. But it all starts from the place of making the work we do open outside the confines of restricted publishing platforms. Because if it can’t be found, it doesn’t exist. And content that is locked away inside institutional content management systems is content that can’t be found except by a privileged few who have figured out how to jump the hoops needed to get access.

Following David’s lead (and thanks to some great WordPress plugin work by Tim Owens),  I’ve installed a social annotation tool called Hypothes.is on this site. Actually, it looks like much more than a social annotation tool, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Hypothes.is is a non-profit funded by (among others) the Shuttleworth Foundation (who are funding some very innovative work right now in the education/web space, including the OERPub project and Siyavula). It is a social web annotation platform being developed around web standards proposed by the W3C Open Annotation community group.

A WordPress plugin is just one of the Hypothes.is tools. There is also a Chrome browser plugin and (soon) a plugin for Firefox. These plugins allow you to annotate and highlight across the web. So, annotation works in 2 ways, either on the user side via the browser plugins, or on the site builder side via a WordPress plugin.

If you highlight and right-click any text on the page, you should see a little balloon/pen icon pop up. Click on the icon and a panel will slide out from the right of the page. You need a Hypothes.is account to highlight and annotate. If you don’t have one, you can create one quickly from the fly out.

If you want to see the comments that are on the page, there are 2 prompts on the page that show you there are comments. First, you can click on the icon in the top right hand corner of the page that looks like this:

Hover over the icon and you’ll see some other icons appear that allow you see the annotations & highlights on the page, or to highlight and annotate yourself.

The second prompt that shows you there are comments are the icons on the right of the page that look like directional arrows:

This one appears in the bottom right corner of the page on posts that have comments on them (like the one you will see on this post if you are viewing the post itself. For some reason, Hypothes.is doesn’t seem to be working on the home page of the blog). Click on the icon and you are taken to the exact spot in the post that has been highlighted or annotated.

This is still very much an alpha project, but looks promising as a collaborative annotation tool. One of the concepts that I really like about it is that you have the ability to aggregate all of your annotations and comments under one account, something I tried to do many years ago, but gave up on in frustration as the tools that were around at the time were frustrating to use. I want to be able to have a central place that shows me all of my conversations on the web, and this might be a good option.

There are a few things I like about Hypothes.is the project as well. Reading their principles, it looks like they are committed to creating a tool that remains non-profit, free and that works anywhere – important qualities if they hope to garner enough critical mass to make the project a success. The rest of the principles are equally important and you should take a read through.

As more and more websites turn off comments, I can see services like Hypothes.is (and existing tools like the Diigo, which is often forgotten as an annotation tool and used by many only as a social bookmarking tools) are going to be important tools to keep the conversation flowing.

As for the more than a social annotation tool bit I hinted at in the lead, Hypothes.is appears to be framing itself as a tool for discussion and collaboration rather than simple highlighting and annotating.

Hypothes.is will be an open platform for the collaborative evaluation of knowledge. It will combine sentence-level critique with community peer-review to provide commentary, references, and insight on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more.

I am not exactly sure how this bit works yet. But as I play with Hypothes.is I am eager to find out.

Something I learned about the history of the web from the Hypothes.is promotional video. Annotations were an original feature of Mosaic, but disabled at the last minute when the browser first shipped. Which makes you wonder what the web would be like today if comments were enabled from the start through the browser right from the get go.

For a guy who says he doesn’t blog about MOOC’s much, 2 in a week might be a record. But there is something about this Exporting Education article that really bugs me. It is the way that the article implies that Coursera and Udacity are the same as Open Courseware and they clearly are not.

At the heart of the difference is the way the content is licensed in the different courses. OCW courses use open licenses, meaning the content can be modified. Courses from Coursera and Udacity are not openly licensed; they cannot be modified for local contexts. In the context of the article, this is a vitally important distinction to make since the article states that:

MOOCs are being welcomed as a free resource and adapted to local contexts

Well, not if they are Coursera or Udacity courses since most of the content is copyright by those corporations (unless the participating institution negotiates to releases their Coursera MOOC material intentionally with open licenses, like, I believe, UBC has with their Coursera offerings).

This is the fundamental problem many in the open movement have with Coursera and Udacity – they are not open resources. But yet they are getting connected by association to the open resource movement. And this is wrong. Not only does it undermine the many years of hard work done by open education advocates to make sure educational resources are openly licensed resources, it is a vitally important pedagogical difference, especially when examined through the lens of this article.

The article makes the point that, MOOC’s as they are being implemented and used in developing countries have the potential to reduce local capacities and lead to the Americanization of education in the developing world. The MacDonald’s version of higher ed. Or, as the author puts it with a better metaphor, the “Baywatch” of learning.

It’s easy to imagine a future in which the educational equivalent of reruns of Baywatch—a limited menu of glossy American fare—comes to dominate the cultural landscape in developing countries around the world, making it more difficult for cash-starved universities in those countries to pursue scholarship relevant to local contexts

One of the ways to keep this from happening is by making sure the courses are openly licensed so that they can be legally adapted to a local context. If developing worlds end up relying on corporations like Coursera and Udacity who tightly control courses using copyright as their enforcement hammer, then developing worlds will end up with a corporate one size fits all educational model. Education outsourced to America. Whereas if those developing countries are free to take and modify courses & educational resources to fit their local context – like they are with OCW materials – then they will have a distributed, highly contextual model of education that better fits their community.

Coursera vs OCW are fundamentally different in this regard. Open Courseware material empowers educators whereas Coursera material creates dependency. Or a market, depending on how cynical your perspective is.

Photo: Baywatch The MOOC is released by me under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. It is a modified version of the following images:

• Baywatch Board Game by What What released under a CC-BY-NC-SA licenses
• Daphne Koller by Dawn Endico released under a CC-BY-SA license
• Future transportation: Sebastian Thrun by World Economic Forum and released under CC-BY-NC-SA license
• Pivot MOOC by Alan Levine released under CC-BY-SA license

United States Senators Dick Durban and Al Franken (above) have introduced legislation into the US Senate called The Affordable College Textbook Act.  SPARC has a good post on the proposed legislation, stating that the legislation will “help expand the use of open educational resources to more colleges in more states, and provide a framework for sharing educational materials and best practices” through:

• Grants for colleges. The bill directs the Department of Education to create a competitive grant program for higher education institutions (or groups of higher education institutions) to establish pilot programs that use open educational resources to reduce textbook costs for students. Grant amounts are not specified, but appropriations in such sums as are necessary are authorized for five fiscal years.
• Pilot programs. Pilot program activities can include any combination of the following: professional development for faculty and staff, development or improvement of educational materials, creation of informational resources, or efficacy research. Grant funds can also go toward partnerships with other entities to fulfill these activities.
• Open educational resources. Any educational materials developed or improved through the grants will be posted online and licensed to allow everyone – including other colleges, students and faculty – to use the materials freely. The bill specifies that the license will be the Creative Commons Attribution License, or an equivalent, which grants full use rights with author attribution as the only condition.
• Sharing outcomes. Grantees are required to submit a report evaluating the impact their respective pilot programs and to submit a plan for disseminating this information to other institutions. The bill also commissions a GAO report on textbook costs and the impact of open educational resources in 2017.

Reading these bullet points, I can see two obvious ways that this proposed legislation can benefit BC, Canada and, indeed, the rest of the world.

First, the legislation is clear that all materials created be licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning that anyone will be able to use and modify the textbooks. So, if this legislation becomes law, we can expect that the number of textbooks that are available in the worldwide commons of open textbooks to substantially increase. Any textbook created with funding from the grants associated with this legislation become textbooks we can use and modify.

Second, the provision around sharing outcomes will provide much needed data that can be used to support the continued development and adoption of open textbooks. I see many case studies coming out of the projects associated with this legislation. With luck, this will also mean academic researchers will be able to tap into funding to conduct empirical research on the effectiveness of Open Educational Resources. This type of research knows no borders. Indeed, much of the empirical research that we currently have on the effectiveness of OER and open textbooks comes from the US & the UK. We need more, and while I would advocate for the importance of Canadian-based research, all research is incredibly useful and important.

I don’t know how the US system of government works in enough detail to know if this legislation has a chance of passing or not. But if it does become law, it has the potential to greatly increase the awareness of open textbooks, the available pool of open textbooks, and the body of knowledge about the effectiveness of open textbooks not only in the U.S., but everywhere, including us in British Columbia working on open textbooks.

Okay, and because it’s a blog post mentioning Al Franken (which I might never get to do again) I have an excuse to link to some classic SNL – Stuart Smalley with Michael Jordan

Photo: Al Franken by Aaron Landry used under CC-BY-NC-SA license