OER

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.

Some excerpts that struck me as particularly relevant:

in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.

In fact, many students I’ve spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”

and

At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B.

In reading this, I was struck how applicable this is to most disciplines, and how the requirements of a system that uses high-stakes testing as a primary means for assessing mastery (and as the basis for funding/management decisions) squeezes out the time required for engaging students around a big-picture vision of a subject -- and how that subject really cannot be contained within curricular lines. While most subjects have a set of core competencies that allow for a greater exploration of the subject, the core competencies cannot be confused with the end goal.

Among the many benefits of open content, this feels like one of the most compelling: content that can be freely edited and redistributed allows a teacher to balance the core competencies against the big-picture understanding. If this learning is supported within a learning environment that supports student-directed inquiry, the information contained within an open curriculum could provide a supporting framework for student work. This type of blended learning environment (part online, part face to face; part teacher directed, part student directed) would allow shared focus on core competencies and larger questions.

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 deal of flexibility for creating and remixing open content.

From my comment on Gardner Campbell's blog:

Hello, Gardner,

As a few people have already pointed out, these are incremental moves -- Open Content has been around for a while, as have blog-based classes. I think most of us are in agreement that, in general terms, these are Good Things, and that these shifts are improvements over expensive textbooks and cumbersome, expensive, proprietary LMS's.

The incremental shifts, however, become more meaningful when considered together.

Pulling content from a closed repository isn't all that big a deal -- we've had rss for a while. But, putting high quality content into a container where it can be readily remixed and reused is an incremental step in the right direction.

Using this newly liberated content as the basis for constructing a course isn't that big a deal either. You can use a blog as the skeleton for a traditional course, or you can use the blog as a tool for fostering discussion within a network of learners. And in this case, the second approach is what generates the excitement.

If you port open content into a blog-based class where students can participate using the tools of their choosing, you are allowing students to participate in a way that doesn't shut them off from their own intellectual work. This is an enormous shift from the traditional LMS.

So, when you combine these pieces together, you get:

1. Open Content in a highly portable, reusable format. This open content, unlike most open content currently out there, is easy to reuse.
2. If you collect your newly created curriculum into a planning repository, you then begin to create a new body of Open Content, thus increasing the amount of good quality open content.
3. When you import your curriculum into a social learning space (I agree w/Chris -- the term "blog" gets confusing), you create class record of student interaction around open content.
4. Students interact in the learning space by using their chosen tools; they always have control over their work. Subsequently, they can make that into a PLE/portfolio if they want to, completely outside of the course context.
5. All of this has been accomplished using tools that are easy to set up, inexpensive to use, and easy to administer.

All of these are incremental changes. However, when you put these changes together, they allow for a degree of flexibility and control not present in most systems. As to whether it's evolutionary or revolutionary, I don't know, nor do I really care. It's an improvement that has the potential to get high quality content to a broader range of people at a lower cost.

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
http://www.chrislott.org/2008/02/17/confused-about-the-blog-uproar/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044813.php
http://www.funnymonkey.com/mini-edu-rss
http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/on-eduglu-part-1-background/
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/010236.html -- this is from Tony Hirst, who has an almost overwhelming amount of great information regarding remixing content on his blog.
I've also been thinking about the work Scott Wilson has been doing with FeedForward.

Toward the end of this post, I fall short of the needed conversation when I talk about the Course and Learner sections. There’s more to be said here -- a lot more -- but the poor souls who actually persevere to that point in the post will probably agree that I’ve said enough by then already.

An Open Content and Open Learning environment

External Repository -- in this context, an external repository is a place where content is stored. In many ways, the external repository is an artificial construct that doesn’t need to exist. The single most important argument in favor of the external repository is that the external repo can provide a level of credibility that less “official” sources of information lack. For example, a piece of information coming from the MIT’s OpenCourseware will have more credibility than a YouTube video.

These external repositories, however, need to expose their content via rss/atom, or web services, something that many of them do not do. With that said, it would also be nice to see the major OCW repositories use less pdf’s to allow for easier modification.

On a technical note, Tony Hirst pointed to a Mediawiki plugin that exposes full Mediawiki articles as rss feeds. This extends Mediawiki’s flexibility by allowing Mediawiki content to be imported via rss feeds.

Planning Repository -- the planning repos are the staging grounds of course preparation. Planning repositories will import selected courses from a variety of external repositories. While a limited number of people might have access to an external repository, more people can have access to a planning repository. Within the planning repository, users can edit existing courses, add links, text, images, etc. Then, users can select individual pieces of different courses, and re-organize them into a new course. By definition, planning repositories should be messy. They are workspaces, and should be viewed as a place where people go from draft versions to more polished versions of course materials.

For example: a history department creates an departmental planning repository. Initially, they import a variety of courses from different external repositories. Then, instructors add content as needed. Once they have finished adding content, they select the lessons/material they want for their course. So, an instructor teaching a course on the Rise of Modernism could incorporate material from a course on WWI. Once the instructors have selected and organized their lessons, they export them into their courses.

On the technical side, the planning repository could be a Drupal site built using the FeedAPI. I described how to do this here, and revisited the idea here. Alan Levine (in the comments here) and Jared Stein and Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn (in the comments here ) ask about how to select individual pieces of content for inclusion in a course. Once you have imported content into a Drupal site, you can use Views Bookmarks, Nodequeue, or node references (part of CCK) for doing exactly that.

Once the individual lessons have been selected and organized into a course, they can be exposed via an rss feed.

Mediawiki would also make an excellent planning repository by using XFeed to aggregate external content and the WikiArticle Feeds Extension (linked to above) to generate rss feeds for curriculum.

However, here is another wrinkle: every school is already producing curriculum. Teachers generate curriculum for all of their classes. If a school used a planning repository to coordinate curriculum planning, they could export the polished curriculum to a web site that could become an external repository. In this way, schools generate their curriculum maps and provide open content as part of their ongoing course planning and development process.These planning repositories becoming external repositories would have one enormous advantage over existing content repositories: they would be fully open, with all content within them accessible via rss feeds. For all schools currently undergoing accreditation reviews, how much time are you spending collecting up curricular materials? If you build your curriculum as described in this post, you have all your curriculum ready to hand, and categorized via tags.

It’s worth noting that the technology to do this exists now, and can be built entirely using open source tools.

It’s also worth noting that, using Drupal, you can clone an entire site -- configuration, content, and even user accounts -- and move that site with minimal effort. It’s what we’ve been doing with DrupalEd for nearly a year, and with less sophisticated class sites since September of 2005.

Courses -- In this context, courses are blog based tools, and could be delivered via a tool like Wordpressor Drupal. Curricular material could be imported; Jim has shown how to do this, D’Arcy has shown how to do this , and the aggregation examples I linked to earlier show how to do this.

The feeds of learners taking the course could be added to a blogroll, or, in the case of Drupal, could be imported directly into the site. With OpenID becoming more prevalent, students could either be site members, or be granted access via their OpenID. This flexibility would allow learners to interact with the course using their preferred tools, and, if they wanted, using their pre-established online identity.

Learners -- In this context, learners are just about anyone. You don’t need to be a student to be a learner, although, for obvious reasons, most schools probably wouldn’t allow open enrollment in their courses.

For me, the interesting piece of this has to with the potential for a true PLE. While I’m not particularly enamored of the whole notion of the PLE (I see it as more of a construct than a piece of technology, and something that is better achieved via innate curiosity than lines of code, but that’s another conversation), this system of open learning solves one of the main problems inherent in most PLE implementations: how to get course content out of the course and into the PLE. In this situation, that’s not an issue, as learners use their chosen tools to contribute in their courses. As they are doing the work from their platform, they retain control of their work in a way that just isn’t possible using proprietary LMS’s, or even open source LMS’s like Moodle.

Next Steps

The next steps could include any/all of the following:

• A school, or a group of teachers, banding together to create course materials in a planning repository. Dan Meyer has called for something along these lines a while back.
• More teachers using a blog-based approach to delivering content. The WPMU work that Jim helped spearhead shows one way of doing this; and the folks at BYU have illustrated another way of doing this.
• Existing Open Content repositories could actually expose their content via rss feeds. If this happened, one of the enornous barriers to actually using the open content that has been published to date would be removed.

These thoughts are incomplete -- what's missing? What needs closer examination? What else needs to be considered here?

I’m writing these ideas out quickly -- there are sure to be holes in this, and gaps in this reasoning -- please point them out in the comments.

For some context on this post, see these two threads on Dan Meyer's blog.

Users working with online lessons will generally fall into at least one of the following categories:

1. People searching for lesson ideas (probably the majority)
2. People already creating content on their own blogs (a growing number of folks, but still a very small percentage, compared to people in category 1, or even teacher-bloggers)
3. People looking for a place to create content (people who want to create blogs, etc -- I have no idea how many people fall into this category, but I’d imagine that if people, particularly younger teachers, saw the benefit they would have some amazing things to contribute)
4. People who will find lessons on another site, edit/revise those lessons for use in their class, and republish the updated content on their own site
5. People who will edit/revise content on someone else’s site (ie, wiki-style) -- the majority of these people would probably be very committed to the ideals of Open Educational Resources (OERs), have part of their professional responsibilities include curriculum development, or have some other type of immediate personal connection to a learning community. These people would probably be the ones to make the greatest use of any social networking features within the site

Produce --> Share --> Reuse --> Remix -- where does influence fit in? The influence of shared lessons, and the role that influence can have in helping a teacher develop and revise their existing materials, should not be overlooked.

Most working teachers do not have the time to collaborate online with other teachers to create freely available resources. Most of the teachers I talk to barely have time to engage in that type of collaboration within their own schools, let alone within an online/social networking context. Most teachers, even the ones currently blogging their lessons, do not have the free time to join another site and learn another system, even if there are long-term benefits. Teacher time needs to be respected, which is why any system that mandates a teacher use a new tool to participate will lose a good number of potential contributors due to that barrier to entry.

Here is what I propose -- and what I have partially built, here: http://threeclicks.org/lessons

1. A site that aggregates lessons already being published online. This way, any teacher currently blogging lessons doesn’t need to change a single thing about how they work. If they want to make it easier, they can choose to tag any lessons with a unique keyword, like “lesson” -- this would allow us (in most cases, anyways) to aggregate posts in that specific keyword.
2. All imported lessons are full-text searchable, and, when possible, tagged with keywords that describe the lessons
3. Organize the lessons by content area
4. Possibly, add in rating mechanisms to allow site members to rate content
5. All posts imported into the site can be printed via a print-friendly page, and exported via rss.
6. As a further development, possibly create a mechanism where site users could clone and revise imported content, or create new lessons to be published within the site. This lesson development would leverage content already created and imported into the site, or could be used by interested people to develop learning resources from scratch. For this type of curricular planning, we could incorporate wiki-type functionality.
7. As noted by David Rothstein here, we could incorporate a “request a lesson” feature

What is missing? Please add any necessary details/suggestions in the comments.

If Jimmy Wales says I'm wrong, then I probably am.

But...

On a recent blog post, Jimmy Wales (or someone posing as Jimmy Wales, because I always assumed Jimmy Wales had better things to do than spend time out here in the EdTech hinterlands. Besides, if I had known Jimmy was coming over, I would have cleaned up the joint :) ) commented on a post where I advocated for using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 (NC-SA) license for open educational resources.

His comment:

What you really are after is copyleft, not noncommercial licenses. Noncommercial licenses block all business models, even those which are not based on taking things out of the commons.

If someone can find a way to make a living out of improving (and selling) freely licensed materials, and they contribute their improvements back to the commons, we are all made better off.

And I get that, and agree with that. The point isn't to block business/commerce, but to take steps to ensure that Open Educational Resources remain open, and freely available. I like two main things about the NC-SA license: 1, by default it prohibits use in a for-profit enterprise, and 2, it contains a clause saying that "(a)ny of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder."

So, as I see it, the NC-SA license means that a resource can be made freely available. If a company wants to use the material as part of a profit-making product, they can seek the permission of the person/organization who holds the license, thus allowing businesses based on open content to thrive. This would not restrict, in any form, the ability of businesses to use the material as part of internal training, a knowledgebase, etc. As Jimmy says, and I agree with, when companies "find a way to make a living out of improving (and selling) freely licensed materials, and they contribute their improvements back to the commons, we are all made better off."

The key here is whether or not the company contributes back to the community. My concern with Open Educational Resources (OER) centers around the attitude of the publishing industry toward content and curriculum -- within the States, the major textbook companies have a long track record of viewing both as commodities, and, as described in this paper (pdf download), they have an effective loop consisting of lobbying to supprt specific educational policy while building curriculum that meets the newly legislated need. Given this backdrop, it is not farfetched to imagine a situation where a textbook publishing company used an OER to produce a text and a curriculum, and then used the threat of legal action to slow down/intimidate the competition. The merit of the lawsuit isn't the issue; rather, it is the time and money needed to defend against a suit. And we don't need to look very far to see an example of legal manipulations and lawsuits designed as part of an overall business strategy. Microsoft provides another example of this behavior.

Does copyleft provide adequate protection against this type of behavior? Is there another license that does this more effectively? What is the best method of ensuring that OERs remain freely available?

From some comments I made on Tom Hoffman's blog, in response to the Capetown Declaration -- Stephen Downes also has a great take on this.

As I see it, the thing to be avoided is:

A person or a community creates a resource that is freely available, and can be easily moved from one site to another. Some other entity comes along, uses that resource as a base for their work, distributes that resource, charges money for access to that resource, yet does not the new source material freely available.

That entity has effectively taken something that was freely available and commodified it into something that is no longer freely available.

In general terms, the point of an OER is to create a tool that is freely available. As that tool is improved, the improved version will also remain freely available.

From reading the Capetown Declaration, it is not difficult to imagine a situation where the major publishers co-opt chunks of allegedly "open content" and unleash their "experts" on it, and then generate reams of marketing material describing how they are embracing the democratization of knowledge. And, of course, this "new" work built on top of OERs would not be freely available.

It's pretty obvious that the barriers to more widespread adoption of OERs are financial, and not technical. Creating, sharing, and republishing content is easy. Any chump with a few hours of spare time can cobble something together. And textbook publishers are very nervous, as they should be. Given that the CC Non-Commercial Share-Alike License exists, and has a mechanism to prevent removing OERs from the realm of free access, why not use it?

The only answer that readily springs to mind is that it doesn't play well with business plans that are predicated on selling content. The thing I love about the non-commercial license is that it aligns perfectly with a business plan predicated on selling services that add value to content. In other words, you actually need to *know something* about what you sell.

David Wiley recently posted on what some folks are calling Open Educational Resources, or OER’s. This post extends my comment left on David’s original post.

In his post, David starts by examining the difference between producers and consumers of Open Educational Resources, with an emphasis that Good Things ™ start happening when the Consumers become the Producers through the magic of wiki-style group editing.

He suggests that one of the impediments to broader re-use of OER’s results from the original R living in a strict context -- ie, the R came into existence because of a specific educational need in a specific educational place, and reusing the R will be difficult in part because no two contexts are alike.

This leads to a comparison of OER development to Open Source development, particularly the notion that OER creators, like Open Source developers, are people who develop resources to “scratch” a personal “itch.”

It’s an interesting and thought provoking conversation, but one that breaks in a few places. Wiley is right on when he speaks of context being a limiting factor in reusing open content. However, he concludes:

Perhaps instead of sharing watered-down, decontextualized, 'professional' versions of our educational materials we should share context-rich, personality-laden ones.

This conclusion sidesteps the issue.

If content is going to be reused in a different context, then it actually needs to be reused in a different context. This context shift cannot occur when the resource remains locked in the originating site, firmly within its original context. A resource only becomes reusable when the next user can pick it up and take it with them (The analogy that comes to mind is taking a kid to a sports store and showing them a soccer ball on display in a window, and then telling them to have a great match, but that they need to play the match with the ball remaining off-limits behind the glass). Pointing to a resource on the web, and even editing a currently existing resource, only accomplishes part of the task. While it’s great that we have a growing body of freely accessible content, we’d be foolish to pretend that it couldn’t be better.

And this brings us to the Open Source comparison, and why Open Source development is thriving: with open source, you can take it with you. I can download Apache, MySQL, and PHP and install them on my computer. I can build a Mediawiki site, and install Drupal, and install Moodle. As I do this, the little mice in my brain start moving and spinning their wheels, and when I have questions, I can look into the code, or change the config settings, on my machine, in my own context. If I have an idea that makes sense, I can bring it back to the community. If it makes sense to enough people there, then the idea gets picked up. If it doesn’t, then so be it. But I can still use my resource, in my way, and connect back to the community as needed.

This portability is the missing piece in creating widely re-used Open Content. There are some initial forays into moving content between sites -- Mediawiki has an excellent xml import/export feature; Moodle has the ability to back up pieces of courses, and Drupal has an array of import/export options. RSS import also provides the means to move content between sites. However, all of these methods require a comfort level with technology that stretches many users. Personally, I haven’t met many people inside or outside education who are particularly comfortable cutting and pasting an xml file.

For Open Content to work, moving content needs to be simple. A user should be able to select anything from a page in a lesson to an entire chapter, and the selected contents should be exportable from one site and importable to another via a web UI.

It’s also worth noting that the obstacles here are not technical. As RSS demonstrates, a lightweight solution does a great job moving large amounts of content between sites. However, until someone proposes a general spec, nothing will move.

So, here goes:

1. Use the native solutions already under development or in use in Moodle, Drupal, and Mediawiki. For Moodle, this would be the backup/restore feature; in Drupal, the Import/Export API , and in Mediawiki, the XML import/export functionality. For what it’s worth, the Mediawiki import/export seems to work with the fewest hitches.
2. Code a central filter to convert content from one site into an appropriate format for the other. This process would likely need to include some choices about supported and unsupported markup. This filter would need to ship as an included library with the import/export block/module/extension for each application
3. For each application, build a form that managed the import into each application; ie, a web UI that exposed the import/export functionality. Our target for reuse is not the technically proficient user, but a more general audience. Exporting and importing content -- from a single page to an entire course -- needs to be as complex as downloading an attachment from email, and subsequently re-sending that attachment in another email. Think of all the forwarded jokes you have received in the last week. It needs to be that simple.