Using Wikipedia Articles To Make OER Textbooks

“We are going to have to invest in our people and make available to them participation in the great educational process of research and development in order to learn more. When we learn more, we are able to do more with our given opportunities.” — Buckminster Fuller

Yesterday was pretty busy. We had a slightly belated family party for my eldest son’s sixteenth birthday, a trip to Warrenton and back to drop off my daughter, and, of course, watching the most excellent and exciting Superbowl in years, complete with a victory for the Baltimore Ravens, who I’d chosen as my favorite based more or less on proximity. D.C. and Baltimore are basically one big area, and they had to root for our football team during their years in the post-Colts wilderness, so when they make it to the big game it seems good to return the favor. Besides, D.C. people were in Orioles’ territory until the Nationals showed up, so rooting for a Baltimore team isn’t all that strange around here.

But enough about all that. In between those other events, I made a presentation for the online CO13 conference on how to use Wikipedia’s Book Creator tool to make quick, easy OER textbooks from Wikipedia articles. I “um” and “uh” too much — as a presenter I’m not exactly Frederick Douglass. But the information is there. I plan to distill it into a working paper for the Free Curricula Centre when I get the chance, so if you’re not in a hurry you may want to just wait for that.

If you are in a hurry, though, there is a recording of the presentation.

Questions About Copyright

In an online conversation, an acquaintance who supports copyright asked a number of questions about how things would work in its absence. Obviously I’m not chair of the anti-copyright committee, but there are some possible answers. If you have a better one, please leave a comment!

Q. I don’t think anyone answered my question above about who will fund drug research if scientists & researchers don’t give their time for free?

A. Universities, philanthropists, generic drug companies (some are very large, and the last thing they’d want is no pipeline), and (alas) probably government.

Q. should a publisher (small or large) have a choice of whether they give content away or not?

A. This is a semantic problem. They’re not giving anything away because copying and taking are two different things. It gets back to what I was saying about scarcity, and how information isn’t property. Nina Paley’s song Copying Is Not Theft explains the sentiment, although it’s not exactly a dissertation and obviously leaves unanswered questions.

Q. Should Gary Trudeau be entitled to syndicate his column however he wishes? Or should he be forced to give his “product” away?

A. Same answer. And the repeated presumption is that artists, musicians, and writers won’t produce content without copyright, even though historically we know that’s not the case.

Q. is a local newspaper entitled to charge subscribers for either its print edition or its online edition? (the only difference is in the method of delivery)

A. Sure, if subscribers will pay, then that’s between them. Also, remember that a print copy of a newspaper is a physical item, subject to scarcity, and really is property.

Q. is a reporter entitled to be paid for his research?

A. Entitled? No. Otherwise I would research things that interest me all day and demand payment from someone.

Q. is Bruce Springsteen entitled to sell his works? Or does he have no right to make that choice?

A. He’s entitled to do whatever he wants. This isn’t about telling artists what they can do, it’s about not telling everyone else what they can’t do. Incidentally, though, musicians make more money on tour than they do from CD sales, so this is a pretty big red herring.

Q. if you look at the credits of any given movie, you’ll see 100s of people helping put that together. Do they deserve to be compensated?

A. They’re unlikely to work on the movie otherwise. But you don’t need a copyright regime to make that happen. Iron Sky, a movie that came out earlier this year, was specifically meant to be free for others to copy, yet it’s made money from voluntary subscription, logo merchandise, etc.

Q. if a publisher (movie, music, journalism, art, whatever) or research company (bio-technology) invests heavily in something and it bombs, should the government bail them out?

A. Not in my opinion. But that’s not a copyright issue.

Q. if someone spend a year writing a book or journal article and it benefits the public, should that be free?

A. The “year” part is a distractor, because it relies on a discredited nineteenth century economic principle called the labor theory of value. Just because I spend time and effort on something doesn’t make it inherently valuable. Or, as Scrooge MacDuck said, “Work smarter, not harder.” The “public” part is also a distractor, since there’s no such thing there are only individuals, who surely would benefit unevenly from just about anything.

Q. If a farmer spends a year working in his field, should he be required to put the harvest in a free public stand for whoever wants it?

A. No. But produce is property, if you have an apple and I take it, you can’t also have it anymore. Information is not property, if you know something and I learn it, you still know it.

The Recent SOPA Strike

For what it’s worth, I meant for this site to participate in the SOPA strike on the 18th. But the WordPress plugin I so confidently chose to make this happen apparently didn’t do anything. So, in the now famous words of erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, “Oops.”

Oh well, at least I blogged about it over on eLearners News.

Meanwhile, if you don’t know what all the fuss is about, I think the best concise description of the danger of SOPA and PIPA has been provided by Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. Shoot first and think later, indeed!

Important: Unesco Replaces OER Acronym

Today brings an important announcement from Unesco pertaining to open education. Those educational resources that have been referred to for the past nine years as “Open Educational Resources” are to be renamed. There are two reasons for the end of the use of the OER acronym. One is that there is continuing debate between those who believe these resources should be called “open” and those prefer to term “free” to describe them. Also, simply referring to them as “educational” resources has been shown to exclude many other areas where they have become increasingly important, such as research and training.

As a result, officially they are no more to be referred to as “Open Educational Resources”, or OERs. From 1st April on, they are to be known as “Freely/Openly Enabled Resources Supporting Training, Education, and Research”.

Unesco officials explained that while they realize that many people have become accustomed to the now deprecated “OER” terminology, it is important that these vital, renewable intellectual resources be renamed to something that highlights all of the areas where they are transforming education around the world. As such, it is expected that before long, those in the movement will become familiar with and happy to use the new term “FOERSTER” to describe these crucial resources.

Please make a note of it!

Fair Use as a Complement to Open Licensing

Penn State World Campus has a great discussion series on open source software and open educational resources called Terra Incognita. I’ve written a piece for it on Fair Use as a Complement to Open Licensing. Feel free to check it out.

Covering the Public Domain’s Back

Excuse my French

There’s a lot of discussion in the free culture movement about the two definitions of “free” that we use to describe our work. Summarized well by Wikipedia, the definitions are often described as:

1. “Free as in beer”, or gratis, where those using free content or software don’t have to pay any money to do so; and

2. “Free as in freedom”, or libre, where those using free content or software have the right to make derivative works.

What I find interesting are the suggestions to use the words gratis and libre to make this differentiation clear. The argument is that it’s necessary to borrow these words from French because there aren’t separate words in English that denote these different meanings of freedom.

Whatever flaws the English language may have, however, a stilted vocabulary is not among them. Rather than import more words, why not simply use ones we already have? Specifically, I suggest that free as in beer can be described as costless, and free as in freedom can be described as unencumbered. They’re accurate, unambiguous, and already present in English. Let’s use them!

Goals for the Free Culture Movement

Over at Free Culture, Kevin Driscoll has asked people to write a brief bit on how they see the world being different after five more years of the free culture movement. While I appreciate the artistic creativity of multimedia mashups and the like, my concerns are mostly in the open education part of the free culture movement. So in keeping with that, I’ll briefly set forth three goals and add some explanation.

Goals

Commonality Goal: We as an open education movement will have drafted a declaration of commonalities similar to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and that policymakers will have begun to sign on to it.

OER Output Goal: At least in the English language and hopefully others, we will have made significant progress toward the goal of a set of free curricula in all disciplines at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.

Diversity Goal: There will be an expectation throughout the open education movement that open educational resources (OERs) will be available not just in English, but whatever languages on instruction parents and students think best, and that different societies with different contexts will be able to localize content to suit their needs.

Narrative

The recent iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia was well represented by different segments of the open education movement, and one of our conclusions was that we would like to take the main points on which we all agree in time for next year’s Summit in Sapporo so that we can walk away from there having drafted a Sapporo Declaration.

Having a complete set of free curricula in all disciplines at all levels by 2015 is a goal of WikiEducator, a Commonwealth of Learning project. I think that it’s possible, but that it will be difficult and will require momentum now. Eight years may sound like a long time, but it really isn’t.

The output and diversity goals may seem to be putting in opposite directions a bit, and to some extent I suppose they are. It will be challenging enough to have a single set of curricula by 2015, much less have localized variations. Still, I can see that we as a movement will have to balance these objectives.

The “Playlist” Model of Course Development: Using Closed Content to make Open Courses

Yes, Jamaica, and no, it wasn’t a vacation

Charles Evans and I presented our paper on the use of open content in curriculum with implications for the developing world at Pan-Commonwealth Forum 4 in Ocho Rios, Jamaica from October 30 to November 2. It was really neat to meet so many people who knew what we were talking about, and who had similar interests. No one believed that a trip to Jamaica could possibly not be a vacation, but since the only time I was on the beach I was wearing a tie I think I can safely declare that it wasn’t. Of course, the resort where the conference was held was all inclusive, meaning five days of open bar goodness, but what was I supposed to do? Not take advantage of it?