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.
Labels: free culture, oer
One of the things I found surprising about international law was that it's not always possible, or at least easy, for an author to place his or her work into the public domain. There are civil law countries in which so-called moral rights cannot be waived. This has been an issue for me, in that I wish to promote dedication to the public domain as the most practical way of releasing content that can be used, copied, distributed, and remixed without any possibility of conflict.
Now Dave Wiley of the OpenContent Foundation has
proposed a license that reserves no rights at all. In other words, it's a license the terms of which are functionally identical to a public domain dedication but with a completely different legal basis. While I'm not a lawyer, it seems to me that if other open licenses (such as those from Creative Commons) are valid throughout the world than this approach would be an ideal complement to a public domain dedication. For jurisdictions that recognize an author's right to disclaim intellectual entitlements, the public domain dedication would apply. For those that do not, the license would take up the slack.
My only objection is that he's referring to it as an "Open Education License", stemming from his original intention to devise a license that would prevent incompatible copyleft provisions from keeping content segregated in separate unremixable silos. He's right that this is a pressing issue for the open education movement, but I think that this license has much broader potential than for just educational materials, and hope that he ends up selecting a more generic name for it as
discussion on the matter continues.
Labels: free culture, oer
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:
- "Free as in beer", or gratis, where those using free content or software don't have to pay any money to do so; and
- "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!
Labels: free culture, oer
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.
Labels: free culture, oer
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