Week 7

Monday February 22

Topics:

• The Commons
• Open Pedagogy

Readings (3):

Building on the Past (video)

This short video explains the gist of sharing and creativity in the digital age, and focuses on how Creative Commons licenses are able to "hack copyright" by make it clear that others can reuse content. As you have discovered in earlier readings, default copyright reserves all rights to creative works for creators by default, but does not make it easy to legally give others rights to reuse work. Since releasing the first set of Creative Commons licenses in 2003, creators have chosen to freely license nearly one billion creative works. CC-licensed works form a significant part of what it referred to as the digital commons, though the licenses can be applied for offline works as well.

Open Content definition (webpage)

The Open Content definition was written by David Wiley, and was clearly inspired by definitions of FOSS. Content is not the same as code, however, and this definition address user rights associated with content that is "open" as well as technical considerations that affect the openness of content. Wiley uses the 5 R's framework to assess this openness and the ALMS framework for assessing technical openness, though both of these frameworks are evolving as we speak. Wiley is a leader in the field of Open Education, and his definition is broadly accepted as ways to assess the openness of educational resources that may or may not be considered Open educational Resources (OER).

2011: The Year of Open (webpage)

In this long summary-type blog post, Paul Stacey (currently at Creative Commons) outlined a great deal of "open" happenings during the 2011 year. While the adoption of CC licenses for the government, heritage/culture, education, and science sectors, specifically look at the list of ways in which people in various roles within education can be open. Atop the list of ways faculty can move towards openness is "Make intellectual projects & processes digitally visible & open to criticism/comment". At this point in the course, it should become clear that this has been a goal of mine throughout. Of the other ways faculty can move towards openness, which have you seen demonstrated in other course experiences you'd had at the university level? Which of the potential student actions have you taken before, or might you plan to make in the future?

Assignments:

Blog post #5

Now it's your turn to design an "open education approach" to teaching and learning. If you are an educator, think through a change in practice that you could make wherein you leverage open content or open pedagogies to add value for your students. If you prefer, you can write this from the angle of being a student, proposing a change in a course or program you are taking. What would it take for your class to adopt an open textbook? What would it mean if your entire class were to publish a research brief or paper as a group? Specifically, what details and nuances specific to your class would need to be acknowledged and worked through when implementing "open"?

As a baseline, you should present a clear arguement for your proposed change.

Come up with an open pedagogical approach to teaching a specific subject matter. (provide examples)