Students have cried out to avoid the high cost of textbooks, and The Board of Regents governing the University System in Maryland has listened. At their October meeting, as per student suggestions, the board decided that there would be an initiative to examine the viability of open textbooks in the system. Interested faculty teaching lecture-sized, introductory courses have the opportunity to pilot the initiative by using open textbooks. The system allows professors to customize textbook material from a pool of online resources, videos, and graphics; all under a publically accessible copyright licence. In the Spring, the council will hopefully decide to join the state universities in Washington, Ohio, California, and Texas, and offer state-supported open-access textbook material to help lower the cost of high education.
Read more here .
= DIGITAL SELF PRESERVATION TOOLKIT =
What happens to your creative & intellectual property when you die? This make gets you thinking about your body of creative, educational, and/or scientific work.
In your country, what happens to your work when you die?
What steps can you take to ensure its posterity?
How would you want it shared and who would you want to own it?
For context, read:
Free Culture Trust: http://questioncopyright.org/free_culture_thing
Free Culture Thing Google Group: https://groups.google.com/group/freeculturething
Tackle the following tasks, or create your own to add to this toolkit!
== TOOLKIT COMPONENTS ==
Task 1: Create an Infographic mapping what happens to your IP when you die in your country (eg. does it get passed onto your heirs under all rights reserved (c) for another 70 years?)
Free infographic creation tools:
http://www.easel.ly/
http://piktochart.com/
http://infogr.am/
http://visual.ly/
https://infoactive.co/
http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/ (archive and visualise tweets using google spreadsheet)
Your IP infographics by country
United Kingdom
Add link to your infographic here…
Name your country…
Add link to your infographic here…
Task 2: List of places on the web where you can preserve your IP for cultural posterity while living.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
archive.org
http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/info/faq – for websites (including blogs, personal sites)
Add link to archive/repository/platform here…
Task: Existing resources/kits that help you with digital and/or personal archiving
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/padKit/handouts.html
Click to access NDIIP_PA_poster.pdf
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/projects-and-work/guidance.htm
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/presentation.html
Task 5: Checklist for what you need to do or think about to preserve your stuff!
Take an intro quiz to learn more about the differences of physical vs digital archiving: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/quiz/
digital versus physical assets, eg. itunes library is licensed to you while living, you don’t own after death
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/projects-and-work/digital-preservation-faqs.htm
http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/appendices/guidelines-tips.html
Task : Tools to help you archive your digital assets while living.
http://netpreserve.org/web-archiving/tools-and-software
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/ – Library of Congress’ tips for archiving your digital materials
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/
ThinkUp – https://www.thinkup.com/join/ – for archiving social media
http://webcurator.sourceforge.net/ (open source tool developed by the British Library)
Task: Create a website/mock-up for the toolkit
prototype: https://janepark.makes.org/thimble/digital-selfpreservation-toolkit-
collaboration link: https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/project/22912/edit
Task 3: Create a will for your body of creative work. What license (or Public Domain tool) would you choose for it? Who would you leave it to?
Do you know of sample wills that addresses this issue?
Add link to it here…
Your IP wills – make it up!
Example: John Doe’s IP will: “Upon my death: I dedicate all of my emoji icons to the public domain using the CC0 PD dedication tool. All of my wedding photos become property of my wife licensed under a CC BY license. Etc.”
Add your will or a link to your will here…
Task 4: IP donor sticker or badge. Some of us have organ donor stickers on our driver’s licenses; what would an IP donor sticker look like? What about the form question asking people about it?
Free badge/graphic creation tools
https://www.openbadges.me/designer.html
https://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/2.5.1/editor/svg-editor.html
http://inkscape.org/
Legal PD dedication tools and open licenses to integrate into any stickers/badges
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses
Your IP donor stickers and badges
Example: Public Domain Donor sticker: http://ni9e.com/public_domain_donor.php
http://wreckandsalvage.com/ipdonor/
How to add backend code for this? eg. like for CC licenses https://creativecommons.org/choose/
Where would the badge link? to body of IP work you are releasing? to the results of the form below? to a statement that links to CC0?
Try http://achievery.com/ to see if it fits some of our needs
Task : Create a form for the IP donor badge
Can Archive.org be the repository for documentation of IP donations? Who is the keeper of this information?
Form fields:
Name
Donate Everything or Donate Specific IP
URLs of specific IP
Concept form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZonsDdXZ8OJlPpt2u1cIzAplt2NAHD4KppYGZETo3JI/viewform
How can we tie this to https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/ ?
Maybe tweak language to reflect “upon death” i will donate work to PD — and legally that will work via CC0 tool? http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
need to account for differences in data/database rights in some jurisdictions, or add clause excluding database content
maybe specify http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/ for data/databases
need to account for estate taxes/laws that may vary by jurisdiction. maybe just start with US? estate would apply only if you’re making money off the IP
Questions
How does the organ donor sticker work legally? Can we fashion the process after that? What are some other similar processes we can use?
Add a new component for the toolkit here…
One of the high points for me at the Open Ed Conference was listening to Audrey Watters deliver her brilliant keynote. Audrey took on the language of the Apocalypse that dominates discussion and innovation in the education technology space, and took us on quite a journey.
You can enjoy it here.
“In the last few years there has been a lot of discussion thanks to the development of technology about the delivery of education in a scalable way to large numbers of students across national borders,” Mr. Suresh says. “The missing piece is how much are students learning amid all this technology? The other piece is what are the metrics, best practices, and eventually standards, if you will, that are collectively developed and acceptable for those who engage?”
Read more on chronicle.com
Published on Jun 5, 2012
Degreed’s entry in the Why Open Education Matters video competition.
By David Wiley, Prof. at Brigham Young University, March 29, 2013.
While “open educational resources” initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare generated media buzz during the 2000s, a new wave of initiatives is leveraging OER to dramatically decrease the cost, improve access, and increase the quality of secondary and higher education for the average student. This presentation demonstrates how “open” is shaping the field of education, and what is coming in the future.
This talk was delivered at the University of Georgia during March, 2013.
The Open Education Conference, held this year in Park City, Utah November 6-8, 2013, is the premiere international gathering of open education practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and advocates. 2013 marks the 10th anniversary of this historic event.
Open Assembly’s CEO Domitilla Enders will be attending.
For over a decade the focus of the open education community has been on creating and sharing open educational resources (OER). A vast, high quality open content infrastructure has been built atop which a new generation of educational innovations are being developed. The 10th annual Open Education 2013 Conference celebrates the success of that work and looks forward to the critical work of the next decade.
Program: http://openeducation2013.sched.org/
Open Assembly announces the upcoming release of a major update to its platform in the spring of 2014. This update empowers users sharing open educational resources (OER) by integrating robust networked learning capabilities.
Sign up here for an invite to preview and/or take it for a spin: Open Assembly v2.0 .
The textbook of the future has no spine, no fixed parts. It’s a born-digital playlist of affordable learning content accessible to every student. It can be customized, personalized, and is ever evolving. —Domitilla Enders, CEO, Open Assembly
Open Assembly will be presenting its platform for assembling and sharing resources to NYC-area educators at Tech-Ed Day on October 21, 2013 at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, NY.
After a successful summer pilot in classrooms throughout several local colleges, Open Assembly is kicking off the fall semester by inviting professors from CUNY, SUNY, and other New York schools to participate in its fall pilot. Participating professors will have the opportunity to test-drive our platform in their classrooms, with their students.
The majority of the instructors who participated in the summer pilot shared that they found Open Assembly to be a valuable tool for teaching and learning. They also universally said that compiling course materials in a single location using Open Assembly alleviated the pressure associated with having students buy books and/or link to various internet sites to access course materials. Of the students surveyed, 77% said that Open Assembly was more visually appealing than Blackboard. Combining drag-and-drop ease of use alongside attractive visual design, Open Assembly’s immersive CoursePilot was designed by educators, for educators (and students), with the learning experience as central to its core.
If you are interested in participating in our fall pilot (or if you know anyone who is), please click on the orange banner on our website to sign up.
Handy guide to DIY MOOCs.
See on www.onlineuniversities.com
What if some universities, or university consortia, can successfully market their own MOOCs? And what if, eventually, all universities will be able to do so? Coursera will try to convince you that no one can beat their marketing reach, but any university can develop one, between existing students and alumni.
DIY MOOCs would (a) allow universities to recover more of the tuition revenue associated with MOOCs, and (b) avoid the copyright problems that are arising with third-party hosts like Coursera and Udacity (Porter, 2013a; Porter, 2013b).
When we heard that the topic of the August NYEdTech Meetup was “Open Educational Resources: standing higher on the shoulders of giants,” we knew that Open Assembly should be involved. Our CEO Domi Enders was invited to represent Open Assembly on the panel, alongside representatives from OERCommons/ISKME, MIT Open Courseware, and the Monterey Institute. Open Assembly was the sole NYC-based company (and the only start-up) featured in the Meetup.
After introductions, each presenter was given a few minutes to discuss OER before the session was opened to questions from the audience. A lively discussion ensued in person and on twitter. You can see more of the discussion on twitter under the hashtag #nyedtech.
The first annual Education Technology Innovation Summit was held in NYC, bringing together educators and entrepreneurs focused on the intersection of education and technology. Hosted by Baltimore-based Mindgrub, the one-day event featured Open Assembly CEO Domi Enders as an invited speakers amongst an impressive line-up. Sessions throughout the day focused on every aspect of EdTech, from mobile learning to game based learning and even professional development. In addition to Domi’s panel presentation, we were able to demo the Open Assembly platform during the networking portion of the day.
On July 17, 2013, the Open Assembly team traveled uptown to Columbia University’s Teachers College for an EdLab Seminar. Over lunch, Domi gave a demonstration of our site and spoke about a variety of topics, including open resources, the challenges of being the female CEO of a startup, and the need to keep our users’ needs at the forefront of our business decisions. The audience asked great questions of Domi and our tech team.
The presentation, and its associated comments, can be found on the EdLab Vialogues page: Video
Milwaukee, WI
8-9 July 2013
Open Assembly was excited to have the chance to meet with a dedicated group of educators at the 2013 Sloan Blended Learning conference. This year’s theme, Trend to Blend, featured “lessons from the field” on the past decade of blended learning.
As sponsors, Domi and Tracy represented Open Assembly in giving a well-received vendor showcase presentation on how to use Open Educational Resources in the classroom. We introduced the standing-room only crowd to what an OER is, how they can find them, and how they can best incorporate them into their teaching (with a demo of the Open Assembly platform).
If you’re looking for more information on OERs or on Open Assembly, attached here are the two handouts that we gave out during the Sloan Conference.
Open Assembly is a free, cloud-based platform for social learning, collaborative teaching, and content curation using open textbooks, open courseware, and other open educational resources (OER).
By unleashing the Power of Open, we’re encouraging innovation based on networked learning in hybrid and online environments. The platform is free for any user–students, self-learners, instructors, admins, institutions–for open education purposes.
Assemble a playlist of learning resources. Remix, adapt, or clone an existing playlist. Share it with a colleague or peer, at the course or module level. Engage with comments and resources of your own. Analyze engagement. Archive only what you want to keep when the course or project is over. Take it with you on your learning path from course to course, or from one learning goal to another. Accessible on any web-enabled browser device.
Open Assembly can be used in numerous ways: to create a playlist or course, to assemble a digital curriculum, a coursepack or collection of resources, and to undertake research, on your own or better yet, in collaboration with others.
Our goal is to make teaching and learning online more accessible, more engaging, more interactive, and a lot more intuitive. We’re setting a new standard for teaching and learning with others. We combine teacher-centric and learner-centric tools, which makes us learning-centric.
Interested in checking us out? Open Assembly is currently in private Beta, but feel free to Request an Invite on our website if you would like to explore Open Assembly or pilot our platform in your hybrid or online classroom. Here’s a preview:
Open Assembly Blog 