Open Content ioe12

Again, these are my notes from the course topic video http://vimeo.com/1796014

 

All this content is attributed to David Wiley.

David starts with the 10 year anniversary of Open Content.

It all started with Free Software (which was covered in the previous topic). It started out with Richard Stallman and the GPL that allowed free (liberty, freedom) reuse of software. Freedom was very important to Richard. In winter 1998 Eric Raymond became involved. He said that ‘free’ was confusing to business, and so developed the concept of Open Source. This focused on why openness and peer review was good.

At the same time David was working and thinking that digital content was really magic because it’s non-rivalrous, because it can be used simultaneously by multiple people without detriment to any. This, he thought, had implications for education. Library books are rivalrous (only one person can use a particular copy at one time), electronic versions of text are not. Digital content could drive down costs and improve access to education. So David went on to work on this concept of making educational content in a way that it could be shared and accessed with others who needed to use and change it for their requirements. That’s when David made the connection between Open Source and doing the same for content. There should be a comparable licence for materials doing the same as the GPL does for software.

David emailed Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond and they asked questions of him about what it would be called (‘free’ or ‘open’) and what it would cover (education, culture, content, stuff ?). So in June 1998 David decided on Open Content. It would cover a whole bunch of stuff. The preliminary licence was called The OpenContent Principles / License (OP/L). There was some success in the uptake of the licence, but very little uptake in education. This required talking to publishers. David was talking to Eric, who was talking to the publisher Tim O’Reilly and the question was asked, “Will you publish something that is openly licensed?”, which lead to a discussion about what publishers might want. Publishers would have to have protection from undercutting, due to costs and work involved. What did authors want? ‘Open Content isn’t really like Open Software.’ Some authors wanted recognition and some wanted to protect the integrity of their work; they were willing to share as long as no changes were made to it.

So in summer 1999, the Open Publication License was published; allowing download, sharing and redistribution. It required attribution to be given to the original author. It came with two options:

Option A) To prevent distribution of substantively modified versions without the explicit permission of the author(s)

[Effectively a derivative works clause]

Option B) To prohibit any publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part in standard (book) form for commercial purposes unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder.

[Effectively the undercutting (no commercial) clause]

This saw much more uptake of this licence.

There were a number of problem. Both licences were abbreviated to OPL. They were both referred to as ‘that open content licence’, so again there was confusion. Also the naming of the Options A) & B) didn’t tell you anything about the content of the option. Additionally a link at the bottom of a page of content that took you off to the Open Content License page didn’t tell you if either of the Options had been implemented for the work or not.

This was a “good idea, but poorly executed”.

Then along came Larry Lessig (and the group that he worked with) and in December 2002 Creative Commons License 1.0 was born. The options were specifically names, e.g. non commercial, no derivatives, etc. and there wasn’t just one licence but each combination of options created a separate licence, with descriptive names, e.g. CC By, CC By-NC-ND.

There was still a button problem, because it didn’t make clear which licence it was. This was fixed later in time.

In the CC 2.0 version, attribution (By) became mandatory.

At the end of the video, David asks “So where are we now, 10 years on?”, and goes on to give a run down of examples from major sites and online services where there are hundreds of thousands of individual content elements made available under Open Content Licences.

In Education, UNESCO convenes a meeting and discusses Open Educational Resources. There’s the Open Courseware Consortium. There are hundreds of university level textbooks openly available. And the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

And looking forward, “Where are we going?”

There are still problems. Licence compatibility; ‘which material from one licence can be mixed with material from which other licences’. Without the Public Domain there is 28% compatibility of CC Licences. (Refer to the card game from the Open Licensing course topic). David states that whichever Copy Left licence you pick, you can’t mix it with the majority of other available Copy Left licences.

Also there is some confusion/concern over the noncommercial clause. At the time 76% of Flickr content licenced as CC contained a noncommercial (NC) clause.

CC+ and CC0 will become more important.

David then goes on to outline a couple of areas of personal involvement for him.

• Flatworld Knowledge textbooks is a new publishing models.
• Open High School of Utah, which is a new free online schooling model. Interestingly the model allows for an iterative cyclic correction of the curriculum.

Drawing on the other course topic reading(s):

“Open content” … is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law – at no cost to the user.

The primary permissions or usage rights open content is concerned with are expressed in the “4Rs Framework:”

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
4. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Managing & Sharing Research Data Part 1

I attended a presentation this morning given by Martin Donnelly, Digital Curation Centre (DCC), University of Edinburgh covering ‘Managing & Sharing Research Data: Good practice in an ideal world … in the real world’  held at The University of Sheffield and promoted by the Research Ethics Committee there. It was a two hour presentation, with the first part made up of a presentation and the second of a demonstration of an online resource produced by the DCC called the Data Management Planning (DMP) Tool to enable easy production of DMPs to meet research funding council requirements.

I attempted to make notes during the presentation in the form of this blogpost; so the following is just that, my notes but you might find some use in them.

Background

DCC was founded in 2004 for UK HE & FE sectors. Its major funder is the JISC. It provides support for JISC projects as well as producing tools, providing guidance, case studies, consultancy, etc.

Body of Presentation

When considering data management there are a number of areas to focus on:

• Ensure the physical integrity of the files
• Ensuring safety of the content (read and understood by your target audience but not accessible by other people / Data Protection / file format / etc.)
• Describing the data (metadata), and what’s been done to the data
• Access at the right time – make data available only after publication (embargo)
• Transferring custody of data from the field to storage, archiving and possibly on to destroying (this process needs managing and is not necessarily done by the data collector)
• Research Ethics & Integrity.

However, there is also the concept of Openness, Open Science, Open Data that needs to be considered. Martin touched on the Panton Principle with respect to Open Science. This was a Principle drafted in Cambridge in July 2009 and officially launched in February 2010. Originally based out of the discipline of chemistry, the concept of the Principle as taken from their website is:

Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.

By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.

[Aside: I shall be returning to this, not least for the ioe12 course.]

Martin also pointed to an article in The Guardian, ‘Give us back our crown jewels‘, Arthur & Cross, 9 March 2006.

Our taxes fund the collection of public data – yet we pay again to access it. Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur and Michael Cross

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) is the strategic partnership of the UK’s seven Research Councils. It has produced a Common Principles on Data Policy, which Martin summarised as having Key Messages:

1. Data is public resource
2. Adhere to standards & best practice
3. Metadata for ease of discovery and access
4. Constraints on what data to release
5. Embargo periods delaying data release
6. Acknowledge of / compliance with Terms & Conditions
7. Data management & sharing activities should be explicitly funded

There are an increasing number of things influencing the management of reasearch data some of which I managed to jot down:

• Research outputs are often based on the collection, analysis, etc of data
• Some data is unique (e.g. date & time specific weather conditions data) and can’t be reproduced
• Data must be accessible and comprehensible
• There’s a greater demand for open access to publicly funded data
• Research today is technology enabled and data intensive
• Data is a long-term asset
• Data is fragile and there is a cost to digital data; curate to reuse and preserve
• Data sharing and research pooling might be more cost-effective: cross-disciplinary and increased global partnership
• Costs of technology and human infrastructures
• Increasing pressure to make a return on public investment

Most (but not all) Research Councils are broadly the same in their approach to data management. They are generally requiring a Data Management Plan prior to funding being granted. The NERC Research Council has a Data Policy & Guidance (pdf), and also provides data centres for managing funded research data.

EPSRC is the odd one out; they are requiring all institutions to provide a roadmap for data management by 1st May 2012 and implemented by 1st May 2015.

RCUK has a Policy and Code of Conduct on the Governance of Good Research Conduct (available as a pdf).

Martin highlighted how some universities have got into difficulty with regards to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. He mentioned Queen’s University Belfast and a request about Irish tree rings that was made under FOI. He also said about how Stirling University had received a request from a tobacco company about the take up of smoking amongst teenagers, useful data for a tobacco company.

The University of Edinburgh has developed a Research Data Management Policy.

The question Martin then put was Why? Why do this? And he outlined the incentives in the form of carrots and sticks.

It’s a good thing

• Data as a public good (the RCUK common principles)
• others can build on your work  (Isaac Newton “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”)
• Passing on custody so making effective use of resources.

Direct incentives to researchers are:

• Increased impact of your work
• making publications online increases citations

These are covered more fully in:

•  Whyte, A., Tedds, J. (2011), ‘Making the Case for Research Data Management’. DCC Briefing Papers. Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre. Available online: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers
• Piwowar HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007), ‘Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate‘, PLoS ONE 2(3): e308. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000308

More incentives:

• Increase citations helps REF
• Research councils are increasingly rejecting on the grounds of poor data management plans
• You receive more funding if you do this right

And the ‘Sticks’:

• Some funding requires data available for many years – appropriate preservation
• Government pressure on research councils
• Make research be published in open access journals
• Department of Business and Innovation Skills (BIS) Annual Innovation Report December 2011
• Journals Nature & Science have policies
• European Commission – Research and Innovation Horizon 2020: The Framework Programme for Research and Innovation

There is a concern often raised by academic researchers about how their data will be used or misconstrued if it is out in the open. Martin emphasised the importance of appropriate metadata to try to prevent this. However, he did say that even then if the data was going to be misconstrued it will be anyway. Files need to be labelled in an understandable, meaningful, standard and appropriate fashion, to include the project title and date. It would also be useful to maintain a separate log describing the data, to include

• research context
• data history
• where & how to access the data
• access rights
• etc.

Backup is also a consideration. It is different from archiving. Backup is about loss, damage and recovery of data during the research process. (Archiving is about retaining and providing access at the end of the research process.) There should be some means of off-site backup. There should be an implemented, automatic backup process at the University, Faculty or School level. If not, then a manual backup process is required with set repeat reminders.

Archiving is a case of depositing data for the long-term. However, it does require things like checking copyright, consent and data protection. You should use the appropriate archive for your subject discipline. It’s also important to publicise your archived data for increased citations. The point was made that there isn’t yet a standard for data referencing, and that some work needs to be done in this area. The other concerns about use of data without knowledge are just the same as if your published work is plagiarised.

Rachel Kane from RIS in Sheffield highlighted that specific Sheffield resources will be made available soon. She also provided some useful examples of what people where doing at the University, including:

• Prof. Steve Banwart in Civil and Structural Engineering approach to open data
• Dr Bethan Thomas in Geography SASI
• HRI Digital – data management services – from application to archiving stages – consultancy

Welcome to Firefox Openness

The video on the ‘Welcome to Firefox‘ page really encompasses my reasoning for staying with the product.

• Principle over profit
• Secrecy is trumped by honesty & corporate interest by community
• We believe that the web is more cared for than owned
• More of a resource to be tended to than a commodity to be sold
• Strongly believe in innovation that puts users strongly & squarely in the drivers’ seat
• We believe that together, with this cause in mind, we can continue to innovate for the benefit of the individual & the betterment of the web so that it always & forever serves the greater good.

Openness in Education Course

So I chanced upon a tweet yesterday about David Wiley’s new Openness in Education Course starting that day and thought, ‘Yep, I need to be involved in that.’ I fired off my application to register this blog as the vehicle I’ll be using in the process. And here I go.

#change11 Openness Community

As promised in my previous post, here is the text to initiate the institutional Openness Community. It was originally intended as an email, hence the request to email me in response – but interested people can add comments, tweet me, or email me.

Openness Community

I am currently creating a community to work collectively on the concept of openness in education. The intention is to develop an Open Educational Practice (OEP) within the community that can then be shared more widely. However, this is not a theoretical exercise, I’m interested in putting this into practice to create new and use existing resources, working openly.

To achieve this vision we will need to examine areas including

• the production of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Courseware (OCW),
• how to produce material to open standards for re-use by others,
• how we would want to license such material under a Creative Commons Licence,
• examine what software and services to use for production and hosting,
• how to re-use existing OER appropriately,
• where and how to access open resources including open textbooks,
• the sharing of useful generic and subject specific resources including the creation of resource directories,
• defining appropriate quality controls for production and prior to consumption.

The community can start from the foundations of the work of

• UNESCO Open Educational Resources,
• The Cape Town Open Education Declaration,
• The Open Courseware Consortium, and
• Open Educational Quality Initiative (OPAL).

There are a number of toolkits, frameworks and publicity materials available that we can use to inform and develop our practice. In addition, there are some significant ongoing research projects including those funded by the JISC and HEA that we can draw upon, as well as various experts and advocates in the subject.

The intention is that this is a grassroots community, pulling together like-minded individuals to create something larger than its constituent parts and furthering the mutual interest of openness across the campus and, hopefully, beyond.

Some areas where I personally would like to see experimentation might include

• development and delivery of a course that uses only Open Content and OER as an example of potential,
• providing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) within 12 months,
• development of a peer reviewed Open Journal,
• development and running of an Open Conference within 12 months,
• producing an open textbook.

If you have a passion for, interest in, or useful practical knowledge of openness in education and would like to be involved in shaping the direction of this community, please drop me an email in the first instance. I will draw up a list of participants and convene an initial meeting and we will take things from there.

Kind regards
Mark Morley

#Change11 Openness Revelation

For years I’ve been enthralled by the concept of openness in education. I’ve written numerous blogposts:

• Open research – Professional Amateurs – Science in Action
• Kahn Academy – DIY OER to Educate the World
• Institution talks about going OER
• Experiment and discussion
• OpenLearn 3 years on & OLnet
• Textbook Revolution
• Opening Up Education – MIT Press
• Can the VLE/LMS reinvent itself for Open Education?
• Lab Notebook Wiki

I’ve developed an extensive bookmark collection over the past three years or so:
http://www.diigo.com/user/markuos/openeducation

But being involved in the MOOC Change11 has prompted me to think about the whole topic in much more detail once again, particularly the David Wiley (post 1, 2, 3, 4) & Rory McGreal weeks.

I have written about the concerns I have in getting the message out onto a big enough stage quickly enough to prevent corruption or being usurped. However, (and thanks go once again to John here for introducing me to this) after seeing this video of Michael Nielson’s TED Talk, which has had a profound effect on me, and with the lack of responses I’m seeing from decision-makers, I am inspired to put out my messages straight into an open arena via this blog. Hopefully, it will mean that the ideas get taken forward and I will receive appropriate attributions, but it will certainly mean things happen faster from my perspective, which may mean less frustration for me though there could be more ‘fallout’ as a result.

Consequently, I’ll be posting in the next couple of days the text I developed to initiate an institutional Openness Community, and for which I haven’t received any satisfactory feedback.

Michael Nielson TEDTalk video:

 

David Wiley #change11 mooc week 5 – post 4

On Friday I managed to develop the first iteration of a proposed email to send institution-wide about convening an Openness Community and passed it on to my departmental director and assistant-director for review and comment. I’m hoping their comments will come back favourably and I can move forward on this. If all goes well I’ll post it here.

Over the weekend I have been considering another issue. Is it possible to successfully practice openness in your work without the honesty and integrity of colleagues? If you work in an environment where you have to be seen to be doing the ‘right’ thing by the ‘right’ people in the ‘right’ places it can be tempting for others to use your work without attribution, particularly if they are better at playing the ‘game’ and publicizing themselves than you are. So without the reputation or big enough exposure for your work, there is a danger that others could profit from your endeavours or even corrupt your purpose if you can’t develop the stage quickly or early enough. I think that the practice of openness is the right way, certain for me, however, I do worry whether I can create the stage and get the message out in a coherent way and quickly enough without corruption.

David Wiley #change11 mooc week 5 – post 3

A couple of years ago I had a discussion with Martin Weller about ‘openness’ spanning his blog and mine. Over the past couple of days I’ve been considering this area again, with reference to David Wiley’s work.

For some time I have been licensing my work under a Creative Commons license a CC BY-SA 3.0 or a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. However, I’ve always wrestled with this choice. My dilemma isn’t the one of many of my colleagues about not wanting other people to use my material in ways that I might not like. No, my continuing struggle is with the fact that I am requiring acknowledgement for my contribution in whatever small way to human knowledge and endeavour. But should this really be a motivation in my efforts for openness or should I be more altruistic and publish using CC0 as Public Domain? Do you have to develop a reputation for your work first before you can adopt a more altruistic stance? Or is it just a product of the current norms in society that a reputation is required? I don’t know the answers, but any input would be appreciated.

David Wiley #change11 mooc week 5 – post 2

This week’s topic has inspired and energized me into revisiting notions I’ve had for a few years. Unfortunately, I’ve found that whenever I try to take them forward there is such inertia from within the institution that they never get off the ground or they falter shortly afterwards. One area that I have found particularly frustrating has been trying to get institutional buy-in to the development, production and use of Open Educational Resources (OERs). There just doesn’t seem to be the interest or passion at the top level. However, the efforts David has made and continues to make are inspiring.

David Wiley: iSummit ’08 Keynote Address from isummit 08 on Vimeo.

David wasn’t afraid to make mistakes, as he outlined in the video. I should also learn from my own past ‘failures’ (for example the disappointments expressed in my previous post) and use them as a springboard to try again and achieve more.

To this end I’ve decided to develop a grassroots community approach to openness within my institution. To achieve this I’ll need to put together a convincing argument that senior management will allow me to take forward. I wonder if members of MOOC Change11 will help me to develop this argument throughout this week (week 5)? Here are some potential questions I need answers to.

• What points do you think would be useful to make? Are the following useful for a community to discuss?
• What technologies would be appropriate for the community members to use to produce & host OERs?
• How can we promote the use of Open Journals for publishing research?
• How can the reuse of OERs be encouraged within the institution?
• Can we aggregate appropriate subject specific open content as a community for within the institution and beyond?
• How can we promote the sole use of open content and open textbooks within a course?
• How can I convince management that a grassroots approach would be appropriate?
• Would it be sustainable as a venture?
• Would it have any direct benefits for the institution?

I look forward to any input or advice you can give. Many thanks.

Openness via Martin Weller

I really like Martin Weller’s thinking, and have referenced him during presentations in the past. I enjoy his ‘The Ed Techie’ blog, and his comments often get me thinking.

Today I had the pleasure of reading his Reflections on openness post. Whilst reading it and watching his presentation via Elluminate I typed the following.

Surely if you where going to start a university now, you wouldn’t do it.

Universities would seem to be institutions designed to perpetuate elitism. With open education are we really still tied into the promotional rewards of these institutions. Should the emphasis in reward come from the community and its valuing of the resources you provide to them, the time you invest, the quality of the discussions you initiate/perpetuate? I believe one has to question from a society perspective the value of closed environments for education now; when digital resources are enabling free access by anyone to some of the greatest thinkers in the world, and providing a platform for anyone with a well-reasoned opinion to be heard and entered into dialogue with. We no longer have to be told who the experts are, we can make a more valued judgement ourselves. I’m not foolish enough to believe that the openness presented to us by this digital world will lead to a free, utopian education for all, and the demise and dismantling of universities, but there are people willing to provide their time and effort to assist by freely sharing their time and resources without necessarily requiring re-numeration for their work. Creative Commons is showing us that.

Whilst accessing Martin’s post, I also had the pleasure of following Mark Smither’s link to his blog. Here is someone else whose writing are going to influence some of my thinking from now on.

I love this social web thingy, and the path of inquiry it can lead you on; a winding path for sure, but one with many places of interest.

I’ve been following Martin on Twitter for a while, and I’m now also following Mark.

A couple of other things occurred to me whilst reading the post and response:

Has the idea of a journal gone to the wall, when open information can have reviewed directly by the community – i.e. peer review?

The Cloudworks concept seems to be looking at unifying resources, a concept that I considered a couple of years ago and then abandoned. It seemed to me more appropriate to retain information on the open web and search for it there, rather than ‘close’ it down again; cloudworks  potentially is an elitist approach attempting to corral and vet information and therefore a philosophy I don’t necessarily hold with. Not even sure it will work. Howard Rheingold created something similar, and I found I didn’t have the time to engage with that. I’m personally moving further away from several Ning based communities for similar reasons or time and access.