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Rethinking CC Licensing

June 24, 2010 in open knowledge | 7 comments

Working with open educational resources (OER) and sharing, I constantly grapple with copyright. I have come to a greater appreciation of explicitly stated licensing. As a consumer of such resources, I often must search, parse, and decipher to determine whether they are OER. This has caused me to reconsider my practices as a content creator.

As I have mentioned in the past, I regard Creatives Commons licensing as an invitation to use and share materials rather than legal protection. It makes my intentions clear so that others need not guess.

This site has had a clear Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license as I mentioned in a post of over a year ago. I have licensed some of my online interactives as CC Attribution Non Commercial Share-Alike. Now I plan to share instructional presentations and need to decide how license them. This has led me again to explore Creative Commons Licenses and their implications.

While I occasionally have used the Non Commercial designation, I will no longer do so. Commercial use is too nebulous. Would use by a private school be commercial? How about the use in a presentation for which the presenter is being paid? Besides, as Karen Fasimpaur tweeted: “do you really think someone’s going to make a ton of $ selling your stuff?” There is a good discussion of the Non-commercial designation in Neal Butcher’s article Open Educational Resources and Higher Education (It also had a great overview of higher education OER sites).

I now realize the Share-Alike endorsement can also pose problems. Share Alike allows individuals to use and remix content with the provision that they license the resultant material with the same terms. This could prevent an individual combining Share-Alike content with material with different licensing from distributing their remix. Again, this is not desirable in my view.

In light of the unexpected consequences with my past licensing choices, I considered Public Domain or Creative Commons No Copyright (CC 1.0 Universal). This would make it as easy as possible for others to use my work. Unfortunately, a lack of attribution lends to a lack of credibility.

In the end, I have chosen the CC-BY license and its simple attribution license  for the bulk of what I do. This site has already been changed to attribution only. I decided to keep it simple so that potential users no longer have to parse out details.

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What about an Open Educational Resource Torrent Tracker?

June 19, 2010 in open knowledge, Technology | 4 comments

There are many resources on the Internet dedicated to open educational resources. Some are sites, for example Curriki, that provide online communities for sharing such resources. Others are search sites such as CC Search that provide links to open licensed resources throughout the Internet. The one variant that I have not yet found is a Torrent site dedicated to open educational resources.

A torrent, or more accurately a BitTorrent, is a decentralized peer to peer file sharing network protocol that is very effective for quickly moving large amounts of data across the Internet. A user, known as a seeder, who wishes to share a file must have a torrent client. Then they submit their information to a tracker, a site that coordinates the file sharing. Through the client and the tracker, a user makes the file available to others users to download. In turn, those who have downloaded the file share the file as well. The files are hosted on each individual’s hard drive rather than a central point. Once enough users have downloaded the file (and become seeders), data transmission can be very rapid.

Torrents tend to have a bad reputation because they are often used to share pirated software, music, and movies. Illegal sharing of textbooks is becoming more prevalent and has been blamed for falling textbook sales and even the closing of campus bookstores. In fact, there are those that call for the systematic scanning of textbooks for sharing as a means of countering the outrageous prices of college texts.

This is not what I am talking about. It seems to me that decentralized peer to peer sharing could be a powerful tool for sharing and distributing open licensed education resources. It employs distributed resources and storage rather than a central repository.

One potential problem would be users sharing materials that are not appropriately licensed. This problem exists on other platforms as well. While perusing Curriki for a curriculum project, I encountered a number of resources that were of questionable or even clearly commercial copyright terms. Such an undertaking would require a diligent community that polices the available content.

Another problem is the temporary nature of availability of the content. Over time those sharing the file (seeders) tend to dry up making downloads slow or just unavailable.

I am not necessarily advocating the use of torrents for sharing open educational resources, but I find the possibility interesting. I am interested in hearing other’s thoughts on the matter.

Sharing isn’t simple II

June 13, 2010 in open knowledge, open source, presentations, Technology | No comments

Copyright issues are not the only obstacles to sharing content with others. Some of the obstacles are my choice of software and platform.

Although I am an advocate of open source software, my focus in this area has been server based applications. When it comes to desktop computing, I run a Mac. I like the Macintosh for its ease of use, stability, and reliability. Ubuntu has come along. I run it on my Mac. We have several Ubuntu laptops and an Ubuntu netbook running Jim Klein’s excellent Ubuntu Remix distro. I am still confronted with upset children with malfunctioning computers more often than I want. It is often time consuming fix these bugs. I do not have the time for that on my production computer. This, however, is not about platforms.

The problem is access. It’s no problem for those running a Mac with iWork. I spend a lot of time making presentations and, I find Keynote has a better look and workflow than the alternatives. Unfortunately, exporting to PowerPoint, usable by MS Office and OpenOffice, is not reliable. PDF exports can be difficult to edit. QuickTime exports play fine in Windows, but not Linux.

Ideally, I could share slideshow with which people could do more than use my presentation, or grab and remix slides from it. They would be able to edit each slide itself–down to the character level.

Now I have hundreds of instructional presentations that cannot be easily shared because of my software choice. Not only do I need to screen my presentations for copyright issues, but I also have to go over exports slide by slide to make sure they are reasonably true to the original.

Keynote has arguably saved time in creating content. I honestly believe that hadn’t I used Keynote I never would have produced such a large body of work in so little time. Further, I never could have so quickly produced attractive content using the alternatives. This has come at a cost now that I want to share.

If I continue to use Keynote, I will probably need to avoid many of the great features that do not translate well into other formats. If I leave Keynote, I will need to relearn software and workflow and give up many features I love. Further, it will be more difficult to make the attractive presentations that I am accustomed to and that my students have come to expect.

Interestingly, my previous blog post on sharing presentations yielded a response from Professor Nathan Garrett of Woodbury University in San Diego who is working on a presentation sharing platform. This poses a new option engineered from the beginning for sharing. Further it is being designed to allow users to alter or annotate the slides easily. I am excited to explore this new possibility and look forward to its development. You may see posts about this in the future.

At the moment. I am not sure how I will create future presentations. One thing is clear though: whatever I create will be done with sharing in mind from the beginning. I have realized that decisions made in the creation of presentations has a significant impact on how they can be shared.

Sharing isn’t simple I

June 6, 2010 in open knowledge, presentations | 3 comments

I have made hundreds of instructional presentations over the past three years. As reflected in my last blog post, recently my focus has been on math. Now my goal is to share these presentations with other educators.

The first consideration is straightforward. I plan on using a Creative Commons license. As I’ve discussed in an earlier blog post, Creative Commons offers a licensing wizard on its site that walks you through the process and generates the appropriate license along with HTML code. I am using an Attribution-Share Alike license for this website. That means anyone can use content from this site and remix it as long they attribute the work to me and let others to do the same with any derivative work. I add the more restrictive Non-Commercial condition for any inter-actives that I have posted online.

While mulling this over, I consulted open content advocate and colleague Karen Fasimpaur. She pointed out that the Non-commercial condition is ambiguous. Could a consultant working for a school district use such material? She also pointed out that use by a tutor or private school could be construed as commercial use. I would not want to restrict such use, so I do not plan to use it. In addition, she pointed Share Alike would prohibit combining content with content that restricts sharing. I now plan on using CC Attribution.

One problem is the use of instructional media. Over the years, our school has had video licenses provided by NY Public Television Stations: first Discovery Education, then PowerMedia Plus also owned by Discovery. I have embedded many of these in presentations. Unfortunately, their terms of service specifically prohibit dissemination of almost all such resources. Worse yet, we must destroy any copies once any subscription has expired.

I have also learned to download YouTube videos to embed them in presentations. I can’t view the videos directly through YouTube because our school’s filter blocks it. Even if it didn’t, I wouldn’t risk exposing students to questionable material on each page such as the often inappropriate comments. While such may be acceptable as fair use in a classroom (I am not a lawyer), sharing it would cross another legal threshold.

I would love to use only openly licensed video, but there simply is not enough available. In an online discussion with Karen Fasimpaur, I alluded to the shortage of such materials as a lack of critical mass.

How can I solve the problem of embedded multimedia content and the ensuing copy right issues? I will work harder at finding open multimedia content, but that usually takes much more time. Perhaps I can replace some of the existing videos with such alternatives. Another option is to remove the video from presentations and insert a reference to the source so that individuals can find it and insert it themselves if they can.

Multimedia is not the only copyright issue. There is other content with such problems. When I have run short of time, I have grabbed images from the Google image search without considering licensing rather than more time consuming searches for public domain or CC licensed content. (Now Google advanced search allows filtering by license) In desperation, I have grabbed problem sets directly from textbooks. Yet other material is routinely and deliberately adapted to presentation format from ancillary materials when I must conform to a textbook and program.

Some of these presentations can never be shared openly. Many others will have to be cleaned up by changing or removing content with copyright issues or ambiguity. Fortunately, I have become more careful lately. I plan to go further by flagging presentations that include such content as I encounter them, so I can clean them up in the future.

As you can see, copyright and lack of openly licensed material make sharing difficult. I try harder to use appropriate materials as time goes on with sharing in mind. I am also gathering resources that help me locate openly licensed materials and streamlining the process. Nonetheless, time constraints will continue to exist; however, they should be less of a factor as I have digitized almost all of my instruction. My next post will consider other obstacles to sharing.

NYSCATE Open Knowledge Presentation

November 26, 2009 in open knowledge, presentations | 2 comments

Slides from my presentation. This is a large QuickTime file, so it will take a minute to load.

Open Knowledge

Audio:

Recording of presentation

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