Category Archives: Open Access, open ed, OER

What is open education?

Wordle of this blog post, from http://www.wordle.net

Wordle of this blog post, from http://www.wordle.net

I wrote the following narrative for a teaching award application, and someone has requested that I post it openly as well, as it may be useful to others. I’m happy to do so! (Update July 18, 2015: unfortunately, I didn’t get the award, but you can see my entire application for it in this post).

This was a section of the application where I describe the basics about what open education is. I then go on, after this, to talk about how I engage in open educational activities in my own work. I might post those sections here later, in separate posts.

If you want to learn more about open education, there is also a great ebook called The Open Education Handbook. David Wiley has created an open course on open education, here: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/4

And here is the open education course at the Open University in the UK that I took in 2013. My blog posts from that course are here.

What is open education?

Financial, legal, technological openness: open educational resources

What is open education? To start, it is useful to consider the various meanings the word “open” can have in “open education.” Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) give a useful overview of some of these meanings, including what they call “financial openness,” “legal openness,” “technological openness, and “social openness.”

A common understanding of “open” is “free,” as in free of cost, or what Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) call “financial openness.” This is the meaning one might immediately think of as associated with Massive, Open, Online Courses. These are courses that are available for anyone with a reliable internet connection to take, free of cost.[1] Financial openness is also exemplified when a teacher makes a set of lecture notes, essay topics, a video, an image, etc. available for others to use without a fee.

“Legal openness” refers to the degree to which teaching materials, student work, research and more are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, and redistribute. Some MOOCs, for example, may only allow you to view materials, not download them to revise or share them with others.[2] The “Open Definition” by the Open Knowledge Foundation addresses this meaning of open directly: “Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)” (Open Knowledge Foundation, n.d.). David Wiley, in a widely-used definition of “open content,” lists similar requirements for openness, and labels them the “five R’s”:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

  2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

  5. 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) (Wiley, n.d.)

Wiley argues that the more of these five activities that are allowed, the more “open” a work or set of materials is. How one alerts others to the possibility that they can use one’s work in such ways is through an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. [3] Giving one’s work an open license means that one retains copyright, but allows others to use, share, and sometimes also revise the work without asking permission each time.

Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) also discuss “technological openness,” which refers to the use of different sorts of software tools. Those that are open source are more open technologically than those that are not. In addition, tools that allow for easy editing by anyone, without having to purchase the software, are more open: thus, documents in Open Office or Google Documents are considered more open than those in Microsoft Word. Both David Wiley and “The Open Definition” also acknowledge the importance of technological openness: if a work can only be edited using tools that are very expensive, or that only run on certain platforms, or that require a high level of expertise, it is less open.

Open education is often discussed in terms of using or creating “open educational resources,” or OER—these combine financial, legal, and technological openness. According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, n.d.).

Thus, syllabi, lecture notes, video recordings of lectures, slides, animations, assignments, podcasts, and more can be OER, so long as they are given an open license. Engaging in open education can be as simple as assigning one or more OER for students to read, hear, watch in one’s classes, or creating OER for others to use, revise and share themselves.

Social openness: open pedagogy and students as producers

Finally, Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) discuss “social openness”: “the willingness to make materials available beyond the confines of the classroom by lecturers, students and university management” (p. 105). Social openness not only involves making teaching materials available to a wider audience, but also engaging in more collaborative activities among students, between students and instructors, and between both and the wider community. Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) point to a range between (1) lecturer-centred openness, in which, for example, an instructor creates all curriculum materials and shares them openly, to (2) more student-centred openness, involving students contributing to the curriculum through adding content in things such as blogs and wikis, to (3) inviting contributions and collaborations between students, instructors, and members of the public—such as through connecting with professionals in the field (p. 105).

Similarly, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, drafted in 2007 and currently signed by nearly 2500 individuals and over 250 organizations, focuses on creation and use of OER; but it also emphasizes changing one’s pedagogy to invite more collaboration between instructors, students and the public:

 We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go (“Cape Town Open Education Declaration,” 2007).

Such collaborative pedagogical approaches are sometimes referred to as “open pedagogy.” Wiley (2013) defines open pedagogy as educational activities that are only possible because materials are made available with an open license. Examples he gives include: asking students to revise and remix OER that are used in a course in order to create tutorials for aspects of the course that students often struggle with, and asking students to create or edit Wikipedia entries on topics discussed in a course. Similarly, though using a different term, Ehlers (2011) labels such activities “open educational practices”: “practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path” (p. 4). Open educational practices, like Wiley’s view of open education, involve the use and creation of OER in courses where learners are collaborators and co-producers of the curriculum. Thus, “[t]he pure usage of … open educational resources in a traditional closed and top-down, instructive, exam-focused learning environment is not open educational practice,” according to Ehlers (2011, p. 5), but doing so in the context of a course where students revise such materials and act as collaborators and co-producers of curriculum is.

Tom Woodward expands on this view of open pedagogy to refer to “a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process,” where “[o]pen is a purposeful path towards connection and community” (Grush, 2013; italics in original). Thus, open pedagogy can also include open assignments, which allow students to shape how they will show evidence of learning (or even create assignments for other students to do); open course planning, in which one invites comments and contributions from others when planning a course; and what Woodward calls “open products,” where students publish their work “for an audience greater than their instructor. … Their work, being open, has the potential to be used for something larger than the course itself and to be part of a larger global conversation” (Grush, 2013).

Asking students to create open products, to do work openly and publicly and thereby contribute to knowledge production both inside and beyond the course, is also part of a pedagogical model that Neary and Winn (2009) call “the student as producer.” Contrasting with the idea of the student as a “consumer” of knowledge transmitted by an expert, and higher education as guided by market forces for the sake of students’ future employability, the student as producer model can be defined briefly as: “undergraduate students working collaboratively with academics to create work of social importance that is full of academic content and value, while at the same time reinvigorating the university beyond the logic of market economics” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 193). The student as producer approach “aims to radically democratize the process of knowledge production” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 201). Bruff (2013), citing Bass and Elmendorf (n.d.), emphasizes openness in the student as producer model, by arguing for the importance of students sharing their work with “authentic audiences,” people beyond just the instructor who can benefit from what they are producing. In addition, Bruff (2013) lists two other elements of his view of the student as producer model: students work on open-ended questions or problems, ones that don’t yet have a solution (rather than only working to get the “right” solution to a problem), and students have some autonomy in choosing and carrying out projects.

I am here linking the student as producer model with open pedagogy as discussed above, because I think there is significant overlap; I refer to all of these here as “open pedagogy.” Examples of open pedagogy include activities from asking students to make public blog posts (or posts that are at least shared with the rest of the class, even if they are not public), having students create websites or wikis that showcase a research project they have completed, encouraging students to revise OER and re-share them for other students, teachers and the public, to opening one’s classroom activities to participation by those not officially registered in the course (such as by having discussions on social media, opening up presentations by doing them on webinars, and more).

In my work in open education, I have used, created and shared open educational resources, and I have also engaged in various activities I am putting under the general label of open pedagogy.

[In the rest of the application I discuss my open educational activities…]

——————————————————–

[1] Many MOOCs currently are offered through central organizations such as EdX (https://www.edx.org/), Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/), Future Learn (https://www.futurelearn.com/), Iversity (https://iversity.org/), and UnX (courses offered in Spanish and Portuguese) (http://www.redunx.org/web/aprende/cursos). But there are also institutions of higher education that offer their own MOOCs on their own platforms, without connecting to one of these kinds of organizations.

 

[2] For example, the Coursera terms of use say: “You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.” (Coursera, 2014).

 

[3] Creative Commons licenses provide a range of choices depending on how one wants to share one’s work (e.g., one can restrict the work to non-commercial uses, one can insist that any new works made from the original be shared also with an open license, or one can allow others to reuse the work but not allow any revisions). Finally, Creative Commons has a public domain license by which one can signal that they are releasing their work into the public domain, free to use, revise, redistribute without restriction on how and for what purpose, and without the requirement that the original creator be attributed. See Creative Commons, “About the licenses” for more: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

 

Works Cited

Bass, R. and Elmendorf, H. (n.d.). Social pedagogies: Teagle Foundation white paper. Retrieved from https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/bassr/social-pedagogies/

Bruff, D. (2013, September 3). Students as Producers: An Introduction [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2013/09/students-as-producers-an-introduction/

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration. (2007). Read the Declaration. Retrieved from http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Coursera. (2014). Terms of Use. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

Ehlers, U.-D. (2011). Extending the Territory: From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2), 1–10.

Grush, M. (2013, November 12). Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency–A Q&A with Tom Woodward. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/11/12/open-pedagogy-connection-community-and-transparency.aspx

Hodgkinson-Williams, C., & Gray, E. (2009). Degrees of openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town. International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, 5(5), 101–116. Retrieved from http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=864

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience (pp. 192–210). London, UK: Continuum International Publishing Group. Retrieved from http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/

Open Knowledge Foundation. (n.d.). The Open Definition. Retrieved from http://opendefinition.org/od/

Wiley, D. (n.d.). The open content definition. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

Wiley, D. (2013, October 21). What is Open Pedagogy? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources

UBC’s Policy 81: draft of a revision

 

Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 4.40.45 PM

Screen shot of top of revised Policy 81, available here.

Around this time last year, the University of British Columbia implemented a policy called Policy 81, which mandated that any time a faculty member shared teaching materials with others, any other faculty member at UBC could use them for for-credit courses. The text of the current policy, not the revised one, can be found here. However, this link may change to the new policy once a revised version is passed; description of the old policy and my thoughts about it can be found in the blog posts below:

A blog post explaining the basics of the policy

A post discussing my fears of how it might affect faculty attitudes towards sharing their teaching materials openly

Slides and notes from my presentation at the Open Education 2015 conference on this policy

 

Revised draft policy

In February 2015, about a year after the initial policy was passed by the UBC Board of Governors, a revised version was put forward for comment. You can see the text of that revised version here (note, this is just a draft policy for comment–it has not been passed!). Here are the most important aspects, to my mind.

  • section 2.3: “UBC Scholars own all the intellectual property in the Teaching Materials that they create but, in order to facilitate ongoing use and collaboration where they have contributed those Teaching Materials to a resource for the collective use of their Department, School, or other academic unit or where UBC has made a material investment in the development of the Teaching Materials, UBC has the irrevocable right to use and revise those Teaching Materials in UBC credit courses and to share those rights within the community of UBC Scholars.”
  • Section 2.4: “For clarity, resources for collective use are repositories that exist independent from course delivery platforms such as Connect or individual course webpages.”
  • Section 2.5: “… a material investment in the development of Teaching Materials involves the provision of compensation, facilities, equipment or other resources beyond those ordinarily provided to all UBC instructors in the course of their normal duties, such as, for example, a direct discretionary investment in the development of Teaching Materials.”

Examples of “material investment” listed on the revised policy include receiving a course release to develop new teaching materials, receiving specific payments from the university to develop teaching materials, receiving TA or RA support specifically to develop teaching materials. It does not include having TA support in regular teaching of courses, receiving salary during study leave (even if one develops teaching materials during that time), “incidental use” of UBC computer equipment, or getting one’s usual salary and benefits.

So what would count under this policy, besides getting a course release or having TA or RA help to develop course materias? I’m guessing, maybe, getting a grant to develop certain teaching materials? Maybe if one gets a grant under UBC’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, perhaps, if that involves (as it often does) developing teaching materials?

At any rate, this is a much restricted version of the current policy, which says that whenever one shares teaching materials with someone else–it is notoriously unclear in what “sharing” consists–then UBC can use those materials in for-credit courses. Now, it’s only if one deposits them in a collective resource within their department, school, etc., or of UBC has made a “material investment” in them beyond one’s usual salary and benefits. It’s helpful that they’ve now clarified, in section 2.4, that posting one’s teaching materials to a Learning Management System or a course website doesn’t count–that was one question numerous people had about the current policy, namely whether “sharing” includes posting in such places.

Reaction from others

I haven’t heard much of anything around campus about this proposed revision. There doesn’t seem to be much of an uproar about it, which is not surprising because it is so much more restricted.

Still, the faculty union has expressed some questions and concerns. I mention just some of those, below, for the sake of this not being too terribly long. Many of their questions and concerns sound quite reasonable to me.

  • The Faculty Association letter (linked to above) states that they understood, through discussions with the university, that this would be an “opt-in” policy, and they would like that clarified:  “we recommend that the words ‘and have expressly agreed to share their intellectual property rights’ be added following the words ‘…or other academic unit’ in clause 2.3.” The idea here is to introduce “transaction points” where faculty members would be made clearly aware that their work will fall under the policy.
    • This is an interesting point because reading the revised policy as worded does not suggest any “opt-in” aspect. I would have had no idea that that was part of the discussion. I’m curious to see what the wording is when the policy is passed, because I get the impression from the current revised wording that it is not an opt-in policy, but happens automatically when one or more of the conditions are met.
    • I’m not sure what would happen at this sort of “transaction point.” Would the faculty member just be made aware that this would be a situation that would fall under the policy, and then they could decide to go ahead with receiving the “material investment” or not, and if they do, then that would constitute agreement to share intellectual property rights? I think maybe not, because of the next point (see below).
    • Is “shar[ing] intellectual property rights” the right language? I think it’s clearer, because fairly commonly spoken of, to say that the faculty member retains IP but provides UBC with a “license” to use the materials in such and such a way.

 

  • Similarly, the Faculty Association notes in the letter linked above that the current policy allows faculty members to opt out, and not have their teaching materials be allowed to be used and revised by others at UBC, but this one does not. Will there be an opt-out possibility? [April 17, 2015:] I re-read the Faculty Association letter and realized I had made a mistake in interpreting it earlier. It actually says that in the earlier version, there was the possibility to specify limits on how one’s teaching materials could be used. I had forgotten that that was the case in the earlier policy. So the following bullet points actually don’t apply anymore. I leave them here just because the earlier version of this post had them, in case anyone returns later.

    • Also interesting. I wonder if the opt-out possibility in the earlier version is because it had such a wider scope than this one, but maybe they aren’t going to allow opting out for this restricted version? Since the earlier version gave the opt-out option only if UBC did not provide a “material investment” beyond one’s usual salary and duties to develop the teaching materials, and only if one did not deposit those in a collection in one’s department, school, etc., then I bet they are not thinking of an opt-out option for this one.
    • Plus, if this one will be opt-in, as under number 1, then an option for opting out would not be needed, right? Or is it that #1 just asks that faculty be made aware when their work will fall under the policy, not that it will only do so if they agree to allow the university to use their teaching materials under the policy?
    • Perhaps the Faculty Association would like to see a “transaction point” before any work falls under the policy, in which the faculty member would be made aware that their work would fall under the policy, and then they have to decide specifically yes or no, whether they would like to share their work in this way (even while still receiving the “material investment”). That way, they could either opt in or opt out. But that doesn’t seem to need a policy…couldn’t we just have an opt-in system where people could share their teaching materials if they want to and not if they don’t? Does that need a policy, if it’s completely voluntary? I’m not sure, but I would guess not. And I’m guessing that such a voluntary opt-in system is not what the Board of Governors is looking for.

 

  • The Faculty Association says in their letter that they would like to see more clarity on what “material investment” means, and specifically, to call it “extraordinary material investment” instead, to point to the difference between investment in one’s normal work and investment beyond that.
    • I think the change to “extraordinary material investment” makes sense.
    • The FA also points out that it’s fairly common in departments to give faculty members course releases to create teaching materials (which is news to me, actually). They are claiming that this is part of a faculty member’s “regular duties” because it is a common practice (I think that’s the point). I think what they’re getting to here is that they don’t want this to be part of the policy automatically, but it would be discussed at some “transaction point” and both the university and the faculty member would then agree that it falls under the policy. But see my above questions about what would actually happen at those transaction points–would one be able to receive the “material investment” while also opting out of giving UBC permission to reuse and revise the materials?

 

  • The Faculty Association letter notes that the policy is silent on attribution: will those whose materials are revised or reused need to be attributed? The previous version of the policy did include provisions for that (unless one says one doesn’t want to be attributed).

 

  • [New as of April 17, 2015:] The Faculty Association wonders in their letter about the definition of “UBC Scholars” in the policy, because it allows all UBC Scholars to reuse and revise teaching materials that fall under the policy. Section 2.1 states, for example: “UBC wishes to enable the members of its community who teach or participate in courses of study at UBC (“UBC Scholars”) to collaborate in the development of materials used in association with those courses.” As the Faculty Association notes, this seems to imply that “the entire student body of the university” would be able to reuse and revise teaching materials that the policy applies to. The FA letter states that this is too wide an audience: “We do not believe that the University intends to be so expansive, but the current wording could produce such an outcome.”
    • I have no idea what the University intends by defining “UBC Scholars” in this expansive fashion. In the previous version of the policy it was explicitly stated that the rights to reuse and revise teaching materials lay only with “UBC Instructors.” This draft quite clearly indicates that anyone who participates in courses of study (e.g., students in for-credit courses, but perhaps also in not-for-credit courses?) would also have such rights.
    • On one level, I actually think of this in a kind of positive light: I think that it could be fantastic for instructors to make some of their teaching materials available for students to revise. It could be a great learning experience for them. On the other hand, though, sharing teaching materials with students and allowing them to reuse and revise them should be an individual choice of faculty members, in my view.
    • A couple of colleagues have brought to my attention that students are uploading their course materials into websites that sell them to others, or allow the materials to be viewed if a student uploads something else, all without the instructors’ permission. This sort of blanket statement about giving students the irrevocable right to reuse and revise would facilitate this sort of behaviour, because if the materials fell under the policy then the faculty member could not complain if this is what ended up happening to them.
      • Personally, of course, I share my teaching materials with a CC license, so students may do this with them. I don’t care so much except that others will think they need to pay for materials I am making freely available, or that they need to violate someone’s copyright to get a hold of them. That part I dislike.

 

Reaction from me

Well, I’m such an advocate for sharing one’s teaching materials openly–publicly, with an open license–that I don’t mind this policy at all. I think it is much less likely to lead people to not want to share their work openly than the last one did, given how much more restricted it is. As noted in the blog posts listed at the beginning of this one, a number of faculty members at UBC were very upset by the original policy, because it seemed to them as if UBC were trying to get their hands on teaching materials in order to use them to make money from courses without having to pay people to develop teaching materials (e.g., in online courses they offer for a fee).

I could be wrong, though; maybe even this restricted policy will lead to the same concerns. I just haven’t heard them yet.

As previously, my main concern with all this has been that it may have led people to be less likely to consider sharing their teaching materials publicly with an open license (such as a Creative Commons license). If they have become suspicious of UBC’s motives (which a small survey I did last Fall suggests some have–see my slides and notes from a presentation I did on this policy last Fall) and don’t want to share even with just UBC, then they aren’t going to be willing to share more widely (because then UBC could also use the materials).

Previous to all this, I thought it might have been a good idea to try for a policy that requires a Creative Commons license if one receives a grant to develop teaching materials, such as from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund at UBC. The money for that grant comes from student fees, and it made sense to me to say that at least students should have access to those materials. Of course, one could give them access through a more restricted policy, and it’s interesting that the Faculty Association specifies in their response to the revised Policy 81, as noted above, that they would like to see it clarified so that it does not include students. But I’m now wondering if the right thing to do at the current time, at least here, wouldn’t be to just focus on efforts to encourage people to share their teaching materials openly on a purely voluntary basis. Any more attempts to make such things into a policy, right here and right now, are not likely to go over well.

 

What else might be done to increase open sharing of teaching materials?

It would be great if we could raise awareness and give support to people who would like to share their teaching materials openly and publicly–e.g., best practices on formats, where/how to share them, where/how to find those by others that one might use, etc. There’s a bit about open educational resources on the UBC Copyright website (but mostly it’s about how you can use such things under the auspices of copyright law). UBC also has quite a comprehensive and useful Guide to Creative Commons.

I wonder if we might do more beyond having these resources available. I’m trying to do a bit by holding workshops on open education here and there, but it is common that only those already interested in such issues attend.

What else might work to raise awareness and provide support? Assuming that the university would actually prioritize putting money towards this, what would be some good things to do beyond a policy that requires sharing in some form? I’m curious if anyone has any thoughts.

 

Media!

So, this is kind of exciting for me. I’ve been mentioned in some articles and blog posts, and even interviewed!

First, as a result of my presentation at the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

Most recently, there was a writeup of my research on peer feedback on writing, on the BCcampus website.

And then there was an article about the three Faculty Fellows (including me) with the BCcampus Open Textbook program for 2014-2015.

So it’s not the New York Times or even the CBC, but hey, it’s a start.

Presentation at Open Ed conference 2014 (on UBC’s Policy 81)

I have been waiting to make this post, because like last year, all the sessions this year were videorecorded, and I was going to wait until the recordings were posted on Youtube so I could embed mine here. But the conference was in November of 2014, and it’s now February of 2015, and the Open Education Conference Youtube channel still just has the keynotes from the 2014 conference up. So I’m going to at least post my slides here.

This presentation is from the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC. It was about UBC’s Policy 81, and my fears that it may have lead to enough bad feelings among some people at UBC that they are no longer willing to share teaching materials with an open license. I did a small survey (28 people responded) of faculty members at UBC who had opted out of Policy 81 by signing up on a registry to do so, and found that that was indeed the case for some.

Now, just this week a revised Policy 81 has come out, and the university is asking for comments. I have a blog post about that too.

Here are the slides from my presentation:

 

I also have a lengthy set of notes for the presentation (surprisingly lengthy, given that I spoke for about 20-25 minutes, if I remember correctly (so obviously I skimmed over much of this!). In case you’re wanting more background on any of this, you can check out the notes:

 

Finally, as a result of this presentation, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.

 

Governance at UBC

At the presentation at the conference, some people asked about whether or not there was shared governance at UBC–how could it be that the administration and the faculty union were so at odds on this issue? A good question. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how governance works at UBC, but here’s what I do know.

The policy was passed by the Board of Governors, which consists of (according to the University Act of BC)

  • the UBC Chancellor
  • the UBC President
  • 11 people appointed by the lieutenant governor, two of whom should be from a list of nominees from the alumni association
  • 3 students (undergrad or grad)
  • 3 faculty members
  • 2 UBC employees who are not faculty members

So there are just three faculty members out of 21 people on the board, and 11 out of those 21 are not currently at UBC (though two of those 11 are probably alumni, from what I can tell). The faculty voice, then, is pretty small.

There is also the Senate of UBC, which is part of the overall governance. The membership of the Senate is pretty complicated, so I’ll just copy here from the University Act, part 7:

(a) the chancellor;

(b) the president, who is the senate’s chair;

(c) the academic vice president who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1 or equivalent;

(d) the deans of faculties who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1;

(e) the chief librarian or a person designated for the purpose by the chief librarian;

(f) the director of continuing education or a person designated for the purpose by the director;

(g) a number of faculty members equal to twice the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), to consist of 2 members of each faculty elected by the members of that faculty, and the remainder elected by the faculty members in the manner that they, in joint meeting, determine, but only faculty members employed through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(h) a number of students, equal to the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), elected from the students who are members of an undergraduate student society or a graduate student society, in a manner that ensures that at least one student from each faculty is elected, but only students studying through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;

(i) 4 persons who are not faculty members, elected by and from the convocation;

(j) one member to be elected by the governing body of each affiliated college of the university;

(k) additional members, determined by the senate, without altering the ratio set out in paragraphs (g) and (h).

So clearly, the Senate has a much greater representation of the faculty than the Board of Governors. But which body does what?

The Board of Governors website lays out the different responsibilities of the two. Briefly, according to that site:

The Board of Governors is responsible for the business of the University – its administration, finances, operations, assets and place in the community – and the integrity of such.

The Senates have a more focused responsibility for the academic integrity of the University, subject to the Board’s involvement where academic matters interface with matters of business and the larger community.

According to the longer list on the site, the Board of Governors has a say in most of the activities and policies of the university. The things that the Senate determines on its own are mostly to do with academic matters, such as academic discipline, final exams, admit students, grant degrees, and manage the library.

The procedure for adopting policies by the Board of Governors, such as Policy 81, seems to be that the policy is proposed, then there is a comment period, and then a vote is held among the Board. The UBC Faculty Association (our faculty union) expressed serious concerns about Policy 81 in February 2014, but the policy was passed anyway.

 

A revised policy

In February 2015, a revised policy 81 was put forward for comment. Please see a later blog post for information on that.

Two presentations on open education and MOOCs at UBC in 2013

I am trying to keep a record of all my presentations here on this blog, because otherwise I forget about them! Which I did; there are two presentations from 2013 that I gave at UBC on open education and MOOCs. The slides for these have been on Slideshare for awhile, but I’m posting them here so I have a record of everything in one place.

However, these presentations are not terribly self-explanatory on their own (lots of pictures sometimes w/o a lot of text), and I no longer have my notes for them, unfortunately. So really, this is just as a record that I did them, for myself.

Here’s one I gave at the CTLT Institute at UBC in May of 2013, on open education and connectivist MOOCs. I talked about the difference between “xMOOCs” and “cMOOCs,” gave some examples of cMOOCs, and used my recent experience with ETMOOC as an example to illustrate the cMOOC model.

And here’s a similar one I gave during Open UBC week in October of 2013, but this time talking about what I myself am doing in terms of open education. I talked about two open online courses that I was part of designing and facilitating: OOE13 and Why Open?. I also talked about what aspects of my on-campus courses I was making openly available, including in Philosophy 102 and through the Arts One Open site. There is a recording of this presentation available on YouTube.

CC licenses posters

I’m participating in a quick, five-day workshop on OER from Dec. 5-10 called Ed Tech Open, and one of the things for the first day (which I’m now two days behind on!) was to look over some resources on creative commons and create something about CC licenses that is itself CC licensed. I thought about making an image, a poster, something like that, but I just don’t have time in this lightning-speed workshop! So I decided to take a look at a few charts/infographics/posters and make a few comments about those. I was wondering what some of the effective ways might be to explain CC licenses visually.

I found the first one, below, from the OER workshop itself, and the others through various web searches. I’ll just saw a few things about how effective I think each one is. BUT, I recognize that such things are quite subjective; what makes sense, seems easy and clear, is going to differ amongst persons I expect.

The following chart, from CC Australia, gives a kind of decision tree for determining which license to use. Here’s the link to the source. This chart is licensed CC BY 2.5 Australia.

 

 

The questions on this poster are very helpful, I think–they’re simple and clear. The colours are what confuse me. The explanation on the left says that the pink boxes refer to remixing, the blue ones refer to commercial uses, and the purple boxes are the licenses. That makes sense, but then if you go that route then the first couple of boxes (the green “start” and the red “all rights reserved” boxes have to be different colours, of course. And the effect of all that just feels a bit confusing to me.

I do like the use of red for the “all rights reserved” box, though. It visually indicates that others can’t do things with your work w/o your permission, and it also subtly suggests that maybe one shouldn’t just jump to go that route–red can indicate, to me, a kind of warning, a danger.

One thing I’d like to see in flowcharts like this is some indication of the implications of one’s choices that one might not be aware of. Sure, I may think I don’t want anyone to change and adapt my content, but would I still think so if I knew that meant that people couldn’t even translate it into a different language, that I thereby make it such that my content will be unlikely to be used in many educational contexts, where adaptation to particular circumstances and learning needs is common?

 

The following poster (link to the original source) comes from Creative Commons Poland, and was designed by Piotrek Chuchla.

 

I think the strength of this poster lies in the fact that it emphasizes images over text. The text is there, of course, but it’s deemphasized. This might work for those who really gravitate towards images. But for me, it’s really no less confusing because I have to make sense of the images themselves. It’s like it’s adding a new visual “code” that I’m unfamiliar with, and that I have learn to recognize (with the text) before I can decipher the meaning. For me, this is a bit off-putting and makes things more complicated. I feel like I’m being hit with a wall of images on each row that I have to spend a great deal of time figuring out.

 

A company called Xplore created a chart that is embedded at the following link:

http://www.xplore.net/web_smart/index.htm?articleId=568

But as they don’t clear give a CC license for this chart, and the copyright notice at the bottom of their site says “All Rights Reserved,” I don’t think I can re-post it here.

I find the format of this one easier to read and clearer, myself. The colour-coded checks under various columns let me know at a glance which licenses allow for commercial use, revision, etc., and which don’t. I also like the brief explanation of each column that follows the chart.

The only thing that’s confusing, though I’m glad they included it, is the row for copyright. There are two problems with this:

  1. The original creator retains copyright in their works when using any CC license. One doesn’t give up copyright.
  2. Everything depends on what permissions the original creator allows for use of the work when asked. The things that are “x” under each column may actually be allowed by the author/creator. It’s just that you have to ask permission first.
  3. The row for “copyright” is under the title “Creative Commons Licenses,” which suggest that there is some CC license called “copyright.”

So I find the “copyright” row problematic. But I’m glad they included the “public domain” row, which many charts leave out. It’s just that they suggest that it’s only for those works whose copyright has expired or forfeited. It doesn’t let people know that they can choose to use CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark.

 

Finally, there is a comprehensive infographic on CC licenses by foter.com, here. It’s quite long and detailed, so I’ll just include a couple of screen shots here.

This image is quite similar to that linked to from Xplore, above. It is of course fine if they based their graphic on the one from Foter (which was published earlier), except that since the one from Foter is licensed CC-BY-SA, then the one from Xplore should be licensed similarly (and the original should be attributed).

 

Be that as it may, this original from Foter doesn’t have the confusing bit about copyright, and doesn’t suggest that public domain is restricted to works whose copyright has expired, been forfeited, or is otherwise inapplicable.

It’s interesting how they order the licenses from most permissive (top) to least permissive (bottom) even though one might have considered putting the SA’s together and the ND’s together. It’s not that BY-ND is more permissive than BY-NC, though; or is it? That’s actually what this infographic suggests in another part:

This suggests that there is a range from most to least permissive, with each license occupying a clear place in that step-wise range. I like the idea here of including the permissiveness/restrictiveness of the licenses in the graphic, but I think the particular order is not exactly clear. Why is ND more permissive than NC? I suppose it is, if one is emphasizing where/how the work may be used, but for OER at least, I think ND is more problematic than NC because to actually be useful in educational contexts one must be able to revise the work.

And of course, why not include CC0 in this list, which would be above CC-BY? I find that CC0 often gets left behind in discussions of CC licenses, with people thinking that the most permissive thing they can do is use CC-BY. But if one doesn’t particularly care about being attributed, then why not use CC0? Some may indeed care, and so then of course CC-BY is the right one to use.

 

I don’t have any big conclusions to draw from all this, except that I personally find the one from Foter the best in terms of presenting the information accurately, clearly and simply. I’d be curious to hear if others have different reactions!

The “open” in MOOCs

I was part of a debate on the value of MOOCs for higher education during UBC’s Open Access Week, on Oct. 29, 2014.

Here is the description of the event and speaker bios, from the Open UBC 2014 website (not sure how long the link is going to be active, so copied the description here). (The following text is licensed CC-BY)

Debate: Are MOOCs Good for Higher Education?

Description

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are subject to both hype and criticism. In 2012, the New York Times declared it was the year of MOOC, while critics branded 2013 as the year of the anti-MOOC. Today, the debate about the impact that MOOCs are having, and will have, on higher education continues and the topic of MOOCs often dominates conversations and questions about how changes in technologies, pedagogies, learning analytics, economics, student demographics, and open education will impact student learning. Many universities, including UBC, are experimenting with MOOCs in different ways – from trying to understand how to scale learning to how to best use MOOC resources on campus.
This session will explore different types of MOOCs, the possible role for MOOCs in higher education, and their benefits and drawbacks.

Speaker Bios.

Angela Redish (moderator) is the University of British Columbia’s Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Enrollment and Academic Facilities. Dr. Redish served as a professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts at UBC for nearly 30 years. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, and her subsequent research studied the evolution of the European and North American monetary and banking systems. She served as Special Adviser at the Bank of Canada in 2000-2001, and continues to be active in monetary policy debates. Her teaching has been mainly in the areas of economic history, monetary and macro-economies.

Jon Beasley-Murray is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia. He has taught a wide range of courses, from Spanish Language to Latin American literature surveys and seminars on topics ranging from “The Latin American Dictator Novel” to “Mexican Film.” His  use of Wikipedia in the classroom has led to press coverage in multiple languages across the globe.

Jon is a vocal critic of the current model of learning and assessment common in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), especially for the Humanities. He blogs at Posthegemony and is the author of Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. His current book projects include “American Ruins,” on the significance of six ruined sites from Alberta, Canada, to Santiago de Chile. He is also working on a project on “The Latin American Multitude,” which traces the relationships between Caribbean piracy and the Spanish state, and indigenous insurgency and the discourse of Latin American independence.

Gregor Kiczales is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Most of his research has focused on programming language design and implementation. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS).  He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera. His discussion of the benefits of MOOCs can be found on the Digital Learning blog.

Christina Hendricks is a Senior Instructor in Philosophy and Arts One at the University of British Columbia. While on sabbatical during the 2012-2013 academic year, she participated in a number of MOOCs, of different types. Ever since then she has used her MOOC participation as a form of professional development and a way to make connections with other teachers and researchers around the world. She has also been one of the co-facilitators for an open online course (not massive) at Peer 2 Peer University called“Why Open?”, and is a part of a project called Arts One Open that is opening up the Arts One program as much as possible to the public.

 

For my portion of the debate, I wanted to talk about openness (duh…it was open access week!) and the degree to which what many people think of as MOOCs are open (some of them not very). I talked a bit about OERs (open educational resources) and open textbooks as ways to make MOOCs more open, and also about opening up the curriculum and content to co-creation by participants. This led me to cMOOCs, which could be described as having a more open pedagogy. I briefly touched on the value of cMOOCs for higher education, partly as professional development for faculty and for lifelong learning for students.

Jon Beasley-Murray has posted a copy of what he said during this debate, on his blog.

I’m told this session was recorded and the recording will be posted on YouTube, but I don’t think it’s there yet. In the meantime, here are my slides from the debate. I just had 12 minutes max, though I expect I went over time a bit!

 

Presentation on Open Leadership for OCLMOOC

In October of 2014 I was invited to give a short presentation on open leadership to OCLMOOC, an open online course for Alberta educators. I was at first unsure what I would say, as I thought perhaps “open leadership” was some category or theory of leadership I had never heard of but was being asked to talk about. But Susan Spellman Cann, who invited me to speak, assured me that I had plenty to talk about because I myself was an open leader.

Me? An open leader? I just started learning about, thinking about, and beginning to practice open education in Spring 2013–a mere year and a half ago. And I started being much more active on my blog and on Twitter starting around then too. I certainly didn’t think of myself as an open leader (yet).

But Susan convinced me, and I thought I might just have some useful things to share about what it might mean to be an open leader, if indeed I could consider myself one. So I agreed.

Here are the slides I used for the short presentation. And the recording of the session on Blackboard Collaborate can be found by a link on this page on the OCLMOOC website.

Oh, and the closed door on one of the slides is actually an animated gif of a door opening; it makes no sense for the door to be closed! It just doesn’t work on Slideshare, darnit!

Open education in Philosophy

Right now I’m working on a chapter for an anthology on teaching philosophy; it is a kind of summary and expansion of a presentation I did for the American Association of Philosophy Teachers meeting last July, in Minnesota (see here for my blog post about this presentation). The anthology contains papers about presentations at the conference meeting.

I’m pasting below the proposal I submitted for this chapter, in case anyone is interested! But I’m also re-activating a survey I did last summer before this presentation, asking anyone who is interested to share their views on:

  • what you think open education is
  • what are some benefits and possible drawbacks to engaging in open education?

This is purely informal; I’ll just use it to inform my thoughts on these two questions (rather than reporting detailed results…I can’t claim anything about patterns of views from this very short and very informal survey!).

If you’d be willing to share your thoughts on these two questions, please fill out the survey! It is already embedded in an earlier blog post; I just updated the intro section to talk about this new chapter I’m writing. Please see the survey here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2014/05/14/informal-survey-open-ed/

Here’s the proposal I wrote for the chapter…

 

Teaching and Learning Philosophy in the Open: Why/Not?

At the 2014 meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, I facilitated a workshop discussing what “open education” means, and why/why not one might want to engage in it. I propose a chapter in the special issue of Teaching Philosophy that includes not only the results of our discussion at that meeting, but also those of a similar workshop I did at my institution, and a survey I have done in the past and will do again, asking a wider audience similar questions.

Slides for the workshop can be found here: http://www.slideshare.net/clhendricksbc/aapt2014-phil-openeduslides

Part One: Open education

In the first part of the chapter I will briefly discuss the concept of “open,” and then talk about “open education” in more detail. There is no single definition of “open” that is universally agreed upon, as what it means differs according to context (e.g., open access scholarly articles, open source software, open government, open data, etc.). I will talk about one definition I have found particularly useful for thinking about open education, which is the 5 “R’s” by David Wiley, open education advocate and Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning (http://lumenlearning.com/). According to Wiley, content is open to the degree that it allows people to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute (see http://www.opencontent.org/definition/ for details on what these mean). One way to engage in open education, then, is to use, create, revise, distribute “open educational resources” (OER’s) that allow for one or more of the 5 Rs—e.g., syllabi, lecture notes, videos, audio resources, animations, and more.

I will then discuss one easy way to make one’s teaching and learning resources into OER’s, namely by using Creative Commons licenses. I’ll give an overview of what those are, what one can use them to do, and the different kinds of licenses available.

In the last part of this section I’ll share various ways one can engage in open education, collected both from the participants in the workshop at AAPT 2014 (some of their answers are recorded on a Google Doc, here), from a similar workshop I did at my university (answers here), and also from responses to a survey I did earlier in the summer of 2014 (and will do again), which can be accessed here.

Part Two: Why/Not?

Part Two of the chapter will be devoted to discussing upsides and downsides to engaging in open education in philosophy. Material for this section will come largely from the answers from participants in workshops and a survey linked in the previous paragraph, but also from my own experiences with teaching and learning in the open.

One of the participants in the AAPT workshop suggested that philosophy teachers may have a special incentive to engage in open education, given the value of what we teach to people of many ages, in many kinds of professions and life situations. We would be following in Socrates’ footsteps, who taught others without asking for payment. In this section of the chapter I will discuss reasons why one might think philosophers could have a special duty to engage in open education, but ultimately I will conclude that the benefits and drawbacks must be weighed by each individual in their particular situation to decide if they should do so.

Open and free, redux; Or, yes the words do matter

I am helping to facilitate a course right now at Peer 2 Peer University called “Why Open?” I did so last year as well, and managed to squeeze out a few blog posts during that course, which can be found in 2013 posts under the Why Open category on this blog. 

We’re in week 2 of the course, and one of the things we’ve asked participants to do is to read a few documents about the differences between “open” and “free.” I blogged a bit about this last year, but realized as I was doing the readings this year that there is still a lot I don’t quite get. And the best way for me to understand things that I find complicated is to write about them.

Free software and open content 

Last year I didn’t really bother with focusing on software to think about the differences between “open” and “free,” but this year I decided it was high time I get familiar with this issue. Here’s where I’m at in my understanding so far, from reading some of the things posted for week 2 of our course, plus also a couple of other articles, noted below.

gnu-47524_640

GNU image from Pixabay.

The original in this dichotomy was free software, defined by four freedoms–as the Free Software Foundation puts it in their “free software definition”:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.

There are, of course, similarities between these freedoms and those of the “open content definition” created by David Wiley, which now has 5 Rs:

The term “open content” describes any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like “open source”) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  5. 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)

Both of these refer to what one can do with the work, the software, etc.–one should be able to revise it, reuse it, redistribute it, etc. Of course, I’m glossing over differences between these two definitions and lists of freedoms, but the basic idea is similar I think.

Free software and open source software

Finley argues in “Where the Free Software Movement Went Wrong (and How to Fix it)” that much of the software that fits under the definition of open source according to the Open Source Initiative would likely also be “free software” according to the four freedoms above. But honestly, looking at the four freedoms above and this definition of OSS, I’m having a hard time seeing exactly where they differ. I think that freedom 0 for FS is not really in the OSS definition, for one thing. And freedom 3, redistribution, is turned into the freedom to redistribute copies as part of an aggregation of software programs in the OSS definition. So there are practical differences between the two (this short article explains briefly how FS is always OSS, but not vice versa).

Tux2, by Larry Ewing, on Wikimedia Commons.

Tux2, by Larry Ewing, on Wikimedia Commons.

The Open Source Initiative’s FAQs on the difference between free software and open source software isn’t terribly helpful in trying to understand the differences. It states that the definitions of FS and OSS use different language, but ultimately get to the same place. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.

Stallman says, in “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software”, that there is a big difference in values and purposes. Those who support “free software” are motivated by and focus on the freedom of the user/developer to do what they will with the software. While proponents of “open source software,” Stallman argues, aren’t so concerned about such freedoms and are instead interested in the pragmatic benefits that can be had through using open source software–better programs, easier ability to gather data, etc. And as a result, the OSS people aren’t worried if some of the four freedoms get curtailed, such as through “Tivoization”.

According to Morozov, in “The Meme Hustler“, Free Software (and its proponent, Richard Stallman) focused on the freedoms of the user of software–their ability to use it on various machines, to change the code, to redistribute it, etc. Morozov claims that Open Source Software, and its proponent Tim O’Reilly, focused on the freedom of developers:

O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

“Freedom” here means being free to develop the software I want, how I want to, and letting you choose whether you want to accept my terms or go shopping for something else. This is the freedom of the free market, perhaps, with all the common arguments about improved productivity, efficiency, innovation, etc. that come along with that view of freedom (which may not actually be accurate, but that’s a different issue).

The words

One thing that is particularly interesting to me in all this is that there is a great deal of emphasis given to the particular word chosen. Some say the OSS supporters wanted to distance themselves from the ideology of the FS movement because the latter was not attractive to businesses (e.g., see Wikipedia on the history of free and open source software). “Free” could sound too much like “gratis” (no cost), “freeware”–which I imagine not too many for-profit businesses are going to want to emphasize. And if you’re not concerned about user freedoms, why focus on the word “free” anyway?

Enter “open,” which Morozov discusses fairly extensively in “The Meme Hustler.” He notes the ambiguity of the word: “Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as ‘open.'” Morozov points out that the word “open” is similar to the word “law” in that both can mean so many different things: “from scientific ‘laws’ to moral ‘laws’ to ‘laws’ of the market to administrative ‘laws,’ the same word captures many different social relations.” This seems right to me (well, at least, that “open” is ambiguous; not sure about it being sexy); the fact that so many people and projects and organizations and businesses can claim to be “open” while doing very different things attests to that. When you consider all the various kinds of things claimed to have an “open” version (a sample list can be found in section 4 of the “openness” wiki entry from Peer 2 Peer Foundation), you might wonder, as I do, what holds them all together. 

So the “open” in OSS can mean that code is available to view/study/revise, and also that software creation should be left to the “open” market without too many barriers on what one must allow users to do. You do not have to give users freedoms besides freedom of choice of which platform/app they want to use, on the terms offered by the providers.

All of this is making me wonder if I don’t like the word “free” better than open, given the sort of thing Stallman was after. But at the same time, of course, “free” is too ambiguous as well. Too often it sounds like no- or low-cost, which doesn’t capture the kinds of freedoms listed in the bullet points of both the FS definition and the open content definition at the beginning of this post.

I can see why some people, such as Chris Sakkas of Living Libre, have decided to try to use a different word–he uses “libre,” which he defines as follows (under “understanding libre” on the Living Libre page):

Describes a work that can be shared and adapted without limitations, though with conditions

A libre work can be shared and adapted by anyone in the world.

When the creator places their work under a libre licence, they give permission for everyone now and in the future to share and adapt their work. This permission, once given, cannot be withdrawn.

This permission is unlimited. You can share and adapt their work no matter who you are or how you are sharing it. You can sell it, print it out, put it on a file-sharing network, and so on.

This permission is conditional. When adapting their work, you have to obey certain conditions. The most popular is attribution: if you share or adapt a work, you have to give credit to the original creator. Another is a copyleft restriction. If you adapt a copyleft work, you must place your adaptation under the same copyleft licence.

 

Questions I’m left with

Is coming up with a new word the way to go? If “open” is ambiguous, how will a new word that most are not familiar with not also end up meaning many different things, since it will be hard to come to an agreement on a single definition?

Or, does it matter if “open” is so ambiguous? Wouldn’t we just be talking past one another if we mean different things with the same word? Doesn’t having so many meanings to the word invite people and organizations to claim they are “open” when what they are doing bears not a whole lot of resemblance to what many would call “open” activities?

Is there anything that ties all “open” things together so as to justify using the same word for them?

 

What do you think?