Tag Archives: #h817open

In the previous post I discussed why I don’t use a CC-BY-NC license for my blog, and won’t do so for any open educational resources I create. In this one I do the same for CC-BY-SA.

Share alike

Some of the blogs connected to the OU Open Education course have opted for a share alike clause for their CC licenses–see, e.g., this post by Inger-Marie Christensen, this one by Guy Cowley, and this one by Gitte Bailey Hass. These express a desire to allow continued sharing of the work into the future, so that someone else couldn’t, for example, put an NC or ND clause onto the work later (well, they could, but, you know…).

The point of using a CC-BY-SA license seems to be to keep things free in the sense of “libre”: the work can continue to be not only reused, but also revised, remixed, redistributed (the four R’s, given by David Wiley). The idea behind CC-BY-SA is similar to the idea of “copyleft,” which is explained on the GNU site in terms of software: “Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.”

Charging money

Now, initially one might think that this means the work would have to remain free (in the sense of gratis) in perpetuity; after all, if one put a CC-BY-SA license on a work, then any changes and redistribution would have to also have a CC-BY-SA license, so it would be available for free (no cost), right? Not necessarily–one can still charge money for something with a CC-BY-SA license. What is not allowed is restricting others’ ability to use and revise and remix and redistribute the work themselves. The legal code of the CC-BY-SA license says: “You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.”

Whether or not you can charge money for such a work is a separate issue. It’s related, of course, in that making money is easier if you can stop others from distributing a work as well, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to charge for it. One way this might work is with software: someone could create a new program based on some code that has a copyleft license, and the new code has to also have a copyleft license. But the program could still be sold, even though the code is openly available for anyone to use, change, redistribute. But there are many people who can’t do anything with the code, can’t figure out how to install the program on their machines, etc., so they might be willing to pay for the software. The GNU site has a good article on how copyleft doesn’t prohibit making money from software: “Selling Free Software.”

Commercial enclosure

Some argue that one can use SA to prevent the sort of commercial enclosure discussed in my previous post, and that it would be a better tool for doing so than NC. For example, a booklet arguing against CC-BY-NC by Paul Klimpel explains (on pp. 12-13) that any work that uses something licensed CC-BY-SA, even when added to or mixed with things not so licensed, has to be released, as a whole, with a CC-BY-SA license as well–“and that is one thing most companies, especially larger ones, are not willing to do,” Klimpel’s translated text reads.

Charles Lowe explains further in “Considerations for Creative Commons Licensing of Open Educational Resources: The Value of Copyleft“:

… if I produce a derivative work of a Share Alike licensed open textbook on my own, one that is significantly enhanced over previous versions, I can sell it, even though I must license it as Share Alike. As a result of the license, any person who buys it—for whatever price I set—can post it to the Internet and give it away for free. From that point on, the potential market value for selling the book has disappeared.

“Pallas cat,” cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by suvodeb

So perhaps CC-BY-SA would cover the concerns about commercial enclosure that Stephen Downes raises (see my previous blog post), and I share, though about which I am not worried for my own work? Downes would not agree; he argues here and here that charging money to access a work means it is no longer free, and here he states that copyleft licenses like CC-BY-SA embody a contradiction: 

They are saying “‘you shall not block anyone from using this content’ and ‘you may block some people from using this content.'” [by charging money for it]

Downes then goes on to reiterate the argument that even if copyleft licenses supposedly leave the free (as in gratis) versions available, it doesn’t end up working that way because the free versions will be enclosed.

What will actually happen is an empirical matter that I don’t have the facts to try to predict, and it’s quite complicated, as this post by Downes and this reply by Wiley suggest. And, as I’m ultimately rejecting both NC and SA, I won’t try to go further into this issue here.

Sharing in perpetuity

There is also a deeper, philosophical argument that can be advanced in support of copyleft principles. J.M. Pedersen argues here that copyleft licenses allow for “reciprocity in perpetuity,” in the sense that they allow one to take resources from a “commons” but also require that anything new done to them be returned back to that commons for anyone else to use.

The GPL [GNU General Public License–a copyleft license] ensures that everyone is able to access the Free Software commons, and also that everyone will act in ways that ensure its continuity (and in fact, growth) into the future. Reciprocity in perpetuity refers to an attitude of responsibility and responsiveness that is necessary in order for the commons to remain perpetually there.

Pedersen also explains that copyleft therefore creates a kind of community of people who agree to reciprocally share their work. This community is, in principle, open to anyone, but of course they have to be willing to engage in this kind of reciprocity: enjoying freedoms to use, to redistribute, and to improve works only if one is willing to allow others to do the same with anything one creates on the basis of them.

This idea of “reciprocity in perpetuity” expresses the desire that free works (in the sense of libre) remain free far into the future. CC-BY and CC0, for example, couldn’t guarantee that–they allow others to use the works in any way they wish, including revising them extensively and releasing the new works under copyright.

I respect this desire, and efforts to keep things libre into the future. It seems that in regards to CC-BY vs. CC-BY-SA, the choice comes down to giving others complete freedom to do what they want with your work vs. ensuring that more people, down the road, have freedom to use, revise, remix, and redistribute your work. There is one restriction that SA imposes that BY alone does not: one has to release whatever one creates from the SA-licensed work under an SA-type license as well. That’s not too much to ask for continued freedom of persons to use the material into the future, right? After all, one could say that the only restriction SA provides is restriction against further restrictions, as Rob Myers points out in this succinct post: “it does not stop you doing anything, it only stops you stopping others.”

But there are costs with SA, of course, as with any choice of license. And looking at those shows that SA does stop others doing some things.

Costs

Mixed Boulder Detail, by Field Outdoor Spaces. Licensed CC-BY

The most direct cost, though some might not think of it as such, is that one’s work is not available for revision, remixing and redistribution by those who do not want to use a CC-BY-SA license. I, for example, don’t even look at any works that are licensed as SA when I am looking for images for my blog, and I am not likely to for OER either, since I plan to use CC-BY for my OER as well. I just completely skip over things with NC or SA licenses (or ND, even though I could use ND images since I use them whole…I just go straight for the CC-BY stuff because it’s the safest).

David Wiley has explained the license compatibility issue arising from SA here, as has Leigh Blackall, here. The issue is that material licensed with SA (or another copyleft license) often cannot be combined with other material that also has a type of SA license into a remix (e.g., one can’t combine material with a CC-BY-SA license with material that has a CC-BY-NC-SA license, because both require that the remix would have to be released under a compatible license as each one). See this chart on the Wikieducator site, which explains license compatibility quite clearly.

Further, of course, the SA designation restricts the sort of license that can be put on the remix, so those who do not wish to use an SA license will simply not use such materials. Which means that, again, releasing one’s work under an SA-type license restricts the number of uses it can be put to, and therefore likely the number of people using it.

Now, this may not matter to some; they may rather want to enter into the reciprocity community Pedersen discusses (as noted above) and only release their work to others who will also share it with others in the same way. But in so doing they are restricting their work to fewer uses (which they may not care about). By using CC-BY (or especially if I choose to move to CC0), my work can be used by more people, which is something I do care about. I put it out there to be used, if anyone finds it of use.

I recognize that this could mean it may be used by more people initially, but then closed off. And that does still bug me–which is why, as noted in my previous post, I’d still like to have some other kind of instrument that would allow for commercial use but not total commercial (or other) enclosure, such that no free versions can be had. This may be impossible, but that’s what I’d like. But again, that ultimately seems unlikely for the stuff I do.

As with most things, the choice between CC-BY and CC-BY-SA comes down to which costs one is most willing to bear. I find SA much less problematic than NC, after all this research, and I very much understand the desire to try to keep works libre in perpetuity through the use of SA.

But ultimately, I think of it this way: I give away my work to be used by others, as many others as want to, and they create something new with it (and maybe with other stuff too). Then it’s no longer just mine; I’m not willing to require that they share it with others in a certain way. My stuff is still available for others to use as they wish; whatever new stuff is created may or may not be, for various reasons that I can’t even imagine at the moment. 

I come back to the idea of giving my stuff away as a gift. Here, you can have it, and that means you can do what you will with it. Maybe you can do wonderful things I couldn’t imagine, and that wouldn’t be possible if I put more restrictions on it. Or maybe you’ll try to enclose it and not allow others to use it. But since I think the latter is less likely with my work than the former, I’m going with CC-BY.

Or possibly CC0.

For week three of the Open Education course at the Open University that I am participating in (though we are now in week 5), one of the activities is to choose a Creative Commons license for “your blog content and other material you produce.” Of course, the latter is so vague that it might be difficult for some to say what license they might use for all of it, as they might end up using different licenses for different things. I am likely to just use one, but I may be in the minority.

I have already gone through some soul-searching on this very issue, but in a direction I haven’t seen in any of the other blogs I’ve looked at for this course: in an earlier post I asked why even use CC-BY instead of, say, CC0, which is more like putting one’s work into the public domain. I’m still undecided, but at this point (as you can tell from this site) am still using CC-BY for my blog.

But what I haven’t done is try to explain why I use CC-BY instead of CC-BY-NC (non commercial) or SA (share alike) on my blog, and why I would probably use CC-BY on any OER I might create (unless I decide to use CC0 instead). Generally, I use CC-BY  because I want to leave my work free for anyone to use however they like. But the issues involved are really quite complicated.

I’m only going to discuss NC and SA and SA in this and the next post, because I can’t imagine asking people not to make derivatives of what I create–it just seems part of sharing freely, to me, that people can revise and remix my work. This post is about why I don’t use CC-BY-NC, and the next is about why I don’t use CC-BY-SA.

[Thanks to David Kernohan, Pat Lockley, Brian Lamb, Rob Myers and Joss Winn for providing some links and ideas on Twitter that I’ve used in this and the next post.]

Commercial use

I’ve read several blog posts in the OU Open Education course that opt for CC-BY-NC  (such as this one by Nick Hood, this one by David (I can’t find a last name) , this one by Daniela Signor and this one by Sukaina Walji.) Some express the sentiment that if they are giving away things for free, then they don’t want others to be making money off of them. I have to say that I kind of get this sentiment, but also not. I guess the idea is that if any money is to be made from what is produced, then the producer should be the one to benefit rather than someone who has just taken the content for free. This sentiment seems to make sense in a market economy, where many people feel that their work should be compensated monetarily if someone else is making money from it; alternatively, some may think it wrong for others to make money from something they have either not worked on or not paid for.

Of course, this sort of thinking should lead people to support open access publishing, since, increasingly, there is not much that publishers do that justifies them closing off access to publications and charging a fee…but that’s an argument for another day (and more complex than I’m making it out here, yes).

Bye Bye Ship by Paulo Ordoveza. Licensed CC-BY

Gifts

I get the idea that if money is being made from something, it seems fair to give some money to those who created the item in the first place. But it seems to me that once you decide to give your work away to be used, altered and remixed by others, it might be better thought of as a gift than a market commodity. And when you give something away as a gift, you might be said to be allowing the recipient(s) to do whatever they like with it. Sure, some people might be a bit upset if they gave a gift that another person decided to sell–but would they be upset because the other person made money off of something that they got for free and therefore didn’t have the right to make money from? To me, that doesn’t really make sense; if you give it away, it becomes someone else’s to do with as they wish.

When I give my stuff away, I’m saying goodbye to control over what happens to it afterwards, because it’s no longer just mine.

I realize that one of the benefits of CC licenses, though, is to allow people flexibility in the degree to which they want to think of their creations as gifts. And some people won’t accept that way of thinking. So here are some other thoughts.

• If I have chosen not to try to make money off my work, why get upset if someone else does? After all, I could have tried to do so myself, but decided (for whatever reasons) not to. I gave up that option when I didn’t need to. I don’t really understand the sentiment that, if I am not going to make money off my work then no one else can either. Just because I chose to give up getting a financial reward, why must everyone else do so? If it’s because they didn’t work on it or pay for it, consider:
• If someone is going to be able to make money off of something I created, they are going to have to do some work that I chose not to do, such as marketing it. After all, if I already put it out for free for others to reuse, change, remix, then there is probably going to have to be some kind of value added to it in order for others to be willing to pay. Such as, at least, making it well-known through publicity efforts.

Costs

An argument for using NC could alternatively be made as follows. A person might use NC on their work so that IF someone else thinks they could make money from what the first person has created, then in order for that to happen the other party must contact and discuss this with the creator, and the creator could set terms that require payment to him/herself. I see that, but even then one is not likely to get much (how much do we get in royalties for academic books, say? A pittance, usually), and to me, especially thinking about my own work, this overvalues the remote possibility of a significant financial gain while ignoring some much more likely costs.

Some of these costs are addressed in article by Erik Möller that has been put into a wiki page. I won’t go through them here because they are pretty well explained on that page. And here’s a nice post by Kathi Fletcher focusing on problems with NC for OERs. Finally, this booklet by Paul Klimpel points out (on pp. 14-15) that the NC clause may actually end up prohibiting use of items by organizations and projects that endorse and promote “open” work, while not stopping large commercial companies from using them against the NC license (because they can absorb the cost of a lawsuit if it should ever come). (The booklet as a whole provides many useful arguments against using NC licenses.)

I’ll just add that this post by Daniel Clark, for the OU Open Education course, nicely addresses the point about the ambiguity of “commercial” in the NC licenses. These comments by David Wiley do too (on a discussion of NC licenses for OER, hosted by UNESCO). And having a license with ambiguous terms is not just a philosophical problem; it can mean that fewer people will use your work because they may be unsure whether their use falls under the vague “commercial” terms.

I have sometimes wondered whether this blog counts as “non commercial,” even, given that it is hosted and supported by the University of British Columbia, which, after all, charges money for its courses and thus “makes money” in some sense. It is syndicated on UBC’s “A Place of Mind” site, and thereby acts as part of the university’s publicity strategy in some (very small) sense. To the extent that my blog might help attract students (hmmm, not sure about that one) or donors (ditto), one might say it’s part of the university’s revenue stream. I realize that’s quite a stretch, but that it could even make sense to consider it shows that “non commercial” is unclear.

And this post by David Wiley shows that I am not alone in asking this sort of question (though the question there is slightly different: it’s about whether a textbook licensed NC could be used for a course that students have to pay for, and Wiley answers yes). I don’t ever use images for this blog that have an NC license, even though I am pretty sure I could. Who knows; maybe someday I’ll move this blog over to a platform on which I actually try to make some money through ads (highly unlikely but…). I refuse to go through and change images from the past were such a thing ever to occur.

Commercial enclosure

There is, however, a more pressing argument for the use of NC, given by Stephen Downes (an example can be found here, in the UNESCO discussion noted above). One part of this is that without the NC clause, commercial ventures can take what is freely available and work hard to “enclose” it completely by closing off access to its free versions. Here’s another iteration of this argument, this time focused on the real-world example of Flat World Textbooks at first publishing free textbooks and then beginning to charge for them. This is a harder point to argue against, for it is clear that those who have a vested interest in profit-making from educational resources will be motivated to find ways to enclose any free versions that might exist (though David Wiley does provide a rebuttal to such arguments, in the UNESCO discussion). Downes defines “commercial use” as “the act of restricting access,” in the UNESCO discussion, which makes sense to me, and I can see the point of trying to use NC to keep access open.

Unlocked x2, by Darwin Bell. Licensed CC-BY

After all, in my “gift” image provided above, what could happen is that I could give something away to anyone and everyone who wanted it (because it’s not just one thing, but reusable, revisable, remixable by anyone), but then one of those recipients could decide they want to make sure no one else can have that gift as a gift. That goes against the spirit of what I tried to do in the first place.

Gratis and libre

So really, the issue seems to come to this (as I’m understanding it): using something like CC-BY only (or CC0) is freeing it in the sense of making it “libre” but could lead to it not being free in the sense of “gratis” (see Wikipedia on libre and gratis). But if you use an NC license, then you might be (if Downes is right) protecting the freedom of that work in terms of it being “gratis,” but it’s not “libre” in the sense of it being available for anyone to do anything they like with it. You’re restricting it to only some kinds of uses.

Downes addresses this distinction somewhat differently, here. He argues that we can look at freedom from the perspective of either the people who already have access to some work or those who do not yet have such access. For the former, freedom in the sense of libre means they can do whatever they wish with the work they already have. For the latter, allowing work to be behind a paywall means many can’t access it at all, much less do anything further with it. The second perspective, he argues, is as important as the first (and for those who can’t access works at all it is more important).

No NC for me

Thus, it depends on which sort of freedom you want to promote, I suppose. I think that the idea of letting people do what they wish with what I create (at least much of it; don’t know yet if all) is more important to me, mostly because of

(a) the ambiguity of “commercial”

(b) I don’t expect to be producing anything that will likely be enclosed by a commercial interest

(c) if someone can add value to my stuff and make some money, that’s fine with me b/c I gave it away by choice rather than trying to do so myself.

I still think of it like a gift, and because of (b) I am not terribly concerned about it becoming enclosed so that others can’t access it freely. I agree rather with Mike Seyfang here, that what I’m most concerned about is people finding and using my work. That’s pretty cool. But unlike what he says in that post, I kind of don’t care about people recognizing it as my work.

What is really needed, I think, is a less blunt instrument to do what Downes wants to do. “Noncommercial” is not only too vague, but too broad a term. I don’t mind if someone uses my stuff to make money for themselves and I don’t care if they ask me first because I don’t feel a need to have a share. But what I don’t want is for them to lock out access for anyone else to have my stuff that I’ve given away for free. Is there some other way to keep that from happening? Downes himself notes a need for such a thing, here:

…we want, I think, something like a ‘free content declaration’, a statement we can link to that identifies our desire, as providers of open content, to ensure that it remains open.

And CC-licenses won’t do this for us, Downes argues. But he uses NC in the meantime, which I have decided not to do, for reasons noted above.

There is, though, an argument that the “share alike” CC license (CC-BY-SA) could prevent commercial enclosure, which I’ll consider in the next post.

In my previous post I described an experiment of trying to find open educational resources on a particular topic in philosophy. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but that may not be the fault of the repositories themselves; I’m not sure such OERs have been put into the repositories I searched. And apparently there are many, many OER repositories. In this post I’ll briefly discuss some of the things that would make searching such repositories easier, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know much about OER but is looking for things to use for a course.

Too many repositories

I didn’t realize just how many there were, until I looked at the blog post referred to above, which lists 73 (and counting). A number of these are focused on particular subject areas, such as mathematics or STEM disciplines.  I can see the value of having such subject-oriented repositories–after all, I probably won’t be searching biology resources, e.g., when looking for Kant (though actually, many philosophers’ work crosses boundaries of humanities, social sciences, and the sciences, so…hmmmm…).

Perhaps even more useful are interdisciplinary collections, because one may actually find something relevant in what is, ostensibly, linked to another discipline. And there are so many different interdisciplinary repositories that it’s very time-consuming to do anything like a thorough search. I am guessing this might be due in part to funding situations: different groups get funding for different OER projects, and the result is that there are numerous different repositories. I honestly don’t know how this issue might be resolved, so really, I’m just pointing out the difficulty experienced by the user without having a clue how to fix it.

Perhaps it’s utopian to imagine that there could be a single portal that allows one to search most of these repositories at once? I expect one problem is that different parts of the world haven’t yet come to agreement on things like metadata, formatting of resources, and more, but this is mostly a guess.

“About” pages

Some of the repositories I searched in my previous post have extensive information telling me about the repository itself, where the resources come from, how they are uploaded into the repository, and more. MERLOT is a good example–there is a lot of info in these multiple “about” pages, and it is written in a way that is understandable for  those, like me, who don’t know much about how OERs and OER repositories and metadata (and more) work. I want to know the source of the resources, whether there is any review of them before they are put into the repository, whether the repository has a general policy on accepting resources that are licensed in a certain way, and more. Perhaps I’m an anomaly, but I find this information useful. On some sites it’s hard to find (e.g., Ariadne, MIT Open Coursware), and on others it’s hard for laypersons to read (e.g., Ariadne, Xpert).

Searching

Some repositories had good “advanced search” options, including allowing one to search by a phrase, all words, none of some words, and more (e.g., MIT Opencourseware). Apparently Xpert allows you to do this in the search bar by using Google search syntax, but they don’t tell you this (perhaps I should have just known? But why not make it clear for those of us who aren’t up on such things?). Some sites allowed you to limit your search to things such as type of resource, language, subject, license, which can be useful, though sometimes I may not know in advance what kinds of resources I want to search (lecture notes? presentations? full courses?). I particularly like how Ariadne allows you to narrow your search results after the search is done, by clicking on one or more limiters on the side of the page (you can have several limiters on your search results at once, and can take them off by just clicking on them a second time).

One thing that would make a big difference from the perspective of someone searching for resources is to have enough information in the “results” list to be able to judge the relevance of the material in terms of what the person is looking for. Having only titles and authors (e.g., Jorum), or title, URL and a text passage from the resource itself (MIT Open Courseware, OU’s Open Learn), or title plus passage from the resource and keywords (Ariadne) are not enough. Xpert comes close to being good in this respect, giving titles, authors, descriptions, license information, and related content, but what’s still missing is “type” of resource (full course? lecture notes? presentation? etc.).

Apparently, according to a comment by Pat Lockley on my previous post, part of the issue here is that repositories may be reliant on the metadata provided by the multiple individuals and institutions who create and upload OERs. That makes sense, and honestly, I don’t know how to solve such problems since I have zero experience on the “other side” of the OER repository situation. I expect there are probably serious reasons why such things can’t be standardized, or at least not easily. But it sure would be helpful from a users’ standpoint.

Open?

I was struck by the fact that some of these repositories have content that is not, actually, open. The Open University’s Open Learn site, for example, has some copyrighted works (as does Xpert I think; haven’t looked carefully at the others). That’s fine, I guess, but it doesn’t really count as “open,” so I don’t see how this is an OER repository, or open learning. And if I’m searching for things I can reuse in my own courses, or remix, then copyrighted materials, or those that are CC-BY-ND (no derivatives) are useless to me. I want to only see OER repositories that have only work that is at least Creative Commons licensed, and excluding things that are licensed as “no derivatives.” I’d rather see only CC-BY or public domain (insofar as that is possible–see an earlier post on this), but that’s another post. Connexions has only CC-BY materials, for example. Of course, some sites with copyrighted or otherwise not-open works often let you restrict your search to only CC-licensed materials (such as Xpert), but still, why have that in an open educational resources repository?

Of course, this assumes there is an agreed-upon definition for what “open” means, does not appear to be the case. Here’s one possibility, but clearly it’s not the one used by everyone calling their work “open.”

Perhaps it does have to be so hard

I would really like to hear from those who know about these sorts of things, what the reasons are for the problems I’ve outlined above–does it have to be this difficult? What lies behind such difficulties? Are there things that could be done to address some of them, and if so, are they difficult to do?

One of the activities in week 2 of the “open education” course at the Open University is to find open educational resources for a fictional course on “digital skills” we should imagine ourselves creating. Since I have pretty much no interest in (nor expertise for) creating a course on digital skills (whatever that means), I decided to look at some OER repositories to see what they have in the way of materials for philosophy.

This won’t allow me to do the activity as suggested, since I expect there are much fewer OERs on philosophy than on “digital skills,” which is probably why they suggested the latter. But it does allow me to do something that might be of more use to me in the future.

The instructions for the activity said we should look at several OER repositories:

• Ariadne
• Jorum
• MERLOT
• MIT Open Courseware
• Open Learn
• Connexions

I find it puzzling that Xpert isn’t on the list, but I’ll look at that as well.

Now, rather than trying to find OERs for an entire course, which I find too time-consuming and unnecessary for my purpose of just trying to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of these repositories from an instructor perspective, I decided to just search for a particular topic. I thought about things that I wish I could find good online resources for, to help students in my courses when my explanations aren’t enough (often it’s good to have resources that approach topics from multiple perspectives and with multiple modes). I also thought it might be helpful to compare the repositories when searching for the same thing on each, to see what the search and recovery experience is for each one.

Many things came to mind, including Plato’s view of “forms” or “ideas,” Foucault’s view of power and resistance (or of the relationship between knowledge and power, or of biopower, or, well, of most things), Kant’s categorical imperative, and more. But I figured there’d be more resources on philosophers whose views are taught most often, so that eliminated Foucault. And since “forms” and “ideas” are pretty vague terms they might be likely to mess with the search results. So I was left with Kant.

I’ll discuss the repositories I searched in alphabetical order.

“Search and rescue swimmers train in a pool…” cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Official U.S. Navy Imagery

Ariadne

The first thing I noticed on the Ariadne site is that there is no information on this repository on the site itself, though through the link on the front page to the Ariadne Foundation I found this page, which seems to explain a fair bit about how the repository works. However, it’s not written for people new to OER and metadata to understand, so it left me still pretty clueless.

The sidebar shows “providers,” which lists (I think) the other OER collections that Ariadne searches, including MERLOT, OER Commons, OER Africa, and others I am not familiar with.

I appreciate how the sidebars allow you to sort results by language (OERs in many languages seem accessible here), format (such as PDF, html, xml, powerpoint, video, audio), context (educational context, such as postsecondary, CGEP, primary, secondary, training), and type (such as presentation, syllabus, image, lecture notes, project).

The search box at the top of the repository page doesn’t have an option for “advanced search,” so I just typed in “Kant categorical imperative,” and got…nothing. “No results found.” Okay, bad start.

A search for “Kant” turned up some resources in Engligh (many more in other languages), though they were mostly full courses that had some Kant in them. I clicked on “type” on the sidebar to focus only on “lecture notes,” just as an example, and all I got still were full courses. Turns out you have to click on the link to the course, which takes you to another repository where you have to click on the link to the course, then finally get to the online course and dig around to find what you want. Nonideal.

I guess I hoped you could just get right to the individual resources. Possibly you could on Ariadne, if you were looking for other topics for OER–I don’t know.

Connexions

The Connexions site explains itself as “a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.” So there won’t be whole courses here. The “about” page notes that:

• “Connexions content is modular for easy remixing. This makes it easier and more cost effective to update and adapt content.”
• all modules are in a standardized XML format (but can be downloaded in various formats)
• all content is licensed as CC-BY
• quality control is provided through a “lensing system by which trusted/knowledgeable vetters review and endorse content,” and those visiting the repository can view material through these “lenses”

It’s possible to browse the content by subject, language, popularity, and author/title/keyword. I tried “subject: humanities,” which led me to a page where all the humanities subjects were listed alphabetically, and I had to go through several pages of “more” to get to philosophy. Not good. But you can do a search from that page that is limited by subject, if you want.

Again, the search bar doesn’t offer an “advanced search” option, so “Kant categorical imperative” it was. This time I got five results, all in English, two of which actually had most of the same content, and all of which were separate “modules” rather than full courses.

They were all texts, which I think all OERs in Connexions are (a downside). All were also highly contextualized in the sense that the discussion was mostly focused on the particular context of the module. These were nearly all from applied ethics contexts, such as business ethics, ethics for engineers, and ethics for administrators. There were some parts that were mostly theory, but most of those were fairly superficial. I didn’t find anything useful for my purposes, which requires fairly in-depth philosophical discussion.

But if I had, I could have saved it to a “favourites” list, or put it in my own workspace in order to remix it. The ability to remix materials on site sounds kind of cool, though I haven’t tried it to see how it works. 

Finally, on the front page there is a direct link and instructions on how to contribute to Connexions, which is nice–it’s not clear how to contribute to Ariadne (don’t think you can, directly).

Jorum

The front page of the Jorum site indicates that resources found there are only from the UK: “Through Jorum, you can find and share learning and teaching resources, shared by the UK Further and Higher Education community.” If that’s the case, it seems unnecessarily narrow.

Like Connexions, there is an explicit invitation on the front page for contributing to Jorum, but yeah, you have to either be a UK educator or a “trusted depositor” to do so (or you can contact them to ask if you can). Hmmmmm. Why? Probably because it was funded by JISC, which is focused on education in the UK. But still, is it really useful even for educators in the UK to have and contribute to a resource that has OER from only their area of the world?

You can browse by subject, date, author, title or keyword. Jorum does have an “advanced search” option, which allows you to specify search terms in “full text,” “author,” “title,” “keyword,” “date” (creation or insertion), “language,” “type,” and more. Turns out this doesn’t help my particular search much, so I just did “Kant categorical imperative” again in the simple search bar.

This time I got 92 results, but it was hard to tell how many are really relevant. All I got was a title and an author, sometimes with an institutional affiliation and sometimes not. How can I tell without clicking on it whether or not a resource titled “Zero Chance? Aiming for Zero in Weapons Control” is relevant to my purposes? (Probably not, but there could be an in-depth discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative in there somewhere.) Some were obviously not relevant, such as “Statistics for Geography and Environmental Science: An Introduction in R,” and “Getting Started with SPSS.” But what about one called, simply, “Newspapers”? (How is that title helpful in any way?)

Since it was clear this search did not yield good results, I went back to the Advanced search and entered “Kant” in “full text” “AND” “categorical imperative” in “full text.” This time I got 3 resources only, which cut out some of the earlier ones that were relevant, and included one that wasn’t (“School Geography: Exploring a Definition”). There was one PowerPoint presentation on the Categorical Imperative that was not bad, but not detailed enough for my purposes.

Back to the simple search, and I found:

• Some courses on philosophy from the Saylor Foundation–same problem as with Ariadne, except Jorum doesn’t even tell me whether to look for lecture notes, assignments, videos, or some other resource type with Kant in it, so this is even worse.
• Some lectures by Peter Millican  on “general philosophy” for first-year students at Oxford, but when I click on the link for the feed I get something that goes straight to Google Reader, which is a problem on so many levels. I’m pretty sure this is a function of how I set my browser to handle feeds, but I don’t know how to fix it. Then, When I click on the second link to try to find these lectures, I am taken to a page with all of the podcasts from Oxford–more searching.
• A module on “moral theories” in the context of health care ethics, without an author identified (hmmm…not sure why having no author specified bugs me, but it does)
• Some resources from an “introduction to moral philosophy” course of some kind, but: (a) I had to view a number of PDFs before I found one on Kant, (b) these were all copyrighted–could I even put them on a course web page without asking for permission first? And (c) it still wasn’t detailed enough for my purposes.

And that was it for what looked relevant from title and author alone.

MERLOT

The MERLOT site could use a serious visual makeover. It is far too busy–and the moving type on the top is just puts it even more over the top.

According to this page, MERLOT has some value-added features, including comments provided by users and “learning exercises” provided by the contributor, to go along with some of the resources. MERLOT also subjects OERs to peer review, through discipline-specific editorial boards. The “about” section of the MERLOT site is the most extensive I have seen, providing quite a bit of information on policies and procedures, and much more.

I started with the “communities” portals, which apparently can provide not only OERs related to different disciplines, but also journals, conferences, etc. But no–nothing for philosophy. Under the “communities” site there is also a link to “compass,” which has a link to the “pedagogy” portal. I went there, and found a sizable list of resources related to things like writing assignments, active learning, inquiry-guided learning, and more. I didn’t have time to look at these carefully at this point, however.

MERLOT has an advanced search screen, which allows for searches by keyword, title, description, language, type, author, license, date, and more. Under “keywords,” which I used for “Kant categorical imperative,” you can choose “any words,” “all words,” or “exact phrase.” It’s possible to sort results by relevance, rating, date, and more.

However, my search came up entirely empty of results. So I searched for “Kant” instead. This got me 15 results, only one of which had been peer reviewed, a series of lectures on Justice by Michael Sandel at Harvard. One nice thing about MERLOT is that, like Ariadne, you can narrow your results by “type” of resource. You can’t seem to do so by language, once you’ve got the results list (you’d have to do that at the “search” stage). You can also narrow by “category,” which seemed to be a list of different disciplines or other contexts, such as humanities, arts, social sciences, and “Academic support services.”

The vast majority of results were full courses, with the same problem as noted above with Jorum: unlike Ariadne, I can’t tell what parts of these courses are related to Kant–lecture notes, assignments, or other. And after a good deal of time searching through the courses, unfortunately I came out with nothing useful for what I’m looking for. This isn’t the fault of the repository, necessarily…I’m beginning to wonder whether there is actually anything available for what I’m looking for.

MIT Open Courseware

MIT Open Courseware was one of the first (if not the first) repositories of open courses. Their “about” page says they publish “virtually all MIT course content.” Many of the repositories discussed above and below link to courses from MIT OCW.

You can search courses by topic, department, language (some have been translated into languages other than English), and more. There is an “advanced search” option that lets you search “all” of some words, an “exact phrase,” “at least one of the words,” and “none of these words”–a fairly robust way to handle search terms. You can also limit your search to things like syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, videos, animations, and more. You can sort results by relevance or date only.

I searched “all the words” “Kant categorical imperative” and didn’t limit to any particular type of materials. I got 18 results, most of which were PDFs. Some of them were the same materials I found through other repository searches, which is not surprising (and probably it would be a good thing if there were more that were the same–it’s best if you don’t have to go through six repositories or more to find results, because they find essentially the same things).

The results screen lists titles, URLs, and a passage from the resource with the search terms in it. No indication of what type of resource it is (except sometimes that’s in the title, sometimes not), and there are not always authors (sometimes in the title, sometimes not).  Sometimes the authors are listed on the resource itself, sometimes not (annoying). Here’s what I found:

• some lecture notes that didn’t go into enough detail for what I want (though one that is pretty close to doing so); one that cites some other text by author and page number, but doesn’t provide a full citation for that text so those not in the course have no idea what text it is (annoying)
• a PDF of a translation of part of Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
• What looks to be a student paper on how neuroscience unsettles traditional moral thought (but why isn’t it clearly labelled as what sort of paper it is?)
• Some essay topics on Kant and other moral philosophers–some of which are useful for sparking my own ideas on essay topics, but that’s not what I’m searching for at the moment
• Some reading/discussion questions about Kant (see previous)
• A list of readings for a couple of courses, some of which had “Kant” and “categorical imperative” in their titles

Again, I don’t necessarily blame the site for not having what I’m looking for, but the results list could be improved by having more than just the title and a few words with the search terms in them. A “type” of resource, perhaps? An “author”? At least. Maybe even a description?

Finally, it’s hard to find what license(s) these materials have. Connexions states explicitly that everything is CC-BY, Jorum and MERLOT have the licenses on the landing page when you click on one of the search items (better if it were in the results list itself), and with Ariadne it depends on what other repository the resource is in, where you can find the license for the materials. For MIT OCW, you have to go to the very bottom of each page, with those tiny menus, and find “Help and FAQs,” then click around on various links to find where the heck the CC license is for MIT OCW. Finally, I found here a notice that they are using a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Shouldn’t that be more prominent? And only through that page did I find a link to the “terms of use page.” 

Now, to be fair, there’s a link to those terms on each resource I found, once you click on it and view it. But for those who want to know before they go through a search and find materials, it would be better to make that information easier to find.

Open Learn

 I originally thought the Open Learn site from the Open University would just be full courses, a kind of “open university” concept in which people take courses for free. The front page doesn’t help explain much what there is, in truth: it says you can “dip into insights from OU academics” (what does that mean?), try “free extracts from OU course materials” (aren’t they all free anyway?), and then go into deeper study with OU (does that mean actually take a course?). So I went to the “about” section at the bottom of the front page, and found this page, which told me I could not only take full courses but browse articles, videos and games from these courses.

The more I poked around in the site, the more I realized that it all looks the same…dreadfully, boringly the same. The same headers appear on each page, and sometimes it’s hard to tell you’re on a new page. But hey, I already knew that from the Open Education course that prompted this blog post; I just hoped that was the case only inside particular courses themselves. Nope.

There is only a simple search bar at the top of all the pages, so I tried “Kant categorical imperative” again. One result: from what I can tell out of context, it seems to be a discussion between Stephen Pinker and some others about one of Pinker’s books. Not relevant. So I tried just “Kant” and got 48 results. Once I got to the results page, then I got an option for an “advanced search,” which is strange. I could search for all words, a phrase, the usual; also approximate searches, like “starts with” or “approximate spelling”; also by file type, date, language, and many more. None were helpful for my purposes, however.

The results page allowed me to narrow my search, by parts of the Open Learn site, by people (authors? subjects of the resources?), and by organization (Open University, YouTube, BBC, and more). I narrowed by “Immanuel Kant” and got 22 results. The results page lists title, date, and author, as well as a brief, few-word excerpt that is sometimes helpful, sometimes not. I found, among other things:

• A tag cloud that presumably led me to resources tagged with those philosophers’ names; clicking on “Kant” didn’t lead me to anything relevant
• A video by Michael Sandel on Kant and the capacity for reason, which was interesting but not quite what I was looking for
  
• A game about lying or not lying, which looks like it might be cool but again, takes too long to load
• A podcast about the wrongness of killing, which features some of Kant’s views and is otherwise quite interesting

Nothing that suits my needs, but what I like is that there are quite a few different types of resources here, including videos, podcasts, and games. A quick perusal of the full 48 results from the “Kant” search showed nothing else of relevance.

What about licenses for the materials? Again, you have to dig to find this information. Sometimes there is a clear copyright symbol on materials, sometimes there is a CC license, and sometimes there is nothing (indicating fully copyrighted materials, since this page says that unless stated otherwise, everything is under copyright).

So I suppose Open Learn is good for learners who want to access materials, but many of the materials are copyrighted, and thus not terribly useful for teachers who want to reuse or remix them.

Xpert

 Xpert has a very clean home page, which, after MERLOT and Open Learn and some of the other repositories, is a nice break (Ariadne does too). The “about” page is written a bit beyond a novice’s understanding, but what I can gather is that there is an open source tool for authoring OERs that one can use, and then an RSS feed from one’s OER creations uploads them automatically to Xpert. Xpert is also JISC (UK) funded, but there’s nothing to indicate that the resources are only from UK educators.

You can subscribe to some RSS feeds, if you want–things like the latest CC-licensed resources, the latest MP3s, podcasts, and videos.

The “browse” function seems resource-heavy; it took ages to load, and froze my browser with a message saying a script on the page was not responding. I would blame this on my slow internet connection at the moment, except Xpert is the only thing I’ve been using for the past couple of hours that is acting like this. Eventually, when the page loaded I found that I could browse by institution, author, type, language, publisher, license, and keywords. I chose to use the “advanced search” option, which was kind of like “browse” but with a search bar. You could enter your search terms and then narrow by the choices above. Again, extremely slow.

When I searched for “Kant categorical imperative” and tried to narrow by language to english, I was puzzled by the fact that there seemed to be several choices for English: “en,” including “en-AU,” “en-US,” and more; and also “eng,” including “eng-GB,” “eng-US” and more; and also just “English.” Which to choose? Will I get different results for each? Hmmmm. I chose “English.” I clicked a box for CC-licensed materials only (there was also an option for UKOER, which I think is OER from the UK, but I didn’t check that box).

I got 40 results, and the results page gave titles, descriptions and authors, as well as license information and a link to “related content” (if there was any). It’s great to see the license information right on the search results page, and to be able to limit results to CC-licensed materials. What I would have also liked to see is something indicating the type of each resource (a course, an audio or video recording, etc.). I could tell from the description that most of the results were courses, but it was unclear from the titles and descriptions just what some of the results were.

Many results here, as with Jorum, were clearly way off the mark, such as an MIT course on programming languages, a course from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on Statistics for Psychosocial Researchers, an Open Learn course on Psychology in the 21st century. I’m guessing something about “categorical imperative” is messing with the results, so I tried just “Kant” instead.

Again, I ran into issues with Xpert–kept getting messages that the server was reset while trying to load the page. Eventually I got 17 results for just “Kant.” Most of these clearly had something about Kant in them, but many of those were full courses in which one has to hunt to find where Kant is–same problem as with Ariadne, above. I also got a good number of links that went to the Open Learn site, but got me only an “oops, something went wrong” page–broken links.

I did discover, however, (thanks to Pat Lockley, who explained what the page did when I couldn’t understand it on the face of it) that Xpert allows you to search for images, and it then attributes them. Use the search box at the top of this page. You also get results for “sounds” and “videos.” That’s all quite nice. I was going to use an image of Kant I found through this service for this post, but strangely I got a bunch of images of people in costume as well as some of women in lingerie.

Interim conclusion

I’m going to write another post in a few days summarizing the problems I ran into during this experiment, and some suggestions for OER repositories (given, of course, that I know nothing about the technological–and likely other–difficulties involved). All I’ll say for now is that I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I don’t blame the repositories for that. It’s probably the case that there either isn’t anything online that discusses the categorical imperative in a detailed way, or that whatever there is hasn’t been linked to a repository…and there could be various reasons for that. But I did find some issues when searching the repositories, and I’ll summarize those in my next post.

For week two of Martin Weller’s Open Education course at the Open University, one of the activities was to read three articles from a suggested reading list on open educational resources (OERs) and discuss three issues related to OERs and how they are being addressed.

I read several articles, but am focusing here on three:

1. Albright, P. (2005). UNESCO (IIEP): Final forum report. Available at: http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/oerforumfinalreport.pdf
2. Downes, S. (2007). Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3, 29-44. Available at http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf
3. Smith, M.S. & Casserly, C.M. (2006) The promise of open educational resources. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(5), 8–17. A pre-publication version is available here: http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/changearticle.pdf

I’m trying to participate in another MOOC (massive, open, online course), though being away on holiday for a couple of weeks is making it difficult. It’s the “Open Education” course from the Oen University.

This is the sort of MOOC where it makes sense to say I’m “behind,” because there is a clear weekly schedule with weekly assignments to complete. I’m about a week behind. This structure is not appealing to me at the moment, after ETMOOC, which was much more open to participants doing whatever they felt most meaningful in response to the presentations, Twitter chats, shared links, and more. But I’m giving it a go because I really want to learn more about open education. I’ll probably do a few of the assigned activities, and then for the rest just write blog posts about what strikes me as most interesting.

Here’s one of the activities for the first week. We were asked to read Martin Weller’s article entitled “The Openness-Creativity Cycle in Education” and Terry Anderson’s slides from a Keynote for Alt-C in 2009. (Alt-C is the conference for the Association for Learning Technology). The activity was to then create a visual representation of open education, based on what we had read. “The key is to provide a representation that draws together the key concepts of openness as you perceive them,” according to the activity instructions.

I didn’t actually do that. Instead, I focused on one aspect of open education, or rather, one aspect of “openness”: that it’s more than just being available for reading/viewing for free, but is also available for remixing, reworking, taking pieces and doing something entirely different with them.

Part of the reason I did this was because I wanted to take on the challenge of creating a visual representation that didn’t just replicate a textual one. And if I tried to pull together all the strands of open education from the two readings (and elsewhere), I’d just end up putting into visual form the same things I would have otherwise written in text. That’s pretty much all I do in my work: write and speak narrative text. And I wanted to try to get beyond that a bit by using a picture that speaks. As you’ll see with the image, though, I couldn’t get away from text entirely.

This is not my thing, usually, so I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t entirely work, and if what seems good today seems simplistic tomorrow.

Since I seem incapable of doing without textual explanations, I will just say this. Multiple pieces made by others can appear as useless scatter, or as raw materials.

Downloaded from http://ruschagram.com/show/44847e9u627uhfs

P.S. The other reason I did this is because one of my Twitter peeps created Ruschagram and this was a great excuse for me to play around with it.