K12 Open Ed

For those of you interested in the progress on the open kids dictionary project, we are moving ahead, and so I thought I’d give you a quick update:

• Starting point — After reviewing many open dictionary sources out there, we didn’t find any that met our needs in terms of content and licensing terms. As such, we decided to start with a public domain word list (which we are editing heavily) and write our own definitions. It is my hope that as a mass collaboration project, this will be a feasible endeavor.
• Infrastructure — We looked at a lot of different platforms to use for this (Wikibooks, WikiEducator, etc.). Our hope was to use one of these to capitalize on an existing community and to help build it. However, the issues of licenses and process (see below) ultimately caused us to decide to host this ourselves. And so, Brad has been busily working to create a platform for this using MySQL with a robust revision control system. The result looks a lot like a wiki, but with the advantages of more robust searching and some other nice benefits. For example, we’ll be able to easily export versions for a variety of platforms (handhelds, iPhones, Kindles, print, etc.).
• License — To give the maximum flexibility in how it is used, we are going to license this under CC-By (or possibly even public domain). We don’t want to restrict people with non-commercial or share alike requirements. (This obviously affected which content and platform we could use as well.)
• Process — User-created collaborate content is great, but for schools, it also poses problems. In the US, much user-created content is blocked/filtered because of concerns about inappropriate content. While I don’t agree with this approach, I do sympathize with the problem of community pressures against inappropriate content, which wikis certainly breed through vandalism. As such, for this project, we will at some point be publishing a “frozen” version that has been screened for appropriateness.

The goal is to have working version of this up in the next month or so. Stay tuned for more info, and let us know if you’re interested in being a part of this project.

Alec Couros at Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy made me aware of some scary legislation being proposed that would make anonymous posts to the Internet illegal.

It seems to me that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech implicitly guarantees anonymous free speech as well. (This was very much an issue to our Founding Fathers, some of whom published their own grievances anonymously.)

In doing some quick searches on this, there seem to be several precedents that have upheld this.

It’s frightening that behavior that wouldn’t even be considered in the “traditional” world (print, broadcast media, etc.) is embraced in the digital world.

April is poetry month and to celebrate, here are some open resources for poetry:

• Librivox poetry recordings
• Spoken Alexandria poetry
• Project Gutenberg poetry
• Poetry in Wikibooks
• Quotes about poetry from Wikiquote
• MIT courses on poetry
• Poetry ebooks for K-12 from K12 Handhelds

Enjoy!

This is also a good time to remind our colleagues of some of the basics of copyright. (I have been in three classrooms in the past couple weeks where teachers have been astounded to learn that everything on the Internet is *not* free for them to use however they want.)

Teachers need to know that:

• Everything (on the Internet, in print, etc.) that is not otherwise licensed is copyrighted and may not be used or distributed beyond the bounds of fair use without permission.
• There are materials that are public domain or Creative Commons (or similarly) licensed that may be reused.
• Licensing your own works under Creative Commons is a great way to facilitate sharing and permit others to use your work.

Wes Fryer recorded and posted a podcast of my presentation “Free Content +  Open Tools + Mass Collaboration = Learning for All” at NCCE in Seattle last week. Thanks, Wes.

I’ll be presenting this again soon at CUE in Palm Springs and TechEd in Ontario. Hope to see some of you there.

Because of the huge amount of interest in this (these presentations have been packed), I’m also working this into a half- and full-day hands on workshop for some summer conferences.

I participated in a group conversation today about Open Ed (part 1 and part 2). It was interesting. The first part of the conversation was really about copyright education, not open ed. When the conversation finally got around to open ed resources, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to license compatibility, CC-BY vs. SA/GFDL, etc., the whole “libre” issue, etc.

As the participants were talking, the call facilitator text’d “For most people, this discussion will go WAY over their heads.”

I replied, “You are right…However…the ‘open’ culture community is forcing this debate. Frankly it’s driving people away from the open movement.”

When asked to elaborate, I shared my view that forcing a specific vision of “open” on others that is not inclusive is likely to fracture the movement before it even gets going (especially in K-12).  I have become more and more frustrated by this issue.

I’m increasingly moving toward David Wiley’s suggestion that “we need a Educational Productivity Pledge along the lines of the following: Every time you feel tempted to engage in a discussion about free/libre issues, create some educational materials instead. Imagine where we might be now if we could all find the strength of character to adhere to such a pledge.”

And I am leaning more toward hosting my open content on my own server. (Still undecided though.)