K12 Open Ed

QUESTIONS: Can you think of license options that CC is currently missing that would benefit the open education movement? As the CC and GFDL licenses are incompatible, how can OCW content be legally remixed with Wikipedia content? Some people claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause. What do you think these people mean, are they right, and why? Is copyleft good for the open education movement? Why or why not?

One license option that my partner and I have thought would be useful for certain of our own purposes is one that allows derivative use (commercially or NC) as long as the piece that is used is not the entire new work. This is similar to the Sampling license that allows a piece of the original to be used, but not the whole thing; however, in this case, we don’t mind if they use the whole thing; we just want the resulting piece to be something new. Essentially, we are happy for people to remix some of our works, but we don’t want them just reposting our works with no changes. (This is kind of the opposite of no derivs; we want only derivs for a certain category of works.)

I don’t know that this has particular relevance to educational works, but it may. For example, I think a license like this may assuage the concerns of some regarding commercial use. I think that many would be ok with commercial use providing that whatever reusers are selling is not just their work. If for example, I write an article, I might be fine with someone incorporating it into a much larger work and selling that. I would not, however, want to permit them to sell just my work alone.

Also, we need to think harder about what “commercial use” is in an educational context. Universities charge fees. Is using something licensed as NC in a university commercial? I would argue that it is. How about charging just enough to cover printing costs? There are a million examples of uses that are technically commercial but that wouldn’t be objectionable to most who specify NC. I am not suggesting that we cover all of those instances in NC licenses; I am suggesting that NC licenses be used more sparingly in educational contexts.

Regarding the question of the incompatibility of CC and GPDL, I don’t have an answer, but I hope someone will provide insight into this. I am currently starting a large new open project and want to put it on Wikibooks and am thinking through the licensing implications related to this.

One possible solution that Wikimedia Commons is offering is dual licensing, so, for example, you can license under GFDL and CC. I have been licensing my own photos on Wikimedia Commons this way, but at this point, this does not apply broadly to text articles in Wikipedia or Wikibooks.

The GFDL says ” A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the copyright resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document.”

I have reread this several times now and am not sure exactly what this means, but it seems to me to allow for the aggregation of GFDL and CC work. I believe that GFDL is compatible with some CC licenses, most especially a CC-By-ShareAlike license. Dr. Wiley, can you clarify why these licenses would not be compatible? [I think I’ve answered my own question….the problem is with the license OCW has chosen, not all CC licenses.] Presumably, an aggregated work could be licensed under the license that has the most conditions (in this case GFDL, which in being more open requires more) as long as none of the conditions contradict licenses of other pieces in the aggregation.

In regards to the claim that the Creative Commons ShareAlike clause provides most of the protections people want to secure from the Creative Commons NonCommercial clause, I think they are two different things. I can produce Work A with a NC clause and Work B with a ShareAlike clause (but no NC clause). Work B could be incorporated into a commercial work that then must by virtue of my license be licensed as ShareAlike. The same is not true for Work A, which could never be used commercially.

I think Share Alike is good for the educational community. I also think that allowing commercial use is beneficial for the community. However, I also think that each artist/author should be able to choose the license they wish, including NC, and for that to still be considered “open.” As there is more and more content available, market forces will give a heavier value weight to more truly open content.

These are complicated issues. I’m going to reread a few of these pieces and may add some resulting thoughts over the next few days.

I’m starting a new project to collaboratively produce a simple kids dictionary. If anyone has seen anything similar or has experience with any public domain dictionaries or other info that might be useful (or if you’re interested in participating in helping to build this), let me know. Thanks.

There are a lot of discussions going on in the OER community about what should be considered “open.” This starts with licensing issues with many considering the no derivatives or non-commercial licenses being too restrictive. In addition, there are format issues revolving around non-accessible formats (e.g. PDFs, etc.). Then there are issues of adaptability, language, language level, etc.

While we will probably never agree on a definition of what is “open,” perhaps we can agree on what is not open. Clearly, content that is licensed under a traditional all rights reserved copyright is not open. Similarly, content that is licensed under terms that do not permit third-party hosting or dissemination (even in a non-derivative form) cannot be said to be open.

While this may seem to be obvious, many OER repositories contain such works.

I understand that the Internet is all about numbers, but more is not always better. The OER community will not establish itself as a transformative force in education if it succumbs to the temptation to include everything under the sun in OER repositories so that there are x-million items attracting x-million eyeballs.

Let’s start the consensus-building process on what is “open” by agreeing on what is not open and removing the “open” label from it. Or better yet, let’s get the content providers to clarify or change their licenses so that they are truly open.

The questions for this week: Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license? To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.

For the first question, I think the percentage of value realized is dependent on how “open” a work is as implied by which license is used. A picture here is the best way for me to think about this. [I am interpreting the use of the term “public domain” in the question to be its literal meaning, not the use of it to mean anything in any sense in the commons.]

In general, as the degree of openness of the license goes down (with public domain on the left being the most open and full copyright on the right being the least), the value also goes down. Two exceptions, though, are CC-By and GFDL, both of which require attribution, but little or no other restrictions. I would argue that these two licenses actually give users more value than public domain because they require including information about the source.

Two other interesting inflection points in this graph occur at the imposition of the non-commercial restriction and at imposition of the no derivatives restriction. At both of these points, there is a significant diminution of value.

Given these points, I don’t think the OER would necessarily benefit from works being placed in the public domain. However, I do think it would benefit greatly from more people loosening restrictions, particularly by avoiding the no derivatives and non-commercial licenses which reduce value considerably.

Nonetheless, I do think that those license variants should exist and that publishers/authors/artists should be able to choose them and still have their work considered a part of OER. To take away those options would restrict the movement too much. As the universe of open resource grows, search and use preference can be given to those resources that are more open.

Of obvious importance in developing educational materials is the readability level. Unfortunately, not enough attention is paid to this measure.

In fact, it is possible to write materials at a relatively low readability level and still convey advanced content. Doing so makes the content more accessible to a wide variety of audiences, including those for whom the language being written in is not a first language. And as with other features of universal design, what is good for special audiences is often good for all audiences. We had an interesting discussion about this at M Brooke Robertshaw’s session at the Open Ed conference last week.

At this session, I learned about the tool Readability Studio. I just got a copy, and it was the best $70 I’ve spent in a while.

Like many others, I’ve used the Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level scale, in part because it is built into Word and other tools. From my textbook publishing days, I know that other scales like Dale-Chall are commonly used for elementary reading level texts. In reading up on this a bit, apparently Flesh-Kincaid is really intended for technical manuals, not for educational texts or literature.

Some things I like about Readability Studio are that includes 18 different scales, explains each, and suggests scales depending on your audience or type of literature. It also gives lists of difficult words and provides other useful information about the text.

If you’re writing materials for the web (open or not), they are likely to be read by a much broader audience than you intend. Giving some thought to readability is a gift to these readers wherever they are.