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Creative Commons and Human Nature

Posted May 2nd, 2013 by Bill

Over on his blog, Dr. Charles Severance has outlined some issues he faces with his use of Creative Commons licensing. I suspect that he is not alone in grappling with these issues. While I have responded in the comment thread on his blog, I also wanted to put these thoughts down here so I don't lose them over time.

Dr. Severance (and additional commenters) outline some scenarios where they have experience issues.

The first two scenarios pull from this comment:

The first scenario is I write a book, make it CC-BY, provide a free electronic copy, and publish at a low price on Lulu so those who want a printed copy can get it. An unscrupulous person grabs the electronic copy and with no changes puts it up on Amazon Createspace and starts selling it. Createspace *would* take the book down if it was ARR but not if it is CC-BY.

After reading through the CreateSpace content guidelines, this actually appears to be a non-issue. CreateSpace is very clear that openly licensed material that is available on the web can only be sold on CreateSpace by the owner of the content. The quotation below is pulled from the "Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content" section.

Some types of content, such as public domain content, may be free to use by anyone, or may be licensed for use by more than one party. We will not accept content that is freely available on the web unless you are the copyright owner of that content. For example, if you received your content from a source that allows you and others to re-distribute it, and the content is freely available on the web, we will not accept it for sale through CreateSpace. We do accept public domain content, however we may request that you provide proof that your submitted material is actually in the public domain and may choose to not sell a public domain title if its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more books already available through our service or available through other retail sites. We do not currently accept public domain material for Amazon Video on Demand.

Lulu doesn't appear to have comparable language around openly licensed content, so the NC license would be required to prevent people from reselling openly licensed materials on Lulu.

The next scenario concerns people taking video content and using it in a YouTube channel:

Coursera allows download of high quality videos for those who have bad connections – sometimes a school will download one copy and pass them to many students – or perhaps a company will grab a copy of all the videos and put it up on their intranet behind a firewall. This is great. I license the lecture materials and videos as CC-BY to allow flexible responsible use of all or parts of the lecture materials and videos and because I firmly believe in open educational resources and permission-free remix/reuse etc. But one (out of over 100,000) students decides that they will download all my materials and construct their own YouTube channel of my materials. I contact youTube and ask for a take down request and of course since they are CC-BY – even as the owner of the materials I have no standing in my take down request.

This could be addressed in a couple ways. First, using the Non-Commercial license would probably require Coursera to ask permission before reusing the material, as Coursera is a for-profit company, and delivering courses is their business. At the least, this would enable a conversation that would allow the creator of the material to have some say in the specifics of how the content was reused in that context. It's worth noting that in this instance, the effect of the NC license is comparable to reserving all rights - except, of course, that the NC license would still permit legitimate reuse.

And, in the case of a student who creates a YouTube channel of these videos, the NC license would provide the creator with additional recourse. And, in the case of videos, embedding links/information about the creation of the video in the video would mitigate some of the effects of a third party creating a YouTube channel, as every video would point back to the original source of the content.

Is this a widespread practice? And if it is, and the video contained links back to the original creator, what harm, if any, is done by this? If the point is to help as many people as possible learn as much as possible, even the spammers are helping (despite the fact that spammers are the lowest form of life, below even car salespeople and SEO marketers).

In another comment, Mike Caulfield describes his concerns with a question bank:

I hit different problems with CC-BY on a course I was building — the question/answer bank was importable from the Common Cartridge export, and it occurred to me that it licensing it CC-BY essentially allows it to be shared with any student taking the tests. I wanted to assert that it was free for teachers while maintaining takedown rights on things like Course Hero. You can’t really get to that level of subtlety with CC licenses.

First, the licensing on the questions has never stopped people from sharing them or posting them. As Mike notes, making them freely available as CC-BY would give them the right, but it's worth highlighting that questions have been shared even when people didn't have the right to share them.

But let's dig into this: what if the questions were shared out and known in advance? Students would still need to read through and learn the answers. If the questions are good questions, this provides another means of mastering the essential information in the course. If the questions are mediocre, that's an instructional design issue, and the quality of the assessment needs to be improved.

In any case, the questions could still be licensed as CC-BY, but only made available on request.

In looking at the issues described in this post, they feel more like issues with human behavior (or misbehavior) as opposed to licensing. As many people have noted in the comment thread, there is a subset of people who steal content all the time, and the license is not relevant to these folks. So, reserving all rights won't do anything to stop the thieving class, period.

Within the Creative Commons world, using the NC license is probably the closest thing (arguably - the No Derivatives license is also very restrictive) to reserving all rights. It's worth noting that using a restrictive Creative Commons license still provides more flexibility that reserving all rights, as the more restrictive licenses all identify specific ways that the content can be reused without needing to ask permission. Looked at in this context, a more restrictive Creative Commons license is like a flag that indicates that the author is open to allowing reuse, but that they want to retain some control over the specifics of that reuse.

Still, with all this said, it's worth noting that you can't license people into good behavior. What a lot of people want is a Creative Commons license that says "People who use this well can use it however they want; people who don't, can't."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

Barriers and Contradictions

Posted April 8th, 2013 by Bill

Last weekend, we ran another open content authoring session at Lewis Elementary in Portland, OR; we'll have more details on the event in a post laster this week. During this session, we talked with several educators about ways to work around the organizational barriers they face. I'm going to list out a couple here; frequently, when we talk about the things that are absent from school learning environment, the conversation stops at blockages of YouTube and other social media sites. Really, though, there are barriers that are far more basic and pervasive than that.

Contradiction

Students Can't Save HTML Files

We spoke with an educator working within PPS who had set up a lesson where students were learning about the web, including some basic HTML and css. The lesson went fine until it came time for students to save their work; they were blocked from saving html files.

SSH is blocked

We have worked in schools, and worked with teachers in schools, where SSH is blocked. For anyone working in web development, SSH is a central tool to doing out work. Blocking SSH is akin to teaching carpentry without hammer and saws.

Districts Claim Ownership Over Teacher Intellectual Property

The way some district contracts are written, districts claim ownership over any work that is done during school hours, over a school network, or on a school-provided machine. So, if a teacher does planning during the school day, even if she is creating something entirely new that is her creation, the district position is that they - the district - own that work.

Why Should We Care?

In the current political climate of educational reform, teachers are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Teachers and schools have a lot of rhetoric directed at them about how they need to embrace "21st century learning" and teach web literacies and develop knowledge workers, all while meeting more time consuming reporting mandated by the unfunded mandates of NCLB, and having their performance measured by standardized tests that often don't examine what learning looks like.

And in the face of all this, there are district-level policies that directly interfere with a teachers ability to work. When a district claims ownership over creative work done during the work day, the district creates an enormous disincentive to work with peers during school time, as any result of the collaboration would be owned by the district and not the creators. This flies directly in the face of what networked, connected teaching should be, as it is predicated on sharing our work with others. Fortunately, as we discussed in our authoring event, incorporating openly licensed materials into our work makes district claims of ownership a moot point, as the district can still claim ownership but the license allows for free and universal reuse.

What is incredibly heartening is talking with teachers, and hearing the creativity, thought, and caring that they put into their work. There are some amazing educators working to help our kids learn, and it's great to see.

What is disheartening is to see the artificial, policy-driven barriers put in their way. Here in Oregon, we are hearing a lot of talk about improving our educational system. And some of these things actually sound okay. And please don't get me wrong: high level change is part of the solution too. But we also need to remove the unnecessary barriers to teachers doing their best work. The notion that a district owns a teacher's work needs to be addressed legislatively, and through contracts. If a district thinks that they are going to get rich from owning and selling content, they should go talk to their local newspaper - the one that went out of business three years ago.

Image Credit: "Contradiction" taken by sweetenough, published under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

I Don't Want To Make Too Much Out Of This, But...

Posted March 27th, 2013 by Bill

At the outset, I want to make it clear that this blog post is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of all things related to Open Educational Resources at the US Federal level.

But with that said, from a high level, it's interesting seeing the move toward Open Educational Resources, and how they are referenced more frequently as both criteria for grants and as a deliverable of these grants.

At http://whyopenedmatters.org/ the Federal Department of Education is helping with outreach to articulate why OER's work.

In 2011, in a joint program between the Departments of Labor and Education, 2 Billion dollars were put toward a program that explicitly required materials produced be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. In February, 2012, a second wave of funding was announced for the program.

And, in a related note, the inclusion of OERs is now listed as a priority for the Discretionary Grant Programs - broadly speaking, this means that Federal grant applications that explicitly reference OERs as part of the grant deliverables mayhave a better chance than other proposals.

Given this general trend at the Federal level, I wonder if/when this will translate into changes at the local level. For example, given the amount of public money being given each year to textbook companies to get proprietary content, why shouldn't there be a directive stating that public money should be spent on acquiring openly licensed content?

At the very least, the trend toward a broader support and use of OER should diminish support for school districts trying to claim copyright over teacher's work.

Open Content: Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse

Posted February 5th, 2013 by Bill

Nearly every time we talk about open content, we are asked about licensing, reuse, and the possible risks of reuse. It's a complicated issue, but it is definitely worth noting that using Creative Commons licensed material is significantly less complex than traditional copyright. With authoring events coming up in Portland and San Francisco, we wanted to look at the resources that already existed to explain licensing, and come up with as simple a guide to licensing and reuse as possible.

This post is not intended to be a comprehensive review of either Creative Commons or traditional copyright. The purpose of this post is to provide people writing open content with some sound guidelines for using and remixing content.

Creative Commons Licensing: An Overview

Every one of the six Creative Commons license requires attribution of the original source, and we will look at attribution later in this post. In addition to attribution, a Creative Commons license can reserve the following rights for the author (or place the following obligations on people reusing the content):

  • Non-Commercial - work released under the NC license cannot be used in a commercial endeavor without the permission of the original creator;
  • Share Alike - when a work is released under the SA license, it requires that any future work that incorporates the original must be released under a comparable license;
  • No Derivatives - work released under the ND license cannot be altered or modified when it is reused.

Molly Kleinman has a series of posts on the details of using the Non-Commercial, the Share-Alike, and the No Derivatives licenses.

The public domain is another option; licensing your work in the Public Domain allows anyone, anywhere, to use your work in any way they see fit, without any obligation to attribute you as the original source.

A central reason that Creative Commons licensing gets confusing for people is that thinking about the license requires that we consider two different events: the initial act of creation; and how the initial work can be reused and adapted over time.

Remixing Work and License Compatibility

When we are creating open content, we will likely encounter - and want to use - content that has been licensed under several different licenses. When we are remixing a work and building on other openly licensed work, we need to consider the licenses of our source material as we choose the license of our new work. The chart included below (adapted from the Creative Commons FAQ on licensing work from multiple sources) shows how mixed licenses can be used.

Compatibility chart Licenses that may be used for a derivative work or adaptation
BY BY-NC BY-NC-ND BY-NC-SA BY-ND BY-SA PD
License of original work PD YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
BY YES YES YES YES YES YES  
BY-NC   YES YES YES      
BY-NC-ND              
BY-NC-SA       YES      
BY-ND              
BY-SA           YES  

As the chart shows, if a piece of source material is licensed under a Non-Commercial license, any work built on that would need to be Non-Commercial as well. When choosing a license, we are limited by the licenses of the work we are looking to incorporate. If a derived work uses information licensed under either of the Share-Alike licenses, the resulting work must also use the Share-Alike license. Accordingly, the license we choose will place similar limits on future uses of our work.

This isn't a bad thing, and to all the people who are saying that this is complicated: yes, but it is much more flexible and humane than the existing copyright system. At the end of this piece, I will demonstrate how to use this chart to navigate remixing different sources.

For additional information on reusing material licensed under different licenses, see Resolving License Conflicts When Authoring Open Content.

Attribution

Attribution is required under all Creative Commons licenses, and it is also just basic scholarship.

To attribute a work used in your open content, include the following information:

  • The author's name or pseudonym;
  • A link to the original work; if the resource isn't available online, then information (like publication date, publisher, magazine name, etc) to help someone else find and use the resource;
  • The title of the original work;
  • The license of the original work, with a link to the license, where possible;
  • If available, any applicable copyright dates.

Molly Kleinman has a good writeup on attribution, with examples.

This information can be collected at the end of your post, in a list of works cited and a list of works consulted.

Of these two lists, the list of works cited is the one that matters for choosing a license. When writing online, arguably, the list of works consulted can be inferred from the list of external links on a page.

At the end of this post, I include a list of works cited and a list of works consulted.

List of works remixed

In this post and our companion post on resolving licensing conflicts, we incorporated and reworked material sections from the three works listed above. Two of the works are licensed under the CC-BY license, and one is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license.

Using the matrix included above, we see that the CC-BY posts can be remixed into derivative works using many different licenses.

Our third work is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license; from looking at the matrix, we see that CC-BY works can be remixed into CC-BY-SA. Accordingly, the only choice on this post is CC-BY-SA. Given that this is the license we like to use, this works well.

List of works consulted

The list of works consulted does not affect the license used when publishing a work. When writing for the web, the list of works consulted can generally be inferred from the links in the post. In addition to the works linked in this post, we also read through the information in the posts listed below.

In addition to the posts listed below, Karen Fasimpaur provided some incredibly useful guidance with finding some of the resources used in this post.

Closing Notes

Questions about licensing have been one of the thornier elements to creating and reusing open content. However, with the large and growing body of high quality openly licensed resources that are available, navigating licenses is becoming easier. A goal of Creative Commons licensing is to facilitate sharing and reuse, and this is a fundamental shift in how we traditionally think about licensing.

Resolving License Conflicts When Authoring Open Content

Posted February 5th, 2013 by Bill

As discussed in Open Content: Licensing, Attribution, and Reuse, the licenses of our source material can affect the licenses we can use when we release our remixed work. At times, there will be potential conflicts that need to be addressed. Unlike traditional copyright, where our options are limited by the whims and decisions of the copyright holder, Creative Commons licensing provides authors with more flexibility and choice.

With some thought and planning, licensing issues can be relegated to just another step in the process of authoring open content.

Resolving Potential Conflicts

If you come across a situation where you are looking at a licensing conflict that appears insurmountable, you have a few other options:

  • Contact the license holder and ask permission; or
  • Fair Use; or
  • Curation; or
  • Multiple licenses covering components within a resource; or
  • Write your own.

Frequently, contacting the license holder and asking for permission will be all that's needed. In many cases, the original author wanted to have some degree of control over where there work will be reused, and are open to allowing it to be incorporated into a derivative work. When we have asked authors to use their work under a different license, we have written a brief email describing our project, how the piece will be used, and why the piece is important within the project. Additionally, we let the author know that we will attribute them, and ask if there is a specific way that want to be recognized as the original creator.

Fair Use is a second option; Fair Use is part of US Copyright Law; there are also some international parallels. The concept of fair use defines a set of conditions under which a portion of a work can be reused or remixed within a new derivative work. This video provides more information on Fair Use. The short version: using information within an educational setting is widely protected under Fair Use.

If Fair Use is not a fit for your specific situation, you can also incorporate work by curating external sources. In this context, "curation" includes a description of how the external resource fits into your work, along with a link to the resource (or, for information not on the web, instructions on how to access the resource).

Using multiple licenses is a third option; while this is the most complex of all options, it does allow for reuse of content under different licenses. When a work uses more than one license, individual components within the work retain their original license, while the bulk of the new work is licensed under a different license. As one example to illustrate when this is a viable approach, if an image under a No Derivatives license is reused in its original format, the rest of the work can be released under a different license while the image retains its original ND license.

The final option covered here is to create your own resource. If none of the options discussed so far work, creating your own new work and releasing it under a Creative Commons license is always a viable option.

Through the options described above, many external resources can be incorporated into open content without infringing upon the rights of the original authors. Attribution and transparency, discussed later in this post, provide additional ways that we can safely and ethically reuse existing content within open educational resources.

Transparency and Intent

One of the fears we hear repeatedly about adopting open content is the fear that it can lead to legal action for infringing on the rights of copyright holders. As with every fear, it helps to temper the concern with some reality.

The reality is that large companies use the threat of a lawsuit as a means of chilling competition. However, the likelihood of that happening is incredibly small, and it becomes even smaller when we use the steps described in this post to make sure that we are respecting the licenses that creators put on their work.

By being completely transparent about the source material we use, by using proper attribution, and by making an intentional effort to use and support open content creation efforts, we minimize any risk even further. The companies and organizations looking to sue are concerned about the long term prospects of their business model, and they should be. The goal of open content, however, is not to ruin the textbook industry in its current form - while that might happen, that's a secondary effect. The goal of open content is to support teachers and learners working together to create the best learning process possible. Content plays a role in that, but, the process of creating and reusing open content becomes more valuable than the actual content.

When discussing open content, many people become focused on the "content" rather than the "open." By being transparent about our sources, our methods, and our goals, we can provide a clear roadmap of how we got to a specific piece of content. In most cases where the author of a piece of work has a question about how their work is being used, they will ask that the work be removed, or they will ask for more information. In these situations, being fully transparent about how we created the work will help demonstrate our intent. This is not a blanket protection against legal action, but given that (in the US, anyways) anyone can sue anyone for any reason, it's difficult to get that blanket protection whether we use open content or not.

Being fully transparent in how we source and create open content, however, helps illustrate the process by which more people can benefit from open content. It's also a stark contrast to traditional textbook companies, where various interest groups vet and make recommendations to textbooks prior to publication. Transparency offers demonstrable evidence of how our work came into existence.

Free and Open

Posted November 21st, 2011 by Bill

Over at Big Think, Kirsten Winkler has a piece on Khan Academy and Wikipedia that she put out yesterday. In her piece, she sees a similarity between Khan Academy and Wikipedia:

So both, Khan and Wales, are proving that there is “a better way” to deliver true free education on the Internet. And I think this is the really radical part. If you take a look at what the Khan Academy is going to offer for free to educators one could ask why anyone would pay for similar products?

Wide open spaces & Dimensions

The fact that both Wikipedia and Khan Academy can be accessed without charge is great, but only considering the cost leaves out the real value: both of these resources can be reused, remixed, and redistributed because they are licensed under Creative Commons licenses that support reuse: Khan Academy uses the Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike variant, where Wikipedia uses the Attribution ShareAlike (It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is built on Mediawiki, an open source platform; I'd love to see the codebase of Khan Academy released for reuse under an Open Source license).

This is where the value comes in, and this is why these resources are important for education: licensing that supports reuse and recontextualization supports analysis, synthesis, and change. In short, the content can evolve with the learner, with the lesson, or with the pedagogical need.

Looking at the learning process as a thing that "needs" a business and a business model to support it misses the point entirely, and it's why people from a business background often don't understand education (in business speak, this generally translates as "the educational market is difficult to crack"). Education is a process; it unfolds over time, over iterations, and when it's working best it's never done. Education is different than certification. But businesses break things down to a transaction, a point of sale - that's not a bad thing, at all, until people conflate the business need of a company trying to profit off education with the needs of the learners that educational products need to serve.

This cultural difference - the focus on a limited time horizon, looking for a big exit; versus education that plays out over years - is frequently overlooked. And this cultural difference leads to people remaining focused on "free" as opposed to "reusable and sustainable." Free doesn't offer much as a business model, but reusable and sustainable offer worlds of opportunity.

Image Credit: "Wide open spaces & Dimensions" taken by regev tovim, published under an Attribution-No Derivatives license.

Khan Academy: Data, Design, and Open Content

Posted November 20th, 2011 by Bill

It's pretty safe to say that Khan Academy arouses strong feelings; one of the barriers in appreciating what Khan Academy actually delivers is how Khan Academy is typically described. However, the conversations about Khan Academy often get bogged down in the goals and plans for the growth of Khan Academy, as opposed to how Khan can be used. In this post, I want to start with the basics: the elements of Khan Academy that are highlighted within the user interface (UI).

The basic premise of Khan - as reflected in the UI - is all about streamlining time on task, as defined by watching videos and working through problem sets.

The dashboard that measures student progress hews closely to these defined goals. A person can see how much time they have spent watching videos, working on problem sets, and how effective they have been at working through these problem sets.

The curriculum is organized into a series of related problem sets, and people can see their progress reflected in the overall scope and sequence, or as part of the grid that ties the quizzes together within a curricular scope.

The game mechanics keep the focus on working within the confines of the site, with students being rewarded for time on task, and for getting questions right. These game mechanics are baked into a student's work on the site; as a student works on problems, windows pop up and inform them that they can move on to a new exercise, or that they have earned a badge.

From the 30,000 foot view, Khan Academy appears to have given people a means to track progress across computerized tests, with tutorial videos provided to give background on a subject. As part of the package, teachers can monitor the work of their students; in the language used within the Khan Academy UI, this is called "coaching."

What's missing, of course, is any comparable emphasis on open ended thinking, or of problem solving that goes beyond quizzes that have a clear right or wrong answer. Also, while participants have the freedom to chart their own course through the video collection, the fact that people can choose their own path through a large set of videos does not change the fact that - from the perspective of an individual learner - a video collection, no matter how large, no matter how often the videos can be rewound and rewatched, is still just a video collection.

As others have noted, the pedagogical strategy of Khan Academy isn't new, despite the energy and zeal of people proclaiming the arrival of the “flipped classroom.” The notion of providing quality resources to students for asynchronous use outside of class -- and using class time for higher level problem solving, collaboration, and student-led inquiry -- feels pretty familiar to a lot of teachers, despite the fact that many bloggers, pundits, and policymakers seem to be stumbling upon the ideas only recently.

But Khan Academy delivers on two things, better than anything or anyone else has to date. First, the existence of the dashboard within the Khan Academy app has the potential to transform the way educators think about using and accessing data on student progress. The dashboard within Khan Academy is, at this writing, limited by what Khan Academy tracks - time on task, correct and incorrect answers on quiz problems - but even that limited info gives teachers (or "coaches," in KA-speak) the ability to help students in a more timely way. When I see the dashboard in place in KA, I imagine how much more effective a teacher could be if the dashboard was itself an opportunity for interaction between learners - what if, for example, a student could flag that they were stuck on a rough draft, or on a lab, or in using physics as a tool to improve their communities? Expanding the scope of what people can interact about is, at its core, a design issue. The data is there, but simple means to visualize and interact around that data are in short supply. The tools within Khan Academy provide a good starting point for conversations about the value of design within education.

The second thing that Khan has made more accessible is the value of openly licensed educational resources. All material on Khan Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, which ensures that these resources, and any subsequent improvements, will remain freely available. Because of the enormous generosity of Salman Khan, and the resources he has marshalled into this effort, the world now has an enormous body of good quality material that can be used to learn about a broad range of subjects. The body of material within Khan Academy can be used to replace large sections of traditional textbooks. The support of high-visibility donors has given these resources a credibility that other openly licensed materials, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed. Salman Khan's effort and vision in building a large body of openly licensed material has shifted the way people think about open content. Partnerships with SmartHistory, and the plans to include community-created material within Khan Academy, will widen the breadth of content within Khan Academy, while ensuring that this new material remains freely available, freely modifiable, and freely reusable in perpetuity. Potentially, Khan Academy will be accessible enough that people will realize that textbooks provided by the publishing industry are an unnecessary expense we can all live without.

Open Content and the Non-Commercial License

Posted August 14th, 2011 by Bill

Over the last several weeks, I've spent some time reviewing how open content is released and licensed on the web.

In this review, I was pleasantly surprised to find fairly widespread use of the Non-Commercial license among some of the larger players.

CK12 textbooks are licensed under a Non-Commercial license. Ditto for Yale. And has anybody heard of this place called MIT? Heck, even Khan is doing it.

CC-NC-BY-SA

(For the curious, CK12, Yale, and Khan all share the licensing info in the footers of their sites).

Given that there has been much debate over licensing over the years (and a recap of the more recent one is available here) it's nice to see that some of the larger players are making this entire question moot.

It's also worth pointing out that using a non-commercial license does not preclude commercial use; it only means that someone who wants to use the resource commercially needs to get permission. For those who are concerned about protecting the rights and preserving the intentions of contributors and authors, this is a very good thing.

For those looking to learn more about the various details of Creative Commons licenses, The Value of Copyleft provides a good starting point.

This Is Why I Wasn't Excited About 2 Billion For OERs

Posted January 24th, 2011 by Bill

There was a buzz among the intarwebz last week at the news that the US Departments of Labor and Education were putting 2 Billion dollars toward the development of Creative Commons licensed materials.

I've noted in the past that Secretary Duncan's language around open content sounds like little more than free R and D money for textbook developers.

Nothing for you!

And, it turns out that there is a catch to this current round of funding. All content must be SCORM compliant. You can see the requirement spelled out on pages 4 and 8 of the Solicitation of Grant Applications (pdf download).

In short, all the content that is developed will be locked in an outdated, unevenly implemented standard, making reuse and recontextualization far beyond the reach of most schools, and certainly beyond the reach of most individuals. Textbook publishers and large corporations, who will be able to consume SCORM content, will be able to modify the content slightly, claim a derived copy, and - aside from attributing the original source - the content will no longer be freely available.

If we wait for useful open content to come from government funding streams, we'll be waiting a long time. Personally, I'm not waiting.

Hat tip to Stephen Downes for highlighting this information.

PDF Is Not An Open Or Reusable Format

Posted October 3rd, 2010 by Bill

Yes, I'm looking at you.

Note: Curriki gets bonus points for having the most convoluted search strings.

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