test

As reported on Ars Technica, a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision has given some legal teeth to open licenses: The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference [...]

A good friend suggested to me yesterday that openly publishing my course materials may not be possible at BYU due to the Brigham Young University Intellectual Property Policy. Curious that such a restriction on my ability to openly share my course materials might exist, I explored the policy in more detail. Here’s what I found. 1. [...]

Open Education 2008 Conference registration is now open! This year’s event will be special in a number of ways (more on this soon!), so please come join us for a fabulous event dedicated to open education and - this year - the ten year anniversary of open content!

People love to analogize / equate open education to open source. There are huge problems with this way of thinking… The one that comes first to mind is that many changes to an open source program can be empirically tested to objectively determine whether or not they improve the program (by increasing its speed, decreasing [...]

I heard this quote at the iSummit today, and it completely sums up what we’re trying to do with the Open High School of Utah: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

I probably would not have named this the ‘Wiley Wiki Design’, but when someone like Leigh names something after you, how do you refuse? =) I’ve been meaning to write a little about this design I’ve been using for the last several years and how it has evolved, but recent proddings by Leigh, Teemu, and [...]

There’s a really interesting company here in Utah valley called Agilix that’s doing some intriguing work in support of the developing world. From today’s press release: Agilix Labs, Inc. announced the extension of learning solutions to unserved and underserved markets with the introduction of its GoCourse Schoolmate product, a self-contained client-server learning system that supports education [...]

Everyone involved with a university understands the problems with the textbook industry, but it’s encouraging to see mainstream media continue to cover Flat World Knowledge’s approach to solving these problems in a sustainable manner. Online ‘open textbooks’ save students cash in the USA Today Coming This Fall: Free Textbooks in Time FWK is an example of openness [...]

For those of you that contacted us about problems submitting by the June 30 deadline, we’ve extended the submission deadline until Friday, July 4th at midnight Mountain Daylight Time. Even if you emailed in an abstract and extended abstract, we still need you to submit your proposal via the website. We’ve re-enabled proposal submission; you’ll [...]

If you have an idea, project, paper, or any other form of activity (believe me, we’re open to nontraditional!) you’ve been considering submitting to the Open Education Conference 2008, today is the day! Head over to http://cosl.usu.edu/events/opened2008/call-for-papers and submit today! We’re looking forward to another awesome conference this year. As Brian Lamb recently gushed: The conference [...]

It is with mixed emotion (but certainly a huge amount of excitement!) that I write today to tell you that I have accepted a position at Brigham Young University. I’ll be making the transition over the summer and begin teaching at BYU in the fall. I remain as committed as ever to pursuing my work of [...]

Had a fabulous time presenting virtually for Brian Lamb today at the UBC Town Hall today. In response to one of the questions that was asked at the end of the session, I had a thought - perhaps a rare occurrence. It was a memory, actually, of a blog post I wrote almost 10 years [...]

As long as we’re enjoying this recent era of new word creation (c.f. “edupunk“), I’ll throw out the idea of an “EduCarbon Footprint.” Marie Duncan, a doctoral student of mine, is currently finishing a study of the structure of reuse with the Connexions repository. While reading her discussion of why more people don’t reuse existing, [...]

Hear ye, hear ye! The Open Ed 2008 presentation submission system is online. (A nod to the great folks at SFU who produce the Open Conference Systems software goes here.) Check out the OpenEd 2008 Call for Papers and submit your proposal! In addition to traditional presentations, we’ll also be accepting technical demonstrations - so [...]

Several readers have asked or emailed about access to the Open High School of Utah’s charter application documents. They are now online for your reviewing and reusing pleasure! http://openhighschool.org/documents/ The documents are licensed CC By 3.0. We sincerely hope that many of you will reuse the charter application documents to start your own OER charter schools!

Several of you have emailed with statements of support for the Open High School of Utah. Thank you for all the offers of help and the connections and introductions you’re making. Please keep them coming in!! I especially appreciated this note from Jun in the Philippines: You have just set a precedent that may be the answer [...]

With extreme joy and happiness I can now announce that this past Friday (the 9th) the Utah Board of Education formally approved our request to create a new charter school to be called the Open High School of Utah. For those unfamiliar with how US charter schools work, a charter school is a publicly funded [...]

Leigh Blackall reports that later this week Otago Polytechnic will become the second higher education institution to formally sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. Way to go!

Fabulous talk by Clay Shirky about where people find the time to work on things like Wikipedia; highly recommended.

FWK is conducting a survey in Facebook about college students’ feelings toward textbooks and potentially open textbooks. Students just go to http://apps.facebook.com/fwksurvey/ and all of the information that they need is there, including info about how we’re compensating students for taking the survey: The first 1,000 responders are guaranteed a $15 Amazon Gift Card; Every responder is [...]