One morning in late June, I made the trek out to the outer mission area to interview two KQED QUEST producers: Sue Ellen McCann and Craig Rosa. I first met Sue Ellen and Craig a couple months prior, when we had an informal discussion about possibly CC licensing some of QUEST’s raw footage for a new program called the Science Media Commons (see below). Since then, KQED and QUEST have made definite plans to open up some of that raw footage, in addition to a whole bunch of their photos that are already CC licensed.

QUEST is KQED’s science and environment series about the San Francisco Bay Area. Through various multimedia, it examines the work of the larger scientific and environmental community and its impact on our daily lives. QUEST operates inside the KQED offices, which are grey on the outside, but impressive on the inside. A bridge-like walkway connects the upper stories, and it was at the end of this walk that we entered Sue Ellen’s office, where she, Craig and I sat down to have a nice, lengthy chat. Craig offered us some of his breakfast cornbread, while I started the recorder. The following is an edited transcript of the interview, my questions in bold.

Could you say a little about yourselves, your position at KQED and QUEST and maybe how you came to be here? What personally interests you in the work that you do here?

Sue Ellen

I’m the executive producer for QUEST. I work on the editorial concepts, fundraising and organizational structure [...]
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Photo by Petri Tuohimaa for GMRI, CC BY-NC-ND

“Sarah on a beach near Portland, Maine looking for two species of invasive marine crabs – Carcinus maenas (European green crab) and Hemigrapsus sanguineus (Asian shore crabs).”

In April, I had a chance to meet with Sarah Kirn, Program Manager of Vital Signs, a field and inquiry based science education program at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The meeting took place in our sunny San Francisco office while Sarah was in town for the week. She marveled at the weather, her native state being Maine, where she has worked with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute since 2002. She explained that the Vital Signs program itself actually started in 1999. Back in 1999, Vital Signs was using Apple E-mates, something which, at my age, I’ve never heard of, much less used. The following are excerpts from our meeting, along with some recent edits over email.

I might have used it, I said. I remember using those old Apples…

“No, no, no,” she said. “It’s not an old box-style computer—it was an early portable computer. They’re really…kind of sleek and green and had a little stylus and keyboard. It was a great piece of technology that didn’t make it into mainstream use. So we started developing Vital Signs on Palm computers in about 2001.”

Let’s rewind a bit. Vital Signs, according to their website and info sheet, “is an inquiry-based, field science [...]
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June slipped by before we knew what was happening, so this is a two-month update. These past two months have seen ccLearn giving a presentation at CSU Sacramento relating open education and universal design, attending the first CC tech summit, and plowing along on the various projects already underway. Also, we welcomed a summer intern, Grace Armstrong, who is coordinating with CCi and open education leaders in Latin America and beyond on holding meetings and identifying promising collaborative opportunities. More on this later this summer.

We have also released a great mapping tool for identifying upcoming open educational events, now found on ccLearn’s home page. What is unique about this tool is that the data are derived from a wiki-table, and anyone can contribute or edit event info. We encourage you to add any events relevant to open education that you may be aware of. We intend to re-purpose this tool for other mapping exercises as well, and since it is open source, like everything Creative Commons builds, you can also use it for your own mapping needs. One idea that has already been discussed is “mapping the open educational space” at the upcoming iSummit… this exercise could take many forms, and the open, collaborative nature of the wiki allows for a lot of creativity in how the map takes shape.

Look for other developments and research projects to come to fruition in the coming month. The days are getting shorter here in the Northern Hemisphere, [...]
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Work on tools and resources that we hope will help to enable engagement with open education continues here at ccLearn. We’re getting into the testing phase for the Universal Education Search project, and we are currently writing a first report on licensing policy diversity among open educational projects and web sites.

ccLearn attended the Berkman at 10 anniversary conference in Boston this month. Creative Commons was essentially birthed at the Berkman Center (Harvard University), so the ten year anniversary provides an interesting reference point for considering how things have changed in that time. It is safe to say that practically everything has changed, at least with respect to the relationship of society and the Internet. For many people, the Internet is no longer a special feature of computing; instead, it IS computing. As social networks, mobile computing, and digital media become ever more integrated into our daily lives, the question of what we want that landscape to look like becomes ever more important. Is this a landscape of blockades and digital hazards, dominated by litigation and enforcement of a code that was developed over many years of pre-digital societies? Or is this a landscape of open pathways and possibilities, predicated on the notion that openness and transparency drive diversity and opportunity. Obviously, we here at ccLearn opt for the latter option.

We hope that everyone who discovers ccLearn and the open education movement will help [...]
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In April, ccLearn crossed telephone lines with Italy and Ukraine for the first time. Executive Director Ahrash Bissell spoke with eIFL.net, Electronic Information for Libraries, an international nonprofit organization whose interests, among many, lie in open access publishing and fair and balanced intellectual property laws for libraries.

Below is a follow-up interview over email with Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, and Iryna Kuchma, Program Manager of eIFL-OA (Open Access).

First, can you say a few words about yourselves and eIFL? How did you come to get involved in eIFL and to hold your respective positions within the larger framework? What about eIFL attracted you? 

Rima

I am a professional librarian, graduated from Vilnius University in Lithuania. I joined the Open Society Institute – Budapest (OSI) Network Library Program late in 1995. The idea for eIFL was born at OSI and later the idea turned into an independent organisation which I joined from its establishment in 2003. Coming from Lithuania, which had poorly resourced libraries and where access to information was restricted when I was a student, I was very passionate about ideas—what could be done in order to improve libraries, open them and offer better services to its users. eIFL.net is a very innovative and creative organisation that offers a lot of opportunities and ideas; it makes things happen.

Iryna

eIFL’s mission statement, “Enabling access to knowledge through libraries [...]
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The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) has been hosting an OER Handbook on WikiEducator for a while now, inviting others to contribute and edit various elements of the book. Now they’ve finally published the first printable version of one of their mini-handbooks: OER Handbook for Educators 1.0.  The [...]
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One morning in late June, I made the trek out to the outer mission area to interview two KQED QUEST producers: Sue Ellen McCann and Craig Rosa. I first met Sue Ellen and Craig a couple months prior, when we had an informal discussion about possibly CC licensing some of QUEST’s raw footage for a [...]
[Read More]

The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) is dedicated to education. It is now available online, including two articles specifically devoted to open education: “A Flat Network for the Unflat World: Open Educational Resources in Developing Countries” (Steven Muegge, Monica [...]
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Last week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, long-time supporter of CC, announced the second annual Digital Media and Learning Competition. The 2008 competition is a collaborative result of the MacArthur Foundation, the University of California, Irvine, Duke University, and HASTAC, a [...]
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In January, the Student PIRGs launched the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign “to encourage faculty to adopt open educational resources in their classrooms” in the form of open textbooks and other classroom materials. Read ccLearn’s post on it from January. Recently, the Student [...]
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The National Science Foundation Task Force issued a report late in June on cyberlearning, more specifically on “Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.” It is, in their words, “A 21st Century Agenda for the National Science Foundation” [...]
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One of my must-read blogs on technology and education, ZaidLearn has been rating various learning tools since July of last year. The blog was started by e-Learning Manager for INCEIF, Zaid Alsagoff, who has done research in the areas of “educational gaming, role-play simulation, virtual classrooms, [...]
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Michael Wesch, creator of the strikingly insightful videos “A Vision of Students Today” and “The Machine is Us/ing Us”, gave a presentation at the Library of Congress back in May on the anthropology of YouTube. The presentation was the third in a series called “Digital Natives,” [...]
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