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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A month ago, I blogged about CC’s Role in Open Access at Otago Polytechnic; specifically, on their adoption of CC BY as their default IP policy. For those who don’t already know, Otago Polytechnic made a novel decision last year to essentially reverse the standard policy of most educational institutions. While other university staff must obtain permissions to release their work under a license different from “all rights reserved” copyright, Otago Polytechnic staff must explain why they don’t want material published openly under CC BY, should they desire standard (restrictive) copyright or another license. Not only does this eliminate all the red tape before getting your work out in the open, it sets open access as an educational imperative. (And by open, they mean really open–free to copy, distribute, adapt and derive the work for both commercial or non-commercial purposes.)

Because of this inversion in standard IP policy, ccLearn was curious to learn how and why and what exactly Otago Polytechnic did and thought to arrive at this decision. While most institutions, especially educational ones, slap on the non-commercial term, Otago seemed to think differently about doing so; in fact, they never even considered it.

Read on for an interview with Leigh Blackall, from the Educational Development Center at Otago Polytechnic. Some things about Leigh: he lives in beautiful Dunedin, New Zealand, develops his own educational resources with his [...]
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It’s tax day here in the USA, but let’s look to more interesting things. I will endeavor to send out an update, perhaps in newsletter form, of key ccLearn activities and plans every month or so, in addition to any announcements or interviews that we post to the site. As we continue to develop our internal capacities to manage communications and projects, I expect that these things will become more streamlined.

We are still hard at work considering the challenges of finding and creating open educational resources, and also with networking and research around existing OER projects. Look to this space for future announcements as we test and then roll out these (hopefully useful) tools.

We are also engaged in planning for a regional meeting among open education projects and CC jurisdictions in Latin America. This is just the first of several planned meeting in different regions of the world to enable greater collaboration and coherence among OER projects globally. We will announce further details about this and hoped-for future meetings as details become available.

We are helping too in planning the education track at this year’s iSummit. The iSummit promises to be an interesting opportunity to engage with open education projects in East Asia and beyond and to consider collective actions that can help to broaden and deepen the impact of the open education movement.

If you haven’t checked out the rest of the ccLearn website lately, you might [...]
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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. [...]
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Thanks to The Wired Campus, I stumbled across this nifty digital copyright tool developed by the American Library Association’s Copyright Advisory Network (in the Office for Information Technology Policy). The ALA Copyright Advisory Network is dedicated to educating librarians and others on copyright, [...]
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Great news being released today that Esther Wojcicki, prominent education innovator, has officially joined the Creative Commons board! We’re thrilled (and lucky) to get her experience and advice on all our developing education related initiatives. You can read all the details at our press [...]
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Today TED announced the 50 millionth view of a TED talk, marking its success since it first launched online two years ago in June of 2006.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—and it features talks by various speakers from Bill Clinton to Bono. However, the most viewed talks are actually [...]
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ccLearn is seeking to fill a new position! Currently, we want someone who will help us in minimizing the legal barriers that stand in the way of open education. However, the new ccLearn Counsel and Assistant Director will not only work on the legal side of things; “instead,this position will [...]
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Agrega, a new educational initiative promoting internet in the classroom, is a collaborative effort on the part  of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Social Politics and Sports, Red.es, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, and the Autonomous Communities and Autonomous Cities of Spain (CC.AA). [...]
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Back in 2004, Athabasca University released the e-version of the Theory and Practice of Online Learning for free online. Now the second edition of the book is out, also available in eBook form under the same license, CC BY-NC-ND. All chapters of the book have been updated with an addition of four new [...]
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Thanks to The Wired Campus, I recently stumbled across this new wiki whilst looking for a visualization tool for a ccLearn research project. The new wiki is called Digital Research Tools, also known as DiRT. DiRT is edited by a team of librarians from Rice University’s Digital Media Center and [...]
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