Open content introduction

Open content and open access:the liberal arts situation, 2010

NITLE MIV sessionFebruary 2010

Plan for today’s session

• Intro• Current examples in the

wild• Academic use: issues• Academic types:

examples

I: introduction

• NITLE research• New Media

Consortium collaboration

• http://blogs.nitle.org/let/• http://www.nmc.org/horiz

on; http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/open-content/

definition

What is open?“"open" refers to granting of copyright permissions

above and beyond those offered by standard copyright law. "Open content," then, is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law - at no cost to the user.”

http://www.opencontent.org/definition/

• Wikipedia:

“any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual.”

(as of today)

definition

One example

• http://librivox.org/moon-and-sixpence-by-w-somerset-maugham/

definition

What isn't open?• Barriers of cost• Format?• What level of technology is a barrier?• Example: is Facebook open?

One question for 2010

Is much of social media open content, for higher education?

Reasons for yes:• Widely consumed by

our community• Some produced, ditto• Hard to tell boundary

Reasons for no:• institutional housing• legal differences• Scale• Overlap with

professional activities

Most of the content our students experience is open content. This is increasingly true of campus staff.

Most of the content we all produce is not.

One provocative hypothesis for 2010

II. Current examples in the wild

By media: text• ebooks (Gutenberg

(1971!))• Internet Archive,

1,873,889 texts

• Hypertext• Web “1.0” content• Internet Archive’s

Wayback Machine• Wikipedia• blogosphere

Images• Flickr: 4 billion, as of

October 2009 (http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/12/4000000000/)

Creative Commons licensed?Attribution License: 17,695,366 photosAttribution-NoDerivs: 6,022,562 photosAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: 41,169,071

Audio

• Podcasts (iTunesU)• FreeSound (Pompeu Fabra University,

Barelona; http://www.freesound.org/)• Much depends on open standards, especially

mp3

Children of Men (2006) creditshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freesound_Project

Web video

• YouTube; others (streaming)• Internet Archive: 249,436 items (downloads)

social media and social networks

• Blogosphere• Twitter• Facebook public• LinkedIn and others

III. Academic issues

The appeal• Lower costs

(consumption)• Intellectual

commonweal• World citizen

(production)• Pedagogies

The problems• Cost/benefit

(production)• Legal concerns (IP, HIPA)• Content concerns

(consumption)

NB: onsumption vs production

academic examples

Campus strategic publication• MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/,• Tufts OCW http://ocw.tufts.edu/,• Yale Open Sources http://oyc.yale.edu/• Open University http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

academic examples

Campus strategic publication: beyond the campus

• http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ – 20 in the US; 148 international

• search http://www.folksemantic.com/

example: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/introduction-to-theory-of-literature/content/sessions/lecture03.html

academic examples

Liberal arts colleges?- “Trinity University’s faculty members today

endorsed a measure to allow them to bypass some publication restrictions while sharing their scholarly research with the broader academic community...”

http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/news_releases/091023openaccess.htm

“The new Open Access policy also would enable Trinity professors to post the author’s version of the article in a freely-accessible digital repository. Such a repository already exists as part of the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository, a collaboration among Trinity and other private liberal arts colleges, including Carleton College, Bucknell University, Grinnell College, University of Richmond, St. Lawrence University, and Whitman College.” http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/news_releases/091023openaccess.htm

academic examples

Oberlin:“Each member of the General Faculty and the

Administrative and Professional Staff grants to Oberlin College permission to make his or her scholarly journal articles openly accessible in the College’s institutional repository...” http://www.oberlin.edu/library/programs/scholcom/OAresolution.html

“To assist the College in cataloguing and distributing the published scholarship of its faculty, each General Faculty and A&PS member will, upon publication of the article, provide an electronic copy of the author’s final peer-reviewed version of the article, along with the appropriate bibliographical data, to the Scholarly Communications Officer. This copy will be provided free of charge and in an appropriate format (such as PDF), as specified by the General Faculty Library Committee in consultation with the General Faculty Council…”http://www.oberlin.edu/library/programs/scholcom/OAresolution.html

academic examples

open source in academe: related • -LAMP• -LMS• -browser (FF)• -mobile (Android)• -gaming: Inform

Big picture, moving forward

• Growing number of institutions producing content

• Growing amount of content in the world• Increasing foundation and government

support

Big picture, moving forward• Mobile devices: boom but split

And struggles in the world:

More from you!

• Examples? Problems? Opportunities?