Posts filed under 'Open Content'
Open Content in education relates to the ability of (re-)using the content produced by somebody else in a different educational context. Although it is very good that one is allowed to use or modify the content according to a legal framework respecting the author’s rights, an important practical question arises: will that be possible when using different systems, or different computers? A positive answer to this question should be provided by interoperability; its goal is to enable that content works across different applications, operating systems, computers, …
The World Wide Web is probably the best example of interoperability achievement: the web documents use html as language and a http protocol, which have been widely adopted. Thus, in general, web documents can be seen with different computers, operating systems, browsers, … In this sense, this is an excellent basis for Open Content.
However, the functions needed in education go beyond “seeing” documents. For instance, most e-learning in practice is based on Learning Management Systems (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, …) which have functions that enable student tracking, content organisation, assessment, administration … These Learning Management Systems are largely not interoperable, since functionalities such as those we have just mentioned do not transfer easily from one system to the other. For the author it means that s/he is locked to one system, and changes of system are expensive in human resources.
How to enable interoperability? Through agreeing interoperability specifications, which all the applications, systems should follow to allow for it. When these specifications have been agreed by certain international bodies, they are called standards. Currently there are several organisations which have proposed specifications in the e-learning area. IMS is the most important and acknowledged among them. The most significant IMS specification from an interoperability perspective is IMS Learning Design (IMS LD, for short). According to this specification, besides the mere content, a learning design has to be provided, a sort of a real lesson plan; the perspective is that people in roles, such as student, teacher, tutor, …, develop activities (with a certain educational flow) within an environment which includes resources, tools, … Using this type of description, the goal is that educational descriptions can be really re-used, they can be moved across different Learning Management Systems – and actual implementation can also be exchanged.
The adoption of a specification depends to a large extent on the availability of good, well-documented, open source implementations. Due to the complexity and recentness of IMS LD, just a few compliant tools have been implemented. The most significant are the Reload editor, the CopperCore engine, and the Sled player. Several European R+D projects focus on different aspects of the standard and are also producing new tools. However, the limited set of available tools is making authors to use other open source tools, being Moodle the main option. Moodle provides an easy-to-understand interface, as well as an easy and well-documented API that enables developers to adapt the tool. A huge community of Moodle authors, users and developers already exists, where a big number of learning resources is accessible. In fact many universities are moving its learning management systems from commercial solutions to Moodle.
Whether Moodle will become a sort of standard de facto is not clear, although not unlikely. Nevertheless, there are efforts in the Moodle community to support IMS LD units of learning, which would be an important achievement from an interoperability point of view. Meanwhile, new tools have to be developed for IMS LD, where a key factor that has to be considered is the new social approach of using the web (Web 2.0), and its implications in the learning process.
Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
May 9th, 2007
A Show-me-day « Creation of Multimedia Learning Modules form Open Content » was offered by the Cologne Bazaar team at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg, April 16, 2007. The major aim of the workshop was to inform teachers about where open content is already available and how it could be used. While creating their own learning modules the teachers should learn what has to took into consideration when using open content for their own learning material.
15 teachers from four countries attended the workshop.
The « Show-me-day » was hold as a four-hour session. In the first part the participants were introduced to Open Content and what ideas are behind this concept. Manifests and political implications of Open Content were presented, but also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property. The participants learned about popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU FDL and how to use these licences for own created content and what has to take into account when using contents of others.
During a second part there was talked about how one could use Open Content for the own teaching. The following tools and resources for finding and sharing contents were presented briefly: Flickr, Internet Archive, Connexions, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, CC Search and CC Directories. Other resources were mentioned as well. For every of the presented tools or resources some minutes were reservered for exploring and trying out. The participants discussed also practices for re-using Open Content and didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use.
In the hands-on-tutorial after a coffee break, teachers created multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. Some teachers have cooperated in groups, others preferred working by their own. One suggestion for the practical work was to create a short module about Open Content for their colleagues. Also a tool for creating the modules was suggested (OpenOffice with eLAIX extension to export a document as multimedia module to the LMS ILIAS). But some teachers preferred to work with their own environment and tools which was accepted as well.
The working atmosphere was very intense and all participants have tried out several tools and resources to find appropriate open content for their modules. During the entire workshop participants could ask for additional information or clarification. Most of the questions raised by the participants were about how marking an open content item with a licence correctly. Several participants asked for the easiest way to find open content lincenced images or textes. Most of the participants were astonished about the variety of resources the might use. But several of the german speaking and teaching participants were disapointed about the small amount of open content in German.
The evaluation of the event showed that open educational resources are not yet that important in daily work for the participants as their own produced materials. The majority of the teachers do not control the property rights of the content they use. And they pay only seldom for copyright. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of knowhow about IPR handling amongst them. But even if the knowledge about open content licences was different, the majority of the participants declared to invest further time to learn more about these licences after the workshop, even if they feel secure or partly secure in using open content licences. So the « Show-me-day » stimulated the participant’s interest in this issue - which can be seen as another step for establishing the use of open educational resources in e-learning.
May 2nd, 2007
Broadly speaking there are four (non-commercial) reasons I can think of to publish something online. It is about sharing, storing, tooling and availability. There are also some issues that make people hesitate to publish online and these issues should not be ignored as non-relevant.
Continue Reading April 17th, 2007
With the success of Wikipedia, Open Content has become a popular concept for publishing any kind of creative work like texts or images and allowing to copy and to modify them by anyone. The Bazaar team offers a workshop about Open Content and IPR-handling at the EduMedia conference in Salzburg, Austria, the 16th April of 2007. In this workshop we try to explore the new opportunities offered by Open Content in combination with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for blended and distance learning.
In the first part, we talk about Open Content and which ideas are behind this concept, about the manifests and political implications of Open Content, and also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property Rights. The variety of popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU-FDL will be presented. We will show how to use these licences for content created by participants and what has to be taken into account when using Open Content of others.
During the second part, we talk about how authors could use Open Content for their work. Therefore valuable tools and resources for finding and sharing contents (like articles, pictures, audio files etc.) will be presented. And we will analyse and discuss practices for re-using Open Content. Special emphasis will be put on didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use of Open Content.
Finally, in the hands-on-tutorial, we will attempt to build a multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. This will give participants the opportunity to use the different tools and to identify the appropriate presented licences for their content production. For the tutorial we will use OpenOffice as content editor and export these OO-documents to the Open-Source-LMS ILIAS by using the OO-extension eLAIX.
More information about the workshop and the EduMedia conference can be found at the EduMedia web site: http://edumedia.salzburgresearch.at/
April 12th, 2007
A very nice video from creativecommons.org promoting the idea of open content creation.
Clik here to watch it.
December 18th, 2006
If we read documents as information in general -since it needn’t be a file on paper and will typically be understood as an electronic document these days-, I could, from the title of this blog, be understood as a fighter for free information. Knowledge is power and power to the people. I will not go into that now.
What I do mean with this title, is that information should be available and readable by as many people as possible. This can be seen on both a world-wide scale as well as on a small scale in creating software (environments) for learning. In other words: we shouldn’t make assumptions in which context or for which purpose the content will be used. Content (documents) should be self-contained and open to integrate with various (software) environments and contexts of use.
A future sketch
It is often heard that we live in an information society and I guess that nobody would deny that. The cost-effective new ways of sharing information via computers, digital media and the Internet or private networks, have made the world of information huge and more diverse.
Still, there is a great deal of publishers and educational institutes that would like to stick to the old model of having one information source (a book for example) that the learner is obliged to use. Of course large investments made in creating educational material should be earned back. But the possibilities promised by multimedia and fast Internet are tempting and the use of Internet is still growing.
In my opinion eventually there will be other models used based on smaller reusable units of learning that are easily redistributed (resold maybe) since it is not likely that people will download complete books. These smaller units might have an increasing quality because of online feedback.
The results of a future scenario exercise presented by Teemu Arina at the conference in march 2005 directed to networks of knowledge interchange. These would be feed by infoware, social networking, social software, blogs, collaborative tagging and/or data storage and so on. A growing number of initiatives on the Internet like eduforge.org, http://www.opencontent.org/ (mainly for the OpenCourseWare of MIT), opencourse.org and many others make it more likely that learning in the future makes a shift from classroom- or book-based learning to gaining knowledge via various knowledge communities on the Internet.
The problem is that there is so much out there, that you don’t know where to start. Moreover, even if we know where to get the knowledge, we might not have the proper rights to access or use it. So there are three issues to tackle to enhance innovation in future learning:
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the ability to find educational material;
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the right to use the material;
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the ability to open and (re-)use the material.
Where to find Open Content?
If one is looking for open content on the Internet, finding good material might be a problem since there is so much out there and there is not just one website to go to. One might use a search robot like Google, but since it has such a wide coverage, the number of hits in a search can be large and therefore it might be hard to find the right information. Communities forming their own portal offer both a social network and a source of information with their own searching engine. By starting a new community and bundling the knowledge and judging skills (of other information resources of interest) of the members, soon an interesting website of information can develop itself.
I believe that judging information is such a complex task, that human skills are necessary next to the work machines can do. A group of users together is very powerful to create a useful information source by selecting, rating, adding and commenting to, information. By facilitating new groups of users that create open content, such communities can prove themselves or not. In time the most useful or valuable information resources will remain and enrich themselves to grow out to content providers (for specific target groups perhaps).
May we use it?
As a learner finds information on the net, he/she may read it, but copyright issues might prevent teachers from using information in their classroom or online course. If the reuse of educational material by teachers is blocked for some reason, the information wealth is more likely to grow in quantity than in quality since everytime material is written anew. But these days the right to use material can be dealt with, by means of a special license mechanism called Creative Commons Licensing which I have been talking about in an earlier blog (An alternative to copyright to enhance sharing educational material). The idea is that the maker of the material can offer in an attached legal document a broader range of preset rights than the standard copyright laws permits.
What is open about Open Documents?
Since we share documents, there should be an agreement on how to read them technically. I will not have a plea for Open Source Software here, but what is important is that documents follow an open standard or at least have the document format publicly available. A simple concept like xml to structure information has been used to make translations between documents possible. The use of open standards makes it worthwhile to invest in the development of new tools that can be made available online such that users can read and modify their downloaded documents.
Open means also that we have the legal rights to use the software and that it does not remains behind walls. Apart from that it means that the document is self-contained by which I mean that it has meta-information that not only describes the document for insiders, but in comprehensible standards to enable a fit in several contexts. Html-documents are a good example of open documents. Anyone understanding the (available) standards can peek into the document and reuse and/or change (parts of) the document.
Last but not least, open means easy to use with little effort to integrate in the existing tooling a person has got. The document format should at least be easy to translate to existing document formats of common available tools and readable by (Open Source) software that is freely available. I think that html became so widely used, apart from its powerful concept of linking locations, because of the fact that translating html to a readable text-file is a matter of omitting the tags (mainly) and the availability of free browsers did the rest.
How to share documents?
Again, as in the beginning of this blog, if we interpret the word document as the broader concept information, a website where you can browse information and download files, might do. I found on our own Bazaar project blog an interesting link posted by George Bekiaridis in his article An alternative way to share our data online about a company called synology offering (for money) a way to quickly set up a website with loads of possibilities. The thing is, that files or information like html-texts alone are not enough. To be able to find and judge information items quickly we like to do two things: label them and group them.
Labelling information can be done by giving an url a tag in a tagging system, giving it a useful name or by providing meta-information. For the latter a number of standards have been developed (specific for learning material) like SCORM, IMS Learning Design. By means of providing and refining meta-information the chance that a piece of information is indeed shared between users, gets higher. The specific purpose of sharing determines the kind of needed meta information and the tools around it. Either we have a lot of different open standards or we have several big ones that are inevitably quite complex and extensive standards (which are not likely to be used manually by individuals). This would ask for new tooling. Preferably, we would have these tools online available instead of downloading them per individual.
Grouping documents can be done on several levels. One of the most important ones is having a website or a network held up by a community. The administrator or the members in the latter case are responsible for the quality and judging the (a)propriateness of the documents within. This means that uploading a document to a specific website or network of websites, is meta-information itself. The users will find a restricted set of documents in their community, all with the type of meta-information of their interest.
Therefore it will be interesting to form new communities around repositories of information or possibly a website with blogs, mailing-lists, tags or rss-feeds of links and other services. It will be interesting to have such services available online since various communities of practice are likely to evolve outside of the settled institutions that have the server space, full rights and fund, to maintain websites of knowledge and interaction.
In the light of this, it is interesting to mention two initiatives with more or less the same philosophy. At web.opendock.net you will find a free downloadable set of tools (interpretable text-files) based on Open Source technology like MySQL and PHP that are available at almost every server (even hired ones). So setting up your own community means uploading a bunch of files at some server address and changing a few settings. Although the installing documentation is mainly in Italian, setting up a new website, should not take long I suspect. What you get is the common social network website functionality like blogging, mail and so on.
At OpenDocument.net that will be launched soon, there will be software available that is based on PHP and MySQL too that will offer you a way to group documents in a repository (rather than information in general as for opendock.net). The way the metadata is organised is so flexible that new modules for different metadata formats can be added to the repository. In the blogs Sharing is a joy for all and What we want from a FLOSS repository it is argued how a repository for educational material should look like in our opinion. It supports IMS Learning Design and Creative Commons and allows the units that are stored to have a structure of their own. They comprise all the (meta) information and files or references that belong to their context. We believe that we can combine the benefits of having a flexible metadata system and a lightweight Internet repository service as to both group and tag information in a flexible way to facilitate new communities of practice.
October 10th, 2006
I was thinking about the Bazaar seminar in Barcelona entitled “Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?” and how to manage our data stored in different locations online.
The first thing we have to look is why we are using services such flickr, youtube etc. I believe because we need a fast, free or even cheap, reliable and easy to use place to store our data online. The best of course is to have such a service just for us, managed by us without any ads and data mining. Most of us will say that this is very expensive and probably we don’t have the skills needed to manage a service.
Few days ago an advertisement email arrived in my inbox and it was for a product called Disk Station. The text was starting as “Time to redefine how you share, how you store, and how you connect your data.” Looking at the web site (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS106serise/index.php) Disk Station is a portable server which has some interesting features copied from product’s web site.
Share More Than just Data
Disk Station integrates so many features you could ever think of in a Home & SOHO environment. It shares data, printer, photo, web, multimedia files and more! Having a Disk Station is connecting all your digital contents. It makes sharing everything easy yet controllable.
Program Your Own Web
Creating your own web site is always a fun thing to do. Disk Station now supports PHP+MySQL. You are free to construct your own web site with dynamic web contents, or to install PHP open source applications from the Internet, such as blog and bulletin board,
Let the Music Play
If you have cool photos, music, and movies, why not share them out? You simply upload the files to Disk Station, hook up a Network Media Player, and you can start enjoying them with your TV or audio set.
Total Backup Solutions
Data backup is so important but people tend to ignore it, Disk Station makes data backup so complete and automatic that backup always be done without your attention. From Network Backup to Local Backup, from USB Copy to PC Backup (Synology Data Replicator II), you can always find the backup alternatives that fit your needs.
Share Photos with Right Persons
Having trouble to share your photos with right persons? Photo Station lets you not only share them with friends through the Internet, but also control who should be able to view which photo albums. You are now the master of your shared photos.
What if plug a Disk Station in a network with static IP and give access to our peers through the internet. I’m sure some of us now and the rest in 1-2 years will have a lot of bandwidth and a static IP (you can do it even with dynamic IP) to connect such devices on the net. I don’t think that everybody will run a service like flickr but will have the able to run our own services with our own policies using our own hardware which is not very expensive. The price of Disk Station in Greece is 320 Euros.
I’m not trying to advertise any product. I’m trying to share some thoughts on how to use a product like this in terms of sharing our data through the internet.
I’ve already ordered a Disk Station and I’ll try to test it. So in a next post I’ll share my experiences on using it.
October 4th, 2006
Inside Higher Ed :: New Model for Scholarly Publishing:
It might be summer but the Open Content movement continues to gather strength.
Here is the first of two post on recent announcements / releases.
“Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.”
Much to be welcomed especially given Rice’s association with the Connexions project. Interesting - why would I publish through Rice, rather than just put the PDF on my own web site. Guess the answer has to be that they see publishing through the Rice site as conveying some kind of additional prestige. I am not so sure this will work in the long term.
Technorati Tags: Open content
July 26th, 2006
At May 15, 2006 the first “Show-me day” of the Bazaar project took place successfully at University of Cologne. Fourteen teachers were introduced in creating, exchanging and re-using e-learning materials with Open Source software tools. The participants came from schools and institutions for further and vocational training of the Cologne region.
The Show-me day started with an introduction to open content by Carsten Kozianka from the Cologne team. Carsten explained how one can safely copy, modify and redistribute Open Content in combination with its own learning material. Equipped with an own computer and online connection every participant could verify how easy it is to add a creative commons licence to an own image or text file.
The second part of the Show-me day was dedicated to hands-on experience in creating e-learning content. Matthias Kunkel demonstrated how to turn a simple text file into an multimedia-enhanced e-learning module by using OpenOffice with the add-on iLEX and the learning management system ILIAS. At the end of the event Carsten presented how to create and format WIKI pages as an alternative way to create content for educational purposes.
Due to the deep interest of the participants and their wish to continue this exchange of information and experience, the Bazaar team Cologne decided to open an ILIAS stall for all participants of the Show-me day and for all people interested in creating e-learning content with ILIAS.
June 7th, 2006
The team at the University of Cologne proudly presents the 1st BAZAAR Show-me day. Matthias Kunkel and Carsten Kozianka will provide hands-on experience in creating, exchanging and re-using e-learning materials with Open Source software and tools.
To ensure direct hands-on experience every participant will be equipped with his own computer in one of our local university pools (15 workstations). Due to a great demand for participation from local and regional teachers the event is already fully booked.
Topics:
- From a text file to an e-learning module: Firstly, we are going to demonstrate how to turn a simple text file into an multimedia-enhanced e-learning module – using the ILIAS OS LMS, OpenOffice and a small tool called iLEX. Then we will show how to keep your content from being stuck in a particular system and re-use it in other contexts. This will include the transfer of an ILIAS module to another ILIAS installation, LMS or CMS.
- Using Open Content for education: The increase of content published under so-called “Copyleft” licenses opens up new vistas for education but also causes concern about legal implications. We will explain step-by-step how you can safely copy, modify and redistribute Open Content in combination with your own learning material.
- Creating and formatting WIKI pages: If a WIKI can be integrated into the daily routines of an educational institution – which means that employees are actually making contributions to it – it becomes a powerful tool for aggregating knowledge from staff. To use this unique power of collaborative writing one has to be familiar with the WIKI syntax that we will give an introduction to.
May 9th, 2006
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