MDDE+622+Openness+in+Education

About course: @http://cde.athabascau.ca/syllabi/mdde622.php toc MOOC site: @http://open.mooc.ca/

Week 1 – Defining Openness 1

 * History of openness in higher education
 * Types of openness: content, teaching, scholarship

Open Ed Resources Movement Timeline: [] An introduction to open content: [] (David Wiley - 20+ min video) Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources: [] (Read chapter 2) Build it and they will come? @http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/viewFile/545/279 The Cathedral and the Bazaar: @http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1472/1387
 * Readings**,

Open education Resources (OER) Resources: accumulated assets that can be enjoyed without restricting the possibilities of others to enjoy them. Open
 * digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research (p. 38)
 * they should be non-rival (public goods),
 * the value of the resource should be enlarged when used (open fountain of goods).
 * resources either provide non-discriminatory access to the resource or can also be contributed to and shared by anyone.

Open Education Openness Definitions,
 * “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” UNESCO in 2002
 * “open educational resources are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research”. most often used now
 * “convenient, effective, affordable, and sustainable and available to every learner and teacher worldwide” Walker
 * “The 4 A’s – accessible, appropriate, accredited, affordable” D’Antoni (Daniel, 2006).
 * “the concept of ‘open’ entails, it seems, at a minimum, no cost to the consumer or user of the resource” and goes on: “It is not clear that resources which require some sort of payment by the user – whether that payment be subscription fees, contribution in kind, or even something simple, such as user registration – ought to be called ‘open’. Even when the cost is low – or ‘affordable’ – the payment represents some sort of opportunity cost on the part of the user, an exchange rather than sharing.” Downes (2006) (p 32)

Technical Characteristics of Openness
 * interoperability and functionality
 * allow new system components to be developed in a way that guarantees their capacity to function as elements in the larger system and also to link proprietary system components together (p 32/33)
 * Openness in technical interfaces leads to additive growth, where new components can be added to a larger system without major effort. The open source approach, in contrast, can lead to accumulation that produces compound growth (no black boxes of hidden code)
 * lack of interoperability and unavailability of technical specifications
 * resources can be used but are located behind passwords in LMS and not available to external users.

Social Characteristics of Openness
 * institutional or economic,
 * copyright or price can limit access to resources
 * Ethical standards relating to research and study can also limit access
 * privacy reasons or money can buy more access
 * political power can be used to change institutional constraints
 * different levels of openness involves access and accessibility
 * unavailable in one's language, or disability,
 * the resource should be published in a format everyone can open without having to buy proprietary software
 * geography
 * the right to use a resource is limited in some instances to a specific geographical area, such as a country or a region (e.g., BCcampus only available in BC)

Nature of the Resource Free, works that are “free” offer the following freedoms (p.35)
 * The freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it.
 * The freedom to redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression.
 * The freedom to make improvements or other changes, and to release modified copies.

Open education includes,
 * Learning content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
 * Tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organisation of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
 * Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localise content.



Open Education Resources (OER) ==> Open Learning Resources (OLR)
 * What materials are for education? There is a grey area for informal and formal educational purposes,

Educational Resource
 * anything that can be used to organize and support learning experiences
 * computer-aided teaching and learning: resources=learning content in forms of text, audio or video file.
 * produce services that anyone can enjoy, without reducing the enjoyment of others
 * open source software which is available for free and becomes more valuable as more people use it. (Metcalf’s law. The more people use the service, the more valuable it is to have access to it. Apps, Skype, email...)

Open Resources
 * Are sources of services that do not diminish their ability to produce services when enjoyed.
 * Provide non-discriminatory access to the resource.
 * Can be adjusted, amended and shared.

Conditions for Contribution OER (CUDOS)
 * communalism--the principles or practices of communal ownership
 * universality--the character or state of being universal; existence or prevalence everywhere
 * disinterestedness--unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motives
 * originality--ability to think or express oneself in an independent and individual manner; creative ability.
 * skepticism

[]
 * Build it and they will come?**

The term “build it and they will come” does not fully relate to open content, development of more content and content of higher quality is needed but just “building it” will only address a small portion of the inhibiting factors that content developers experience with reuse of open content. (p. 14/15)

Inhibiting factors for OER usage (p. 14)
 * educational rules and restrictions,
 * language,
 * relevance,
 * access,
 * technical resources,
 * quality,
 * intellectual property,
 * awareness,
 * computer literacy,
 * teaching capacity,
 * teaching practices and traditions.

Common Issues (p. 14)
 * Content developers see it as their job to create content for the students and they do not just want to copy what someone else has created.
 * They see the content development process as self-development and they want to incorporate their own ideas, their innovations and their perspectives in the content.
 * The often mentioned statement that open content can help save time in the development of content can also be questioned.
 * Most of the time content developers find it easier and quicker to create their own material instead of finding and assessing content on Internet.
 * They have too much material to choose from, it is hard to assess the quality and copyright restrictions and it is time consuming to modify the material.
 * Educational practices and traditions that historically have shaped the educational system of the countries also pose a hinder.
 * Content developers are used to basing their teaching material around text books and they want control over what information that is passed on to their students.

[]
 * The Cathedral and the Bazaar**

The “bazaar” comes as the opposite of the “cathedral” development model where there is a very strict hierarchy of system engineers/architects, developers, testers, etc. In a “bazaar”, everything is open, anyone can contribute, ownership is collective. (link)

The 'bazaar' needs to have some organization to make it work more efficiently (e.g. SCORM, [|Web Content Accessibility Guidelines] (WCAG), tagging...). Treating users as co-developers (p. 7ish, just before point 7)





Week 2 – Defining Openness 2
> read about the progress of the OER movement and solidify the ideological orientation that drives much of its activity. > revisit the definitions of the open source software movement
 * History of copyright
 * Alternative licensing systems
 * Open source/Linux models
 * Creative Commons
 * Current copyright/content protection initiatives (ACTA)
 * read about how the open university movement (through the creation of the Open University UK) provides a parallel narrative for the emergence of openness in education
 * read about how the open university movement (through the creation of the Open University UK) provides a parallel narrative for the emergence of openness in education

"The last temptation is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason." T. S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

- History of Open University: [|http://www.mcs.open.ac.uk/80256EE9006B7FB0/(httpAssets)/F4D49088F191D0BF80256F870042AB9D/$file/History+of+the+Open+University.pdf] - Open Source in Open Education: Promises and Challenges: [] - Open Source Definition: annotated: [] - A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities: [] - Open Educational Resources and Practices (chapter 3.2) – OLCOS [] - Open Educational Resources: Enabling Universal Education: [] - Cute Kitten Syndrome: [] - Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and challenges for higher education: []
 * Readings,**

Resources Definition (p. 21)
 * Open Educational Resources and Practices (chapter 3.2) – OLCOS** []
 * Open Educational Resources and Practices (chapter 3.2) – OLCOS** []
 * creation and provision of open course content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
 * open source software and development tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
 * development of standards and licensing tools: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localize content.

Free can mean (p. 22)
 * a financial point of view (free of charge)
 * free of ownership in the sense of 'public domain' or 'commons'
 * technical considerations such as a possible mandatory provision of content in open formats and availability of the source code of software

Education can mean (p. 22)
 * formal?
 * informal?
 * or is it a sufficient condition that educators find some content potentially useful in teaching and learning activities?


 * Open Educational Resources: Enabling Universal Education**: []

Definition: describes how practitioners commonly treat open education resources — cute, cuddly, beyond reproach. (link) Why OERs?
 * Cute Kitten Syndrome**: []
 * What are we trying to achieve?
 * Marketing our institution?
 * Reducing costs for learners?
 * Better quality learning materials?
 * Making the world a better place?
 * Help people in developing countries?
 * What’s your motivation or the motivation of your institution in pursuing OERs?
 * What can we do with them that we cannot do under our current system?

George Siemens Talks about Motivations
 * Educational institutions (particularly those publicly financed) should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
 * The altruistic motivation of sharing (as for institutions), which again is supported by traditional academic values.
 * OERs are window dressing if systems and structures of education do not change (just like wikis, blogs...they don't change the fundamental structure of education) and will not create a deep, significant, and systemic change that is required
 * OERs exhibit (are embedded with) certain ideologies/views/pedagogies and different world views and thus naturally inject their identity and culture
 * From Comments (link) “we love kittens but we don’t like cats”. It does seem to be an unfortunate side of human nature to congregate around an idea and vilify those who don’t.
 * From Comments: I think all this misses the point about what educational resources are, where they come from, how they are used and who uses them.The greater part of learning is informal (ie. outside the educational system) and the pedagogy generally adopted by the learner, who is also the teacher, is based on the time honoured principles of discovery learning. The effective learner will single-mindedly exploit any resource available to achieve their goal. Web searching for global educational resources is available to us now. There will be resources out there developed by institutions, but there will also be stuff from industry (the new instruction manual for BMWs latest car, the maintenance manual for the new gas boiler etc), stuff from government, public bodies, special interest groups etc. All of this can be harvested using search techniques and the developing search technologies.To my mind, open educational resources means the totality of information, knowledge, advice and guidance available on the Web, from whatever source, that can be used to facilitate effective learning.
 * From Comments: ...motivations for developing and promoting open content ... is creative because I find it impossible to really dedicate my efforts to creating hidden work and because the more creations we put out there the richer the environment is for others to do more and go further. Shared content is becoming the oxygen of innovative education.
 * From Comments: Intentional and accidental OER: Intentional is stuff that was produced for the purpose of teaching (even though it might be remixed etc), whereas accidental OER is all the stuff out there that we can contextualize… whether it’s television ads from the 1950’s, that can be wonderful visual aids in a class about women studies, etc.


 * Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and challenges for higher education**: []

Openness= knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole. (page 1) Key aspects,
 * free availability
 * as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource, whether technical, legal or price barriers

Motivation in the Social Domain
 * expected social benefits
 * ethical considerations related to freedom to use, contribute and share

Motivation in the Technical Domain
 * access to source code
 * access to interoperability standards or the standards process

Tuomi (2006) ....“open” means “without cost” but it does not mean “without conditions”. (page 2)

OER Definition (most common) (p. 3) “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007).

Resources Definition (p. 3/4)
 * creation and provision of open course content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
 * open source software and development tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
 * development of standards and licensing tools: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localize content. (OECD, 2007)

Authors talk about Visions/Goals: mainly philanthropic ideals (p. 4)

Drivers/Enablers and Inhibitors

Short-medium term (to 2009) Drivers/enablers: Inhibitors:
 * International organisations’ promotion and funding available
 * Competition among leading institutions in providing free access to educational resources as a way to attract new students
 * Success of open access initiatives and repository projects;
 * Rapid development and wide use of Social Software tools and services and emergence of personal learning environment;
 * Licensing open content will become easier as plug-ins for widely used authoring software packages become available.
 * Growing competition for scarce funding resources
 * Difficulty in finding a balanced approach to open and commercial educational offerings;
 * Copyright issues
 * Fears of low recognition for OA publications, particularly among young researchers
 * Lack of policies for the development and use of repository at institutional level
 * Lack of communication and cooperation between system and tool developers and educators;

Long-term (to 2012) Drivers/enables Inhibitors
 * Policies emphasise educational innovation and organisational change in educational institutions
 * ICT-based lifelong learning and personalised learning needs
 * Opportunities for co-operation and collaboration between institutions around the world
 * Global competition in Higher Education and decline in student numbers in Europe due to demographic trends;
 * Creative Commons licensing is firmly established and is being used increasingly.
 * New systems for creating and handling group-based Learning Designs may become more widely used;
 * Semantic applications will provide new ways to access knowledge resources.
 * Business models in OER will remain tricky
 * Lack of institutional policies and incentives for educators to excel in OER
 * Models that build on teachers in the creation and sharing of OER will need to invest considerable effort in training and support;
 * Creation of educational metadata will remain costly
 * Need more advanced tools and services for educational

Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories

A variety of business/funding models for OER: (Downes, 2007) (p. 10/11)
 * Endowment models-project obtains base funding
 * Membership models-a coalition is invited to contribute a sum
 * Donations models-requests are made for donations
 * Conversion models-initial freely made material ultimately leads to some element of paying consumer
 * Contributor-pay models-contributor pays for the cost of maintaining the contribution and the provide makes it freely available
 * Sponsorship models-such as commercial advertising
 * Institutional models-the institution assumes responsibility for the initiative
 * Government models-direct funding via Government agencies
 * Partnerships or exchanges-the focus is on exchanging resources (not in the paper, but found here)

(p. 11/12) Continuum of OER Models in Higher Ed
 * MIT Model || USU Model || Rice Model ||
 * Centralized || Centralized & Decentralized || Decentralized ||
 * Exclusively paid employees || Paid employees and volunteers || Volunteer-driven (+online support for volunteers) ||
 * External Funds (private donors and vendors) || Some external funding || No funding ||
 * 2 155 000 £/year || Funding of125 300 £/life of project (budget 63 647 £/year) || None ||
 * Non-replicable less scalable/sustainable || Replicable || Very replicable and mores scalable/sustainable ||

Why should anyone give away anything for free? (p. 13)

The reasons for individuals and institutions to use, produce and share OER can be divided into basic technological, economic, social and legal drivers. (link)
 * The technological and economic drivers include improved, less costly and more user-friendly information technology infrastructure (such as broadband), hardware and software. Content is cheaper and easier to produce and costs can be further reduced by sharing. New economic models are emerging around the distribution of free content. Legal drivers are new licensing schemes that facilitate free sharing and reuse of content. Social drivers include increased willingness to share.
 * A technical barrier is lack of broadband availability. Lack of resources to invest in hardware and software for developing and sharing OER is an economic barrier. Barriers such as these are often mentioned as significant obstacles in developing countries. Social barriers include lack of skills to use the technical innovations and cultural obstacles against sharing or using resources developed by other teachers or institutions.

There are three arguments for governments to support OER projects. (link)
 * They expand access to learning for everyone but most of all for non-traditional groups of students and thus widen participation in higher education.
 * They can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning for both the individual and the government.
 * They can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal and formal learning.

Institutions mention six types of reasons for being involved in OER projects. (link)
 * The altruistic argument that sharing knowledge is in line with academic traditions and a good thing to do.
 * Educational institutions (particularly those publicly financed) should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
 * Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing.
 * It is good for the institution’s public relations to have an OER project as a showcase for attracting new students.
 * There is a need to look for new cost recovery models as institutions experience growing competition.
 * Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and external use.

A further motivation, mentioned by some major distance teaching institutions, is the risk of doing nothing in a rapidly changing environment. (link) Incentives for individual teachers and researchers can be summarized under four headings.
 * The altruistic motivation of sharing (as for institutions), which again is supported by traditional academic values.
 * Personal non-monetary gain, such as publicity, reputation within the open community or “egoboo” as it is sometimes called.
 * Free sharing can be good for economic or commercial reasons, as a way of getting publicity, reaching the market more quickly, gaining the first-mover advantage, etc.
 * Sometimes it is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed. If it can be of value to other people one might just as well share it for free.

Others motivations that are not mentioned above (by David Wiley in his "Introduction to Open Education Lecture 02 - Motivation")
 * Increased pedagogical flexibility/effectiveness
 * Decrease suffering and violence in the world
 * Lift up, and prepare people to receive the Gospel

Lessons Learned (p. 14/15) Culture issues and localization, Incentives for faculty member,
 * The conditions under which OER are created, the //languages// used and the //teaching methodologies// employed result in products that are grounded in and specific to the //culture// and //educational norms// of their developers. Localizing OER material: language, culture, pedagogical differences.
 * Concern: time required to prepare elements of a course that will be available, monitored, maintained, updated and perhaps re-formulated for new settings and different uses.
 * Little or no institutional or peer recognition or encouragement-->there is little incentive to take on the extra burden of developing and refining OER content.
 * Creation of OER should be viewed as an integrated part of the scholarly endeavour that is useful, first and foremost, to a faculty member’s own teaching, scholarship and career.

User support and experience,
 * We need better data and research so we can develop better tools to support use and reuse the content
 * E.g., If we had better data, or some data, then we could design OERs specifically for reusing teaching materials and self – learning, it is important that user support systems should be built into the resources themselves and develop self supporting online user communities.

Sustainability: Sustainable in production of OER/sustainable in sharing of resources)
 * Major Challenges (p. 15/16) [Sustainability, Intellectual Property & Copyright Issues, Quality Assessment & Enhancement, and Interoperablity]**
 * influenced by the size of the operation (small or large)
 * type of provider (institution or community)
 * level of integration of users in the production process (co-production or producer-consumer model).
 * Approaches to Sustainability
 * Encourage institutions, rather than just individual pioneer-faculty, to buy into the OER movement so that institutional resources will be committed to sustain it.
 * Situate OER collections not as distinct from the courseware environment for the formally enrolled students but as a low marginal cost derivative of the routinely used
 * course preparation and management systems.
 * Encourage membership-based consortia to share cost and expertise.
 * Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing and adopting OER.
 * Consider a voluntary (or mix of voluntary and paid) wiki-like model, in which OER is the object of micro-contributions from many.
 * Examine ways that social software can be used to capture and structure user
 * Community and OER (p. 16)
 * To make OER initiatives work and keep them for the long run, it is important to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users, increase usability and improve quality of the resources created.
 * The “community” offers possibilities for rapid diffusion and a strong community influences user behaviour and increases the likelihood that users will come back to the repository.
 * OER should not only pay attention to the “product” but on understanding what its user community wants and on improving the OER’s value for various user communities.

Intellectual Property & Copyright Issues: Barriers raised by copyright to the use and production of open educational resources as follows (OECD, 2007):
 * Practical difficulties for obtaining rights, such as whether a licenses is applicable or not, sometimes requires sophisticated legal analysis; it is not always easy to locate the appropriate license holder, which can be very expensive for the OER initiative. The difficulties and costs related to rights clearance for use of third-party content are considerable, in some cases almost half of the cost of the whole initiative.
 * The issue of unintended incompatibility between materials or tools licensed under different licenses, or different versions of the same licenses, is becoming a key issue. Like technical interoperability, increased legal interoperability is of fundamental importance for the growth of the OER movement.
 * Low awareness among teachers and researchers producing learning resources of permit controlled sharing, with some rights reserved to the author. Although many academics are willing to share their work, they often hesitate to do so in this new environment for fear of losing their rights to their work. The opposite of retaining copyright is to release work into the public domain, in which case the author retains no rights and anyone can use the material in any way and for any purpose.

Quality Assessment & Enhancement: (p. 17/18) There are several alternative ways of approaching quality management issues (how to find the resources that are most relevant and of best quality):
 * //Institution-based approach//: this is to use the brand or reputation of the institution to persuade the user that the materials on the website are of good quality, such as the OCW initiatives and UK Open University’s OpenLearn initiative. Institutions most probably use internal quality checks before they release the courses, but these processes are not open in the sense that users of the resources can follow them. The major challenge here is how the use of open educational material might constantly improve the material through reflected use.
 * //Peer review approach//: This is one of the most used quality assurance processes in academia. As well as being well-known and well-used in Open source software projects (to review the code delivered by community members) and Open access journals (to decide which articles should be published), it could also be used for OER to guarantee the quality of a repository’s resources. It is necessary to make review decisions credible, and peer review according to agreed criteria is well suited to that purpose.
 * //Open Users Review Approach//: This is a kind of low-level or bottom-up approach, letting individual users decide on whatever grounds they like whether a learning resource is of high quality, useful or good in any other respect. This can be done by having users rate or comment on the resource or describe how they have used it, or by showing the number of downloads for each resource on the website, such as Rice University’s Connexions project.

Interoperability Learning resources need to be searchable across repositories, and it must be possible to download, integrate and adapt them across platforms.
 * Interoperability, accessibility and reusability: IMS and SCORM,
 * Standardised content formats: DocBook, TEI or DITA

Policy Concerns (p. 19)
 * Actions & the Future**
 * governments/institutions should review and develop policies (general organizational, cultural and pedagogical issues) that foster openness and access
 * Polices should be adopted that enable or encourage in the creation, sharing and provision of educational resources.
 * The following areas should be addressed:
 * Curriculum development
 * Financial support
 * Intellectual property
 * Culture of sharing
 * Assessment and accreditation
 * Quality assurance
 * Staff development
 * Student support
 * Technical infrastructure/software
 * Institutional model

Social, culture and pedagogical concerns (p. 20)
 * Personal learning environments (PLE) may move the power over learning from the institutions, to individual learners.
 * Teaching and learning material is not necessarily created by one teacher or even by a teacher at all; learners should be actively involved in the process of designing curricula and syllabi and in the creation of knowledge. The development of using OER implies support for an open curriculum where learners have the flexibility to select a range of individual units/courses to suit their personal needs for the development of expertise.
 * Increase in non-formal/informal learning can increase the demand for assessment and recognition of competences gained outside formal learning settings.
 * recognition and accreditation will be of growing importance.
 * May need a competency-based educational framework--create an “assessment on demand” option where students have free access to OCW, free access to volunteer tutors and gain credit on-demand from providing institutions.
 * Community building
 * Community of Practice (CoP)
 * embedding the development of content in a community of practice is a key way to ensure that OER are relevant to the practice of learning and teaching.
 * providing access to databases of content will not encourage communities to become involved in the OER movement.
 * Giving recognition and support to existing communities of users at the right time could provide the most powerful intervention in terms of sustainability of any OER funded initiative.


 * Technical concerns** (p. 21)
 * simplify the user experience across the entire range of OER activities, from access to use to reuse and creation
 * provide flexible, extendable platforms and easily adaptable open tools to access, use, reuse, create and post content to the Web.
 * main emphasis: evolve infrastructure for enhanced content creation and use of infrastructure for accessing digital content

An Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) should comprise of a set of organizational practices, technical infrastructure, and social norms that collectively provide for the smooth operation of high quality open learning in distributed, distance-independent ways permits distributed participatory learning;
 * provides incentives for participation (provision of open resources, creating specific learning environments and evaluation) at all levels; and
 * encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.
 * An OPLI platform should include at least three types of activities:
 * creating and providing infrastructure;
 * meaningful and transformative use of the infrastructure; and
 * discovery and transfer of the fruits of relevant research into future generations of the infrastructure.

CLICK on the graphic below to see the complete graph.



Week 3 – Licensing & Content Protection 1

 * Crowdsource? Or Expert?
 * Economics and impact of open source

The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World: @http://questioncopyright.org/promise Against Perpetual Copyright: @http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Against_perpetual_copyright Documentary: RiP: Remix Manifesto: @http://vimeo.com/8040182 (some language concerns) Lawrence Lessig, 30 minute presentation: @http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html About Creative Commons: @http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
 * Course Readings,**


 * MOOC Readings**
 * Stephen Downes, [|An Introduction to Connective Knowledge]
 * Stephen Downes, [|Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge]
 * Dave Cormier, [|Rhizomatic Knowledge](.pdf)

> WOW!!!!!!! >
 * The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World**: @http://questioncopyright.org/promise
 * Copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized distribution.
 * To read the true history of copyright is to understand just how completely this reaction plays into the industry's hands. The record companies don't really care whether they win or lose these lawsuits. In the long run, they don't even expect to eliminate file sharing. What they're fighting for is much bigger. They're fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. And by positioning the issue as a contest between the Beleaguered Artist, who supposedly needs copyright to pay the rent, and The Unthinking Masses, who would rather copy a song or a story off the Internet than pay a fair price, the industry has been astonishingly successful. They have managed to substitute the loaded terms "piracy" and "theft" for the more accurate "copying" — as if there were no difference between stealing your bicycle (now you have no bicycle) and copying your song (now we both have it). Most importantly, industry propaganda has made it a commonplace belief that copyright is how most creators earn a living — that without copyright, the engines of intellectual production would grind to a halt, and artists would have neither means nor motivation to produce new works.
 * Brief History of Copyright,**
 * **​**sixteenth-century England
 * authors generally regarded copying as flattery
 * bulk of creative work has always depended on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc.
 * introduction of copyright allowed for a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors
 * arrival of the Internet, with its instantaneous, costless sharing, made that business model obsolete — not just obsolete, //but an obstacle to the very benefits copyright was alleged to bring society in the first place//. Prohibiting people from freely sharing information serves no one's interests but the publishers'.

"Would creators still create, without centralized publishers to distribute their works? Even minimal exposure to the Internet is enough to provide the answer: of course they will."

copyright ==> credit right Against Perpetual Copyright: @http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Against_perpetual_copyright
 * Intellectual products by their nature are copied and shared freely and it is on the whole good for society that they be so.
 * Copyright in the United States was created for one purpose only, as stated in the Constitution: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
 * The public (USA) possesses rights of free trade and free expression.
 * The right of free trade ordinarily would mean that any publisher has the right to bring out an edition of any book in competition with other publishers.
 * The right of free expression ordinarily would mean that anyone who speaks lawfully and truthfully may do so making use of others' words as well as his own.
 * Yet the public refrains from exercising its full rights of free trade and free expression for a time, in order to encourage authors by providing a stable market for new works. So nothing has been taken from the author when a copyright expires. The public merely resumes its full rights, which for a time it generously refrained from exercising.
 * I have the Natural Right to use others' works, but I will refrain from doing so for a short period of time because in the long run it will promote the progress of science and useful arts through unrestricted exploitation, by myself or others, of the works' expression.

Termination Rights (link)
 * Rivalrous, Non-Rivalrous, and Anti-Rivalrous Goods**
 * Because of the non-rivalrous nature of intellectual works, the possibility is higher than with rivalrous goods that an unrestrained market for new works will fail. ...This temporary freedom from sharp competition acts as an encouragement to publishers to seek out new works from authors, and to offer them to the public.
 * [|Thomas Jefferson] used the example of candle fire, [|writing] “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Of course candles burn out but it’s not the light that’s diminished, it’s the candle. (link)
 * Anti-Rivalrous: Social networking platforms increase in value when more people use them. (link)
 * Under the US Copyright Act, an artist signed to a US record company may, 35 years after a recording was made, give notice to the record company to terminate their transfer of copyright to that record company. This effectively means that the copyright in the recording reverts to the artist.
 * The year 2013 is the first year that falls 35 years after the 1978 Copyright Act came into force. But bear in mind that, each year, a new crop of recordings becomes eligible for termination

Week 4 – Licensing & Content Protection 2

 * Semi-open resources (Wikipedia, iTunes, YouTube, Academic Earth)
 * OER databases
 * Search engines

Open Content Licensing for OERs: [] Giving Knowledge for Free (chapter 5): [] Open-source textbooks a mixed bag: [] Richard Baraniuk: Open Source Learning (i.e. Connexions project) []
 * Course Readings**


 * MOOC Readings,**
 * [|Activity Theory: Short Introduction]
 * (YouTube video) [|Introduction to Learning]
 * [|Theories][|What is Actor Network Theory]...and,
 * for a quick overview of the history of learning theories, please see [|Situating Connectivism]

Open Content Licensing for OERs: []
 * Copyright protects the //expression of an idea//, not the idea itself. (p. 5)
 * Why share? (p.9/10)
 * Ideologically and financially this may be acceptable – the most compelling example is government and the public sector where information is ultimately owned by and for the people.
 * To sponsor access and innovation.
 * Open contenting one version of your material e.g. a draft (E Print) or a chapter may in fact be a strategy for enhancing the commercialized version of your content.
 * A wish to share with others for creative and educational purposes.
 * Publicity – what the free and open software movement calls “egoboo” or reputation within the open community which in some cases will be exploited commercially down the track.
 * Negotiability – through technologically implemented generic protocols that can be utilised with the click of a mouse.
 * As part of a new business model.
 * To enhance knowledge and culture.
 * “What is junk to one may be gold to another” – the idea that the off cuts or digital junk of one person may be the building blocks of knowledge and creative genius for another.
 * “Indirect appropriation” – money, design and use of end product, pleasure or social profile gained through involvement in peer production.


 * “Free software” means free as in freedom (to access code) not price (p.10)


 * Open Access--open up access to research, data sets and scholarship especially that which is publicly funded. (p.11)
 * Some commentators have suggested that the sustainability of OER may lie in developing non institutional education communities – like the free software community – that can act as a reliable, continuous, cheap and effective resource upon which to build open education (p. 14)

Open-source textbooks a mixed bag: [] Richard Baraniuk: Open Source Learning (i.e. Connexions project) []

Intellectual Property (IP)
 * Giving Knowledge for Free (chapter 5)**: []
 * umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas or other intangibles in their expressed form.
 * holder of this legal entitlement is generally entitled to exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of the intellectual property.
 * reflects the idea that this subject matter is the product of the mind or the intellect, and that intellectual property rights may be protected by law in the same way as any other form of property.
 * The five main categories of intellectual property are:
 * //Copyright//covers creative and artistic works (e.g. books, movies, music, paintings, photographs, software) and gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of such works for a certain period of time.
 * //Patents//may be granted for a new, useful and non-obvious invention, and give the patent holder an exclusive right to exploit the invention commercially for a certain period of time (typically 20 years from the filing date of a patent application).
 * //Trademarks//protect distinctive signs which are used to distinguish the products or services of different businesses.
 * //Industrial design//protects the form of appearance, style or design of an industrial object (e.g. spare parts, furniture, textiles).
 * //Trade secrets// are secret, non-public information concerning the commercial practices or proprietary knowledge of a business, public disclosure of which may sometimes be illegal. They are sometimes either equated with, or a subset of, “confidential information”.

Interesting Example, (link)**WD-40 is not patented, to make it MORE secure against copycats!** Sounds backwards, but it's a smart tactic. It's an insanely popular lubrication product, and has virtually no competitors. The reason for this is that it's hard to replicate. Part of this difficulty lies in that WD-40 has not been patented. If they were to patent the formula, they would have to disclose the ingredients. By not doing it, they keep them as a trade secret and avoid having their competitors replicate it!

"When Bill C-11 (//The Copyright Modernization Act//) is finally passed and proclaimed in force, Canadians may want to bear that adage in mind, as our copyright law is about to enjoy an injection of comedy. Section 29 of the //Copyright Act// will be modified to include both “parody” and “satire” as categories of “fair dealing.” The change will allow users, so long as their use is “fair,” to incorporate copyrighted materials into new activities and works without the need to obtain permission from or pay royalties to the owners of those materials — but only so long as the new activity or work constitutes “parody” or “satire.” Therein lies the seed for what will be many years of speculation and debate as Canadian lawyers and potential litigants struggle with the contours of humour. Adding parody and satire to “fair dealing” will make Canada one of only a handful of jurisdictions in the world in which the scope of user’s rights is so explicitly broad. The “fair use” mechanism found in United States copyright law, while often described as more flexible and adaptive than “fair dealing,” only extends protection to parody. Among significant comparable common law jurisdictions, only Australia includes both parody and satire within the ambit of its “user’s rights” or exceptions to infringement."
 * Parody, Bill C-11** (link)

Critics of the N**on-Commercial (**NC) clause argue that the clause is harmful because it restricts content by limiting reuse, creating a significant barrier to the growth of free content in education, and it hinders the development of new economic models that add value around free content. (link OER Africa)
 * Criticism of Creative Commons**

Criticisms comes both from proponents of free content and from commercial players that view Creative Commons as a threat to the rights of creators.(Wikipedia)
 * Commercial players view: publishers and users alike will be less willing to pay for work that is also available for free; therefore, Creative Commons licenses and others devalue creative works.
 * Möller explains that "the people who are likely to be hurt by the NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers."

Various interpretations of **non-commercial** include the following: (link OER Africa) 1. No money should be exchanged as part of the transaction of using of the materials – regardless of whether the money represents a break-even of marginal cost, reimbursement or profit. This has been the view of the open source software community, but this is not how non-commercial is usually interpreted, especially within the educational community 2. The type of user instead of whether there is a financial exchange. 3. A transaction is non-commercial unless the transaction is driven by a motive.
 * some consider any use of a licensed work by a corporation to be commercial and any use of a licensed work by a non-profit organization to be non-commercial. Under this definition, many licensors in the educational community believe that charging for course packs is permitted under the NC clause.
 * some believe that any for-profit businesses should not be able to charge course fees or make use of NC content--this would imply that a private school may not use NC materials for educational use, and that a for-profit company may not use NC materials for non-profit purposes such as corporate social investment activities.
 * MIT, in their OpenCourseWare (OCW), state that //‘Determination of commercial vs. non-commercial purpose is based on the use, not the user//’. Thus, according to MIT OCW, for-profit companies may use materials with an NC clause depending on how the materials are used.
 * For example, a commercial education and training business may not offer courses based on OCW materials if student pay a fee for the courses and the business intends to make a profit – although incidental charges to recover reasonable reproduction costs are permitted.
 * Likewise, the //Commonwealth of Learning Copyright Guidelines// specifically address the issue of the NC clause and make a distinction between profit (commercial) and cost recovery for operating costs (non-commercial). By this definition, a corporation or non-profit organization may still charge registration fees, and recover materials duplication costs and overhead costs incurred during customization, duplication and distribution of materials – as long as there is no profit gained.
 * While this approach may seem intuitive, the concept of motive or ‘intent’ is very complex and difficult to prove in court. In practice, if a non-commercial use is ever brought to court, the court will look at the licensor’s intent when determining the meaning of the term, and possibly also at what the licensee understood the term to mean, and/or at industry practice.

How to put your work into the Public Domain? Use the CC0 license.


 * CC0 PDM** **Comparison Chart**

Week 5 – Models for Developing Open Resources 1

 * Open access journals
 * Informal peer review
 * Open press and textbook publishing
 * Describe differences between peer-produced and expert-based educational resources
 * Detail impact of OER development models on resource quality
 * Analyze organizational impact of OERs on universities


 * Readings**
 * OERs and Low Riders: @http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=178
 * Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Resources: @http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf
 * When the “wiki-way”=Poor Quality: @http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1022
 * Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources: @http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf

Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Resources: @http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf Two significant reasons to be interested with the trajectory and viability of peer production of educational materials. (p.3)
 * 1) quality of education everywhere (motivation: improved quality/reduced content development cost)
 * use commons-based production of educational resources to produce a much more **varied** and **high-quality** and relevant materials
 * 1) access to educational materials in poorer countries (motivation: decrease suffering/altruism)
 * access, production, development, distribution systems

Belief: information, knowledge, and culture are “public goods” (p. 4) and are non-rival goods

We have copyright because: it is efficient to have these kinds of exclusion rights so that market-based producers will engage in the useful activity of creating new information, knowledge, and culture. (p. 4) But there are two problems: price can retard new creation and consumption to less-than-efficient levels. The tradeoff therefore is between how much, at any given level of regulation-created exclusivity, new incentives to produce are created from the ability to charge higher prices on more uses of the information, relative to how much the cost of creating information is increased because of the expanded exclusivity.
 * Common-Based Production and Common-Based Peer Production**

Common-Based Production: Non-market action based on taking information that is available in the public domain, not subject to exclusivity, mixing it with new creativity, wisdom, and time, and making new moves in the conversation (or "niche markets"). Production that uses inputs from a commons over which no one has exclusive rights, and that releases its outputs back into the commons, to enrich both its creators and anyone else who, like them, follows the same patterns of production.

Peer production: (aka mass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome. The content is produced by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field.
 * Coordination/cooperation is not achieved through price signaling based on property rights and contracts.
 * Motivation is not achieved primarily through material rewards measurable in crisp amounts—like salaries or bonuses.
 * Coordination, cooperation, or motivation are not achieved as they are in firms or bureaucracies, through a system of command and control, the sending of orders and the monitoring and rewarding or punishing of compliance. (p.5)
 * they rely on a set of social signals and social-psychological motivations to both motivate and direct or organize the disparate productive efforts of the many contributors.
 * e.g. the free software movement includes both commons-based and peer production efforts.
 * Linux or Apache web server are peer production comprising thousands of volunteers organized through a combination of licensing provisions, social norms, and communications platforms like message boards.
 * Some free software development projects include only one or a small number of developers. They release their code under the common license used by most projects of this sort—the GNU GPL (General Public License), thereby releasing their outputs into a self-binding commons.

Common-Based Peer Production: the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization. These projects are often, but not always, conceived without financial compensation for contributors.

Discrete Learning Object Can be created whole in small and discrete chunks, that need no conceptual coherence with other similar objects until the moment at which they are collated into a learning experience. This modularity or “chunkiness” is often used as part of the very definition of learning objects

Cost Reduction: research, printing and distributing--much cheaper now that we have internet.

When the economics of industrial production require high up front costs and low marginal costs, the producers must focus on producing a few superstars and making sure that everyone tunes in to listen or watch them (p. 8)

"The open sharing of one's educational resources implies that knowledge is made freely available on non-commercial terms," then this raises the question of how such a network is to be sustained. If resource users do not pay for their production and distribution, for example, then how can their production and distribution maintained? (p. 29)
 * Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources:** @http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf

Sustainability of OER questions, (p. 29)
 * what are they?
 * who creates them?
 * how do we pay for them?
 * how do we distribute them?
 * how do we work with them?

Sustainable Means (p. 33) >> Organization (technical competencies, training, standardization communities) >> Policy (openness, business model)
 * 'sustainable' does not mean 'cost free',
 * the production of OERs may involve a large scale investment ant to have 'long-term viability for all concerned' it must meets provider objectives for scale, quality, production cost, margins and return on investment.
 * if the consumer of a resource obtains the resource for free, then the provision of the resource must be sustainable (whatever that means) from a provider perspective, no matter what the benefit to the consumer.
 * Commercial Objectives: Some OERs are sustainable if they represent a cheaper alternative to accomplish the same task than the mechanism they are currently employing to accomplish the same task. For example, The Wellcome Trust in an examination of scientific publication, argues that savings of up to 30 percent could be achieved through open access publishing.
 * Cost of OER often does not include 'total cost of ownership' (ancillary costs: staff training to use resource, maintain, upgrade) [think of using Moodle vs Blackboard]
 * if the OER is software, then one needs to consider "software sustainability" and infrastructure needs generated by the use of the resource
 * Technology (hardware, software, connectivity, standards, etc.)
 * Social Objectives: other providers may have different objectives, as in Australia distance learning is used to enable people to learn in their own communities--thus 'sustainable' in this instance may mean not merely financially cheaper, but capable of promoting wider objectives.
 * where course completion rates are not as important, provision of resources in a particular manner may be favoured because it is cheaper.
 * where there are few existing graduates, completion rates are more important and therefore the //outcome// of the resource provision, and not merely the cost, becomes the primary factor (p. 34)
 * 'sustainable' will ultimately depend on the economies and the objectives of the provider (p. 36)

Why OERs are desirable?
 * The innovation impact is greater when it is shared: the users are freely revealing their knowledge and, thus work cooperatively. (p. 29)
 * benefit: increase the value of individual resources and increase the well-being of the community as a whole. (p. 30)
 * **but a network of OERs is desirable only if the cost can be borne in terms of funding and practicality.** (p. 30)

The benefits of OERs on stakeholders in an OER network (p. 30)
 * For authors, open publication grants enable access to the widest possible audience--articles from open publication are cited more frequently.
 * For readers, open access grants enable access to an entire body of literature.
 * For publishers, open access guarantees the widest dissemination of the articles they publish.
 * Funding agencies obtain the highest impact for their investment. And universities obtain increased visibility for their scholarship.

Additional Ideas on Openness (p. 32)
 * Obligation to contribute back to the community: educators whose students spend on aggregate N hours using the open course content for learning are obligated to contribute back to the Project N hours of their own or their students' time.
 * Are resources 'open' which require some sort of payment by the user
 * whether that payment is subscription fees,
 * contribution in kind, or
 * even something simple, such as user registration,
 * even when the cost is low - or 'affordable' - the payment represents some sort of opportunity cost on the part of the user, an exchange rather than sharing. The requisite of payment imposes overhead on the distribution of the resource, mitigating the value of the resource as described above. It furthermore predisposes access to (and therefore design of) the resource to those willing to obtain the resource instead of some other sort of asset they could purchase with the same money or **effort**.

A variety of business/funding models for OER: (p. 34/35) (Each approach will reflect the interests of the funding party, the needs and the motivations of the resource producers, the nature and expense of the project, the level of funding available. p. 36)
 * Funding Models**
 * Endowment models-project obtains base funding
 * Membership models-a coalition is invited to contribute a sum
 * Donations models-requests are made for donations
 * Conversion models-initial freely made material ultimately leads to some element of paying consumer
 * Contributor-pay models-contributor pays for the cost of maintaining the contribution and the provide makes it freely available
 * Sponsorship models-such as commercial advertising
 * Institutional models-the institution assumes responsibility for the initiative
 * Government models-direct funding via Government agencies
 * Partnerships or exchanges-the focus is on exchanging resources


 * Technical Models** (p. 36)
 * Must consider how develop and distribute OER, as securing the funding for the project does not ensure sustainability.
 * This has led to the development of the Learning Object, in the hope that sharable and reusable learning resources would reduce the cost needed to produce them
 * Learning Object technical requirements
 * interoperability among data, software and services.
 * discoverable, modular, and interoperable

Two Technical Models
 * Free use, used locally – the OERs are used ‘as is’ without modification by the educational institution; use consists (in a sense) of the ‘putting together’ of a collection of resources, (e.g. how lego blocks are put together to form toy houses)
 * Resources are downloaded, adapted, and sent back to the system repository for vetting and potential use by others. (translation is part of adaptation, not a separate function and in order to achieve these and other recommendations, an appropriate level of user registration may be indicated.)

How to make OER Accessible (p. 37)
 * Require tools for access, including browsing, searching and data-mining, syndication, mechanisms to assist dissemination, adaptation, evaluation, and use of open courseware materials.

Global Index System [similar to collaborative filtering] (p. 37)
 * based on vetting by a volunteer group acting as an editorial board
 * feedback loops should be established for evaluation and distribution of lessons learned in the process of developing and using open courseware.

Repository Access (p 37) >> It can be argued that the mechanism for accessing OERs (even those that may be freely used and even modified) impacts on whether such resources may be considered to be ‘open’. Some repository networks, particularly those that form repository ‘federations’, restrict access to (for example) students at member educational institutions. It is argued that such networks, while not charging directly for access, nonetheless impose access fees indirectly by requiring that users enroll in (and pay tuition for) university courses
 * Resources should be stored in distributed databases.
 * They may be downloaded from there for adaptation or use.
 * There will be one centrally maintained index of resources.
 * The courseware is very dynamic; the index will represent a snapshot in time and will need to be regularly updated
 * The index will include a full history of the provenance and use of the resources as well as users' feedback and comments
 * But
 * resources stored in repositories, even those just listed, may not be open educational resources; some repository projects, such as Advanced Distributed Learning’s CORDRA project, often include access controls and even digital rights as part of their core functionality.



> Sustainable, in this context, could be seen as tantamount to reusable, and so OER developers have devoted a great deal of attention to reusability,
 * Content Models**
 * The nature of the content being developed will impact its sustainability
 * sustainable=flexible content that can be adapted to local needs and conditions; (glocal: the adaptation of a product or service specifically to each locality or culture in which it is sold)
 * Lifespan
 * book: may be useful for decades,
 * course: much more limited lifespan, perhaps 8 years
 * Reusability
 * digital image: easy
 * book: not easy, unless in digital format with the correct copyright
 * ‘reuse’--integration into an existing context of use, which in turn raises questions of meaning and vocabulary
 * content issue--the license associated with the resource (major expense in clearing of licenses)
 * Global/local continuum: the goal involves inverting the standard dichotomy: being “mindfully global” and “selectively local”. The problem is that this is really hard to do. It takes a lot of discipline and coordination on both sides of the table. When the two sides have very different priorities, each views the other as a cumbersome burden. (link)
 * Hegemony: accusation of cultural imperialism has long been leveled at attempts to export courses outside national boundaries, particularly as most of the examples involved Western institutions providing courses for Third World
 * OER use could be improved ==> a shift from a ‘provider/user’ paradigm to a community model of collaborative development
 * artificial provider/user/organizer/sponsor roles are constraining and misleading
 * the reality of OER creation, adaptation, use, advocacy and financing provides far more scope for creativity and sustainable development
 * represents a move from ‘knowledge for all’ to ‘construction of knowledge by all’
 * Co-development is emerging as an important aspect of OERs--the real vision for OER is the sharing in all directions of resources and approaches to teaching
 * Given the cost of content, the under-resourcing of universities and the scattered nature of expertise, the collaborative development of open content seems like a useful way to get high-quality, locally-relevant content for using to enhance teaching-and-learning. (p. 38)
 * Example: When universities in Brazil put their medical journals online a few years ago, the number of citations by non-Portuguese speakers rose dramatically.
 * It is important to think of OERs not in isolation but “Open Content + Community = Open Course"
 * the development of a sustainable open content community is an integral part of the development of a network of OERs and thus, there is a need for a different set of technical and support needs.
 * When there are constraints (transport, telecommunications, # of qualified people available to teach), many students are left to rely on their text materials alone; therefore, there is a need for tutorial support from within the learning materials.

>>> Users are tiny, have no power (except in the aggregate) >>> Ecosystem Model: (Emergent/Community model together) those creating, using and improving open content form an ecosystem.
 * Staffing Models** (p. 39)
 * Traditional model: involves the selection and hiring of staff (typically professional staff) to complete the work.
 * Most often, the production of OERs (and especially software) has been driven by volunteer staff
 * Sustainability (non-financial):
 * no longer merely ensured through appropriate payment--incentives of volunteer staff are very different from those working for a paycheck.
 * altruistic: the main motivation or incentive for people to make OER material available freely is that the material might be adopted by others and maybe even is modified and improved
 * concrete incentives (publicity/reputation/egoboo): professors, for example, contribute their work to the public good in the hope of receiving tenure, promotions or recognition
 * the act of sharing resources usually takes place in a community, as many of the factors that motivate sharing may only be produced within a community (without the culture a potential contributor would not feel a professional obligation to share, and perhaps more importantly, would not have personally experienced the value of sharing.)
 * Volunteer organization must be such that it recognizes and promotes the volunteers’ motivations for sharing and needs a clear overall vision, strategy, and roles for participants
 * There are two major models of organization (p. 40)
 * Emergent Model
 * Need reputation mechanisms like Ebay, Slashdot
 * Community Model
 * Reputation is a natural outgrowth of human interactions
 * Users are powerful, must be respected

The support for OERs consists in support for production and distribution to a consuming population;
 * Producer-Consumer Model**
 * more likely to be managed centrally,
 * to involve professional staff.
 * more control over quality and content,
 * require greater levels of funding

Consumers of the resources take an active hand in their production.
 * Co-Producer Model**
 * decentralized management (if it is managed at all),
 * involve numerous partnerships
 * may involve volunteer contributors.
 * little control over quality and content,
 * require much less funding.


 * Prosumers:**
 * the process where the customers are becoming actively involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they consume (//i.e. producer + consumer = prosumer//).
 * integrate consumers in the acts of development, production, marketing, and advertisement, rather than in the act of consumption alone. (link)
 * highly involved hobbyists.
 * producer’s point of view: integrating consumers in the act of production reflects a new logic that aims to achieve the primary goal: maximizing profit.(link)
 * consumer’s point of view: (more positive light) cooperation, self-expression, and even freedom are terms used to describe the new emancipating potential of the integration of consumers into production. (link)
 * critical perspective: the alleged emancipation and freedom are nothing but the continuation of exploitation through much more sophisticated means.(link)[[image:http://rahulnambiar.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/prosumer.jpg?w=300&h=185denisbhancock.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/july-24th-2008.jpg link="@http://rahulnambiar.wordpress.com/tag/prosumers/"]][[image:http://www.sohoos.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/prosumer.jpg width="378" height="216" link="@http://www.sohoos.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/prosumer.jpg"]]
 * We consumers hate to wait. Today more than ever, we’re willing to assume roles previously filled by paid employees if it means we can save ourselves time and get things faster (link)
 * As futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler describe in their book //“Revolutionary Wealth,”//companies and organizations of all kinds have recognized consumer desires for instant gratification and found a solution in successfully cutting out the middlemen – putting the consumer to work. According to the Tofflers, these “Prosumers,” do-it-yourself prone consumers, will have a big hand in shaping the economy, and perhaps shaping which jobs are created and eliminated in the future.
 * We’ve all been to the grocery store and used a self-checkout, scanning and bagging our lettuce, milk and frozen pizza’s by ourselves. But it only takes a trip to IKEA, the Scandinavian furniture behemoth, to see just how much work the consumer workforce is willing to exert.
 * Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site – they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version, the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups)--the site is now a prosumer platform.




 * The use of a learning resource, through adaptation and repurposing, becomes the production of another resource. Though there is a steady stream of new resources input into the network by volunteers, this represents, not the result of an OER sustainability project, but the beginning of it. (Downes, 2007, p. 41)
 * There is great temptation to depict the sustainability of OERs in terms of funding models, technical models or even content models and it seems evident that any number of such models can be successful. But it seems clear that the sustainability of OERs (affordable and usable) requires that we think of OERs as only part of a larger picture, and include (Downes, 2007, p. 41)
 * volunteers and incentives,
 * co-production and sharing,
 * distributed managemen
 * t and control.
 * t and control.
 * t and control.



What is the difference between User Generated Content (UGC) and peer-production or crowdsourcing? For example, Netflix offered a prize of $1,000,000 for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings of films. There were 184 teams competing to beat Netflix's own algorithm for predicting ratings of movies that customers would like by 10 percent. (link) || * content is made publicly available over the Internet, User-generated content is often associated with ratings, reviews, forums, media sharing, social profiles within a niche community, and similar opportunities for consumers to publish and share. As brands participate in social communities - asking and answering questions, engaging customers, and sharing content - numerous opportunities arise to involve the community with content creation. (link) ||
 * [[image:http://api.ning.com/files/UF9xH*FVWWs2boxttJ7BjFx2ASw4m5oGcmdMSjztbz-8*ER8cTE9kDb*mLoUaQdUYNJbC63ZVXjI3-vEr5iWtMJdqoWjY6GU/Crowdsourcing1.png link="@http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/towards-a-new-taxonomy-by-jeff-howe/5458"]] || [[image:http://socialtimes.com/files/2011/06/User-Generated-Content.jpg width="263" height="236" link="@http://www.simplyzesty.com/facebook/revealed-how-much-social-networks-make-from-user-generated-content/"]] ||
 * The practice of presenting the community with a problem along with a plea to assist in its solution.
 * reflects a “certain amount of creative effort”, and
 * “created outside of professional routines and practices”. (OECD, 2007).

Week 6 – Models for Developing Open Resources 2

 * How does openness influence learning design?
 * Do OERs save university money?
 * Does the university’s role in society change when content is freely available?

Research on OpenLearn initiative in at Open University [] Evaluating the Results of Open Education: Chapter 5 from Opening up Education: [] Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation []
 * Readings**

Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation [] A good chuckle on the very first page of the paper, see below. His paper has this comment on the bottom left of the first column--no copyright to be found anywhere.




 * Types of User-Led Online Environments** (p. 1)
 * widely distributed, loose and //ad hoc//networks of participants (blogosphere)
 * centralized sites of collaborative work (Wikipedia);
 * ungoverned spaces (like Indymedia),
 * hierarchical or at least heterarchical structures (many open source software development projects),
 * emergent self-organizing tendencies as well as operate under some degree of corporate governance (multiplayer online games)


 * Producer**
 * an individual or organization which transforms raw materials into a finished product according to an existing blueprint, recipe, or other model. The assembled product is complete and finished and ideally represents the best outcome possible given the producer’s current knowledge and skills, and the intended price point
 * the product is then shipped from producer to distributor, who will add packaging and/or other ancillary materials, and might bundle the product with others for distribution and sale.
 * Customers purchase the product and are entitled to certain consumer rights, but usually remain at a significant distance from the original producer, providing (if at all) only general and individual feedback on product quality or possible improvements, and must purchase an entirely new product when the next version or edition of the product is released by the producer and made available through the distributor
 * This model of an industrial production value chain has operated throughout the industrial age, and applies to (p. 3)
 * physical goods (e.g. cars)
 * informational goods in physical formats (e.g. music CDs),
 * informational goods in intangible formats (e.g. commercial software available for online purchase)
 * distribution of products is controlled by producers and distributors, not by consumers
 * consumers are seen as mainly passive and isolated ‘end users’ who literally consume, or use up, products until they are depleted and need to be replaced with new and updated versions.
 * **outcomes of the produsage process are no longer discrete product versions, but rather rapidly evolving revisions of existing content, released for public view and further update immediately upon revision**


 * Produsage** (from Produsage.org, unless noted )
 * ​the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement (p. 3 of his paper)
 * a new term to represent production that is user-led, or commons-based peer production, or the production of customer-made products
 * the creative, collaborative, and //ad hoc// engagement with content for which user-led spaces such as the //Wikipedia//act as examples
 * it highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge
 * the role of consumer and even that of end user have long disappeared,
 * the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance.
 * users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role - they have become a new, hybrid, //produser//.

Produsage Approach, Key Principles (from Produsage.org)
 * Open Participation, Communal Evaluation
 * quality control and improvement are probabilistic rather than linear
 * the more participants are able to examine, evaluate, and add to the contributions of their predecessors, the more likely an outcome of strong and increasing quality will be
 * **given enough eyeballs,** **all bugs are shallow**
 * participants who consistently make unusable contributions will drift to the outside of the community and those found to be usually worthy contributors gradually rise to greater prominence among their peers--the organizational structure is non-hierarchical and network-centric
 * being able to view all of their peers' contributions provides individual members with a clear understanding of the forms and formats their own contributions may take, and the quality and quantity of input required of them if they wish to become a more central member of the community
 * being subject to evaluation by potentially any one of their fellow participants encourages them to be particularly careful and diligent in their contributions if they wish to retain their status in the community--it helps maintain community cohesion and content consistency, and over time is even likely to improve the odds of the probabilistic content development approach
 * Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy
 * //equipotentiality//: the assumption that while the skills and abilities of all participants in the produsage project are not equal, they have an equal ability to make a worthy contribution to the project.
 * this allows project leaders to emerge from the community based on the quality of their contributions
 * the structure of the produsage community networked, non-hierarchical lines, and is in constant flux.
 * these flexible lines are able to make progress working as individuals or in small teams of produsers, rather than requiring whole-of-community decisions at every step of the process
 * produsage communities organize their processes through //ad hoc//forms of governance, they have leaders both for the overall project and for specific aspects of it
 * Rather than forming a strict hierarchy of command and control, which allows for the existence of multiple teams of participants working simultaneously in a variety of possibly opposing directions.
 * Leadership is determined through the continuous communal evaluation of participants and their ideas, and through the degree of community merit they are able to build in the process; in this sense, then, produsage heterarchies constitute not simply adhocracies, but //ad hoc// //meritocracies//.
 * What will be accepted as the overarching project aims depends on their take-up by the communal and ongoing processes of evaluation within the community itself - and where multiple frontrunners emerge, the temporary or permanent division of communities into separate groups is also possible.
 * Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process
 * Necessarily remain continually unfinished, and infinitely continuing.
 * Produsage does not work towards the completion of products (for distribution to end users or consumers); instead, it is engaged in an iterative, evolutionary process aimed at the gradual improvement of the community's shared content. Over time the shared community resource is expected to improve in quality as long as negative contributions are outweighed by the impact of a larger number of positive contributions.
 * To ensure overall positive development, they rely on a combination of community- and technology-based processes.
 * the principle of community evaluation means that there is a good likelihood for negative contributions to be discovered speedily;
 * poor contributors will diminish in social status within the community, thus both ensuring that their future contributions will be regarded more critically by the community from the outset, and providing an incentive for users to improve the quality of their future contributions in order to avoid further marginalization.
 * Tools to create community property not palimpsests,
 * examine the development history of content, contribution history of individual, rolling back development to a point preceding negative contribution, continual discussion through comments and annotations 'in the margins,' repeated overwriting of existing passages in a shared effort to arrive at a better representation of communally held values and ideas.
 * produsage outcomes are 'artifacts' not products
 * they resemble cultural artifacts more than commercial products (we "[|think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished.]" Artist Brian Eno)
 * the process of content development is always incomplete,
 * the content always represents only a temporary artifact of the ongoing process,
 * Any attempt to describe such content as a product once again overlooks the fact that produsage is not production, that users acting as produsers are not producers, and that the community does not operate under hierarchical, corporate frameworks aimed at generating a saleable product to consumers.
 * information that is sold in the (physical) form of products has more to do with the legacy of information distribution models (industrial, pre-network age) than it has with the inherent qualities of those 'products'. If - owing to its changing and changeable nature - information is ill-suited for packaging as a product, however, then it is important to ask whether the conventional production model is appropriate for the creation of such informational 'products' at all; informational produsage may well represent a more suitable model.
 * Common Property, Individual Rewards
 * produsers to contribute to a shared, communal purpose.
 * First the project must ensure that the commons is managed and protected effectively from abuse or exploitation, and remains openly accessible
 * people wanting to capitalize on the content of the information commons, beyond what is seen to be legitimate under the rules of the community, must therefore be avoided (Creative Commons, GNU...)
 * produsers are able to gain personal merit from their individual contributions and are a strong motivation for participation
 * Such personal merit (whether gained through contributions at the level of content development, community coordination, or administrative service) rewards the individual by adding to their social capital within and - in some cases - beyond the community; increasingly, where emerging from prominent produsage communities, it has also proven able to be converted into tangible rewards including professional accreditation and employment outcomes for produsers with a proven positive track record within their communities.

Produsage: Necessary Preconditions
 * Probabilistic, not directed problem-solving--participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole.
 * Equipotentiality, not hierarchy
 * Granular, not composite tasks
 * Shared, not owned content

Such approaches can be broadly divided into these models: the non-commercial or commercial utilization of produsage artifacts by organizations inside and outside the produsage community, while respecting applicable content licences and cooperating with the community -aggregation services in the blogosphere, which identify and collect the most-cited blog posts or tags and make them easily accessible to all participants || The provision of value-added services using artifacts developed by the produsage community, aimed mainly at non-participants. Such practices are mostly benign unless applicable content licenses are ignored by the harvester -The Sims can also be included in this category, to the extent that Maxis selects the best of user-contributed content for games extension packs or related products. || The provision of value-added services into the produsage community. Such practices are mostly benign unless a community lock-in to the harbouring service is exploited by the service provider (and such threats may exist in the context of the increasing reliance of users on Flickr for photosharing, for example). -the value of Facebook rests on the millions of profiles and pages created by users, Facebook serves as the "central space for community coordination and engagement" and //Facebook// succeeds in centralizing the discrete content of social-networking produsage and thus gather further multitude of users to their website; -Wikia for wiki-based knowledge management communities; -Flickr for photo enthusiasts. || combining the worst aspects of harvesting and harbouring, this practice deliberately aims to achieve lock-in of produsage communities for financial gain. -Players pay the developers of MMOGs to play games, while playing they are responsible for the creation of virtual items, yet at the end of the day, due to stipulations in the End User License Agreement (EULA), they do not own anything that they have created. In EverQuest, owned by Sony, attempted to bar its users from selling their hard-earned game characters and artifacts on eBay, can be seen as instances of this practice. media type="youtube" key="u_tCx0O0P8I" height="283" width="504" A video developed in protest of EULAs. The text that accompanies the video is: “What if other products were sold the way video games are sold, would we find those terms acceptable?” ||
 * [[image:http://qatar-weill.cornell.edu/images/elibrary/rss.gif width="314" height="198"]] || **Harnessing the hive**
 * [[image:http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BDQ273BGJoQ/ToutnjqODuI/AAAAAAAADSA/hhkriuW4BW4/s1600/The+sims+1+Expansion+pack+8+in+1.jpg width="270" height="224"]] || **Harvesting the hive**
 * [[image:http://www.techi.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Facebook-Flickr.jpg width="366" height="161"]] || **Harbouring the hive**
 * [[image:http://www.requnix.com/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/library/timthumb.php?src=http://www.requnix.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/review-main.jpg&w=630&h=250&zc=1 width="428" height="120"]] || **Hijacking the hive**

Harvesting/Harnessing the Hive Exploitative Examples,
 * Trendwatching.com’s ‘Customer-Made’ newsletter
 * Apple’s harvesting of ideas for new versions of the iPod,
 * BMW’s gathering of driver feedback for the development of new model lines.

crowdsourcing or outsourcing (corporate term)= the employment – usually in a figurative rather than monetary sense – of users as produsers of ideas. Given that in most such scenarios, users are rarely acknowledged or rewarded for their intellectual labor, the morality of the crowdsourcing approach is highly disputable.

focus on the delivery of services around produsage artifacts, rather than on the development and marketing of products themselves.
 * Sustainable & Ethical Crowdsourcing** (p. 5)
 * **consultancy**on the effective utilization of prodused artifacts ( consultancy provided by expert open source developers to organizations wishing to switch from proprietary to open source solutions for their systems, for example),
 * **aggregation** and **packaging**services for prodused artifacts (including Red Hat and other open source packaging services, as well as printing and publishing services for artists in collaborative creative produsage communities),
 * **filtering** and **quality control services**(producing ‘best of Wikipedia’ or ‘best of Flickr’ selections in printed or CD-ROM format), and
 * **hosting**services for produsage communities and projects
 * providing **expert input** into produsage environments and communities – for example, some players in multi-user online games will pay significant sums for already developed characters or in-game goods, while some knowledge management or open source software development communities may be prepared to pay for the contribution of recognized experts in their field into the overall project.

Just as much as it is questionable whether such disruptive approaches are sustainable in the longer term, however, it is also important to note that the debates and corrective actions engendered by such interference are themselves indicative of a growing bottom-up produsage-based resistance against production-based top-down information (or indeed propaganda) campaigns, and that this resistance is increasingly effective. This once again demonstrates the growing ability of produsage to hold its own against its more traditional rivals. If such trends continue, and if the produsage model proceeds to establish itself in a yet wider variety of contexts, then it deserves to be regarded as a fundamental paradigm shift with profound and far-reaching implications. (p. 6)

Rachel Botsman: The currency of the new economy is trust There's been an explosion of collaborative consumption -- web-powered sharing of cars, apartments, skills. Rachel Botsman explores the currency that makes systems like Airbnb and Taskrabbit work: trust, influence, and what she calls "reputation capital." [Warning: she's just trying to sell her book and/or a little naive that her book will push collaborative consumption into a global movement--it already is a global movement and we don't need your book, she doesn't get it... or she is trying to drive up her reputation.] Note: Reputations are vulnerable to Sybil attacks

Week 7 – Searching for Open Resources 1

 * Open Teaching
 * Open accreditation
 * Search for open and semi-open educational resources for utilization in courses and learning activities
 * Evaluate different search engines/sites to determine suitability for intended learning activities

Look at these sites,
 * Interacting with various OER repositories--take time to get comfortable with the different repository types, how licensing schemes are communicated, and which are the most promising for finding a range of resources.
 * [](this links to an old version of the site. It has since been vandalized. I've left it as is as a discussion topic: i.e. maintenance of openness)
 * []
 * Finding free/open images: []

Link to my OER-based learning module, my new site http://tppma103.wikispaces.com/HOME

[] [] [] Teachers' Domain from PBS Wiki Books (Wikimedia Foundation) Wiki Educator (Open Education Resource Foundation) K12 Online Conference (note that presentations from prior conferences are archived) National Curriculum Online (includes standards and curriculum documents for the United Kingdom) PhET Interactive Simulations GeoGebra Wiki (English)
 * Math**

Google Images - [] Creative Commons Search Engine: [] [|DiscoverEd] - "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources" [|Jorum] - "free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education Institutions" [|OCWFinder] - "search, recommend, collaborate, remix" [|OER Commons] - "Find Free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from around the World. Organize K-12 Lessons, College Courses, and more." [|Temoa] - "a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community to find those resources and materials that meet their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and collaborative search system and social tools." [|University Learning = OCW+OER = Free custom search engine] - a meta-search engine incorporating many different OER repositories (uses Google Custom Search) [|XPERT] - "a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use." OER Dynamic Search Engine - a wiki page of OER sites with accompanied search engine (powered by Google Custom Search) The [|UNESCO OER Toolkit] links to further useful, annotated resources and repositories. [|JISC Digital Media] maintain guidance on finding video, audio and images online, including those licensed as Creative Commons. OER Glue - tool aiming to facilitate course building by 'stitching' together OERs from a range of sources. Flickr - [|www.flickr.com]
 * Search Engines**

Wiki Commons - [] or [|http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources] Khan Academy - [|www.khanacademy.org] TED - [|www.ted.com] freesound - [|www.freesound.org] NASA - [] Open Video Project [] Gray’s Anatomy [] Open Library - [] Internet Archive - [] European Southern Observatory - [] MIT Opencourseware [] CK-12 Foundation [] OER Africa [] Connexions [] Curriki (K-12) [] Flat World Knowledge [] P2PU [] [|OER Commons] is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, from K-12 through college, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone. [|Open Educational Resources (OER)] Making High Quality Educational Content and Tools Freely Available on the Web (Hewlett Foundation) [|CERI - Open Educational Resources], OECD. [|The Virtual University and e-learning], by [|UNESCO] [|Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance] [|Open courseware consortium] (includes an index of open course ware sites) [|UNESCO OER Wiki] [|OLCOS, Open eLearning Content Observatory Services project] [|OER HE]Innovative OER in European Higher Education [|MORIL] is a Open Educational Resources (OERs) initiative by the Open and Distance Teaching Universities within the EADTU membership. MERLOT [] OpenLearn/Open University
 * Repositories or Places with lots of OER content**

SEC OER training in Qatar: [] OER Infokit Wiki [] How to attribute a CC photo from Flickr []
 * Other**

Week 8 – Searching for Open Resources 2
access vs. open and quasi-open content

Look at these sites, 101 Open Educational Resources: [] OER Dynamic Search Engine: http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/OER+Dynamic+Search+Engine Finding OERs: []

Week 9 – Scholarship 1
Stratified Economics of Open Access: [] The Stratified Economics of Open Access by Willinsky. The Nature of Scholarship: [|http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-004.xml]The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice by Martin Weller. (This is a web version of Martin Weller's text - it is not the most pleasant interface, but kudos to the company for making an accessible version available).
 * Readings**

media type="youtube" key="L5rVH1KGBCY?rel=0" height="315" width="420" align="center"

A Guide to Understanding the Core Components of Open Access []

The Stratified Economics of Open Access by Willinsky. Open Access: research articles that readers can
 * find online
 * read in full
 * without being a member of a subscribing library
 * without having to pay a fee

These principles hold that the value and quality of research and scholarship are related to the extent of its circulation,
 * as greater dissemination subjects the knowledge to greater review,
 * enabling more people to take advantage of it

Open Access articles (through archiving or by the journal) (p. 54) This suggests that they have indeed increased their contribution or value within the literature by virtue of being open access.
 * appear to be read more often in the short term
 * cited more frequently with time
 * more valued (Google Scholar citation counts show greater readership and citation levels)

Open access is increasing the value of knowledge through a number of other channels, (p. 54)
 * publishers’ generous agreements that provide developing countries with free or deeply discounted access to a wide array of journals
 * the use of open access research by government policymakers and by professionals in other fields
 * the contribution that open access is making to the educational quality of public knowledge resources such as Wikipedia

This English-language market ($7 billion annually for just science, technology and medicine alone) is made up of three relatively distinct publishing economies
 * independent journals,
 * scholarly society publishers
 * commercial publishers
 * Price: commercial publishers charge three-to-nine times as much as society publishers across six disciplines from ecology to physics. (p. 55)
 * Quality: they used the price-per-citation, finding that the citation, as a measure of reputation could cost ten times more with commercial publishers (p.55)


 * Independent journals,**
 * the oldest, if currently the smallest segment (15 percent of journals are independent)
 * these journal have operated with some measure of institutional support in terms of: overhead, graduate student staffing, with print editions costing libraries a few hundred dollars a year.
 * Open access has also proven to be a boon for independent journals


 * Scholarly society publishers** (p. 55/56)
 * forms around disciplinary interests (societies)
 * societies publish journals as a service to their membership,
 * to assert their expertise,
 * as a means to at least potentially generate a surplus,
 * through subscription sales to research libraries,
 * to cover such expenses as the society’s professional staff.
 * 40 percent of the journals published today, with the vast majority of societies publishing a single title
 * A growing number of societies are contracting out their publishing to commercial publishers who now publish close to half of the societies’ titles this enables societies to take advantage of
 * online publishing infrastructure of the commercial houses
 * more savvy marketing and pricing practices


 * Commercial publishers**
 * dominant publishing force through (60 percent of all peer reviewed journals either on their own or on-behalf of societies, with the six major commercial publishers playing a role in the publication of almost 30 percent of all scholarly journals)
 * by initiating journals, when the scholarly societies were slow to respond to the great expansion of university research, particularly in the fields of science, technology and medicine (STM)
 * by securing respected scholars as editors, while employing professional staffs to actively acquire and aggressively price and market titles,
 * they have been able to not only increase their market share but also set drive up their subscription fees considerably higher than the other two segments.

All three segments are looking at open access in various forms, by (p.56) While the motives may differ, there is a shared sense that the Web is giving rise to growing access expectations, especially around **public goods** such as federally sponsored knowledge.
 * adopting author self-archiving policies,
 * utilizing open source software systems,
 * charging article-processing fees,
 * providing delayed open access,

Despite the wonderfully promising aspect of universal access to research and scholarship the publishers want to sustain a stratified economy that (p. 57) If the academic community cannot keep up with the price of open access, then we are again faced with what we have now: Limits to the circulation of knowledge.
 * has yet to be justified in any substantive way and
 * comes with a total price tag that the academic community has declared on more than one occasion to be ‘unsustainable’

The economic discrepancies within this three-tiered unsustainable structure may arise out of recent history, but they speak to the lack of (p. 57)
 * governing economic and intellectual property principles that might guide the handling of this public good,
 * principles that address the mix of academic and business interests,
 * the balance of public and private concerns,
 * and the need for open and closed account books in scholarly publishing



In the 1990s researchers started to posted papers on their websites, set up a place to share papers about to be published, and established what we now think of as open access journals. By taking advantage of these new technologies, they proved to be sources of innovation and development in scholarly publishing. They could (p. 57)
 * demonstrate the value of having immediate and unrestricted access to recent papers and work in progress;
 * exercise rights of academic freedom and editorial independence in setting up new journals; and
 * bring journals published by scholars working outside of the industrialized world into far wider circulation, as well as bringing such scholars into editorial positions with journals that can be edited from anywhere.

> (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Colatition (SPARC) Open access is generally placed into two categories:
 * Self-Archiving Open Access**
 * Open Access in scholarly literature means "**immediate, free availability** on the public internet, permitting any users to **read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to** the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose..."
 * Driving concept: publicly funded research should be available for all

Green access
 * author “self-archiving” (e.g., arXiv/astro-ph, PubMedCentral, authors' homepages), when the author places a copy of a paper on their own site or on an e-print server.
 * this concept has known issues, e.g. retrievability and archiving/preservation

Gold access
 * free access provided directly by journals ( pure or 'hybrid' OA)
 * access is then provided free of charge (to the reader) for everyone. The direct costs apply now at a different stage: in order to publish their manuscripts, authors are required to pay a fee. A shift has taken place from the readers-pay to the authors-pay model.

Nine key questions to ask about any hybrid journal program (link) Those are the nine major questions, but here's a minor tenth: 10. Did the publisher previously criticize the very idea of charging author-side fees for OA dissemination, arguing that it corrupted peer review? (Elsevier and the Royal Society did.) If so, how does the publisher escape its own criticism? Has it issued a retraction?
 * 1) Does the journal let participating authors retain copyright?
 * 2) Does the journal use an OA-friendly license, like those from Creative Commons? Does it let authors do so?
 * 3) Does the journal automatically deposit participating articles in an OA repository independent of the publisher? Does it allow the author to do so?
 * 4) Does the journal waive fees in cases of economic hardship?
 * 5) Does the journal promise to reduce the subscription price in proportion to author uptake?
 * 6) If authors have a prior obligation to their funding agency to provide OA to their peer-reviewed manuscript, does the journal let them comply without choosing the new OA option and paying the associated fee?
 * 7) If the journal previously allowed author self-archiving without an embargo, does it still allow it for authors who do not choose the new OA option?
 * 8) For participating authors, do the OA publication fees cover page and color charges or are the latter laid on top of the former?
 * 9) Is the fee high or low?



The availability of gold and green OA copies by scientific discipline. The disciplines are shown by the gold ratio in descending order, rather than in alphabetical order. Why is the OA model attractive for publishers? (link)
 * Immediate income: author-pays model, no necessity to sell subscriptions
 * Production and maintenance costs relatively low: in most cases e-only
 * OA is ‘en vogue’: OA advocates, librarians, scientists have created a lot of attention; access seems to be more important than all other publishing issues(actual costs, authenticity, quality, ethics, preservation, sustainability...)

Why is the OA model attractive for authors? (link)
 * Fast availability: articles are accessible immediately upon publication
 * Copyright: authors retain the right to further use their publications
 * OA mandates: institutional or government policies demanding public availability of research results (after X months)High acceptance rates: temptation to publish a manuscript that would otherwise not be submitted
 * Maximum visibility / accessibility: increased downloads (and increased citations?)



Week 10 – Scholarship 2
Development of Disruptive Open Access Journals: [] Interdisciplinarity and Permeable Boundaries: [|http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-006.xml] Public Engagement as Collateral Dammage: [] Altmetrics Manifesto: []
 * Readings**