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Jan Hylén reports back from:
The Open Education Conference held at Utah State University, 27-29 September 2006
For the second year I participated in the Open Education Conference at Utah State University in Logan, USA. It is not a very big conference – perhaps 200 attendees – but key to the Open Education Resources movement. Despite its rather remote location it gathers most of the important players in this growing field. Of particular interest this year was the participation of University of Phoenix which is a for-profit university, and that the Open University of Catalonia had sent no less than 8 participants.
There were two excellent key note speakers, Mia Garlick from the Creative Commons and Erik Duval from Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven (Belgium). Mia Garlick gave an overview of recent developments of the Creative Commons licenses with a special focus on the issue of commercial use. One of the options in the CC license is the possibility to prevent other people from making commercial use of material, without the consent of the creator. As many as 2/3rds of all CC license holders make use of this option, although the number is decreasing and the license is more and more disputed. This on two main grounds: one is whether it is in accordance with “openness” to restrict the use for other people in this way; the other is what strictly speaking is meant by “commercial use”. It was this second issue that Garlick tried to shed some light on. The question is how close open content can be linked to commercial activities of different kind without violating the non-commercial clause: advertisements on the website, mingled with commercial content, used in course packages by for-profit universities, etc. Garlick admitted this is a grey area with so far only one guiding court case, but not in the education area. Earlier this year a tabloid in the Netherlands was ordered to pay damages for using photos from Flickr without the consent of the photographer.
Erik Duval’s key note was devoted to the importance of open standards. For him the use of open standards are more important than the use of open source software. Duval is very well known for his work on metadata (which is used to find content on the Internet) and the importance of strengthening the opportunities to find and use content and tools from different sources, was at the core of his talk. “All the content to everyone” was his motto. He also said that “searching is passé, now it’s about finding”. He described different context-related search mechanisms which gives much better relevance than ordinary Google searches. This requires what is called attention metadata – data about the user’s interests, habits, needs etc. Since this is sensitive data he also pleaded for this data to be “open” – not owned by search engine companies (like Google, Yahoo), but by the user. The mission of the organisation AttionTrust.org is to educate and empower people to exert greater control over their attention data.
In the concurrent sessions some presentations are worth mentioning. Two of the founders of the OER repository Connexions from Rice University talked about sustainability, using the among other things the background note prepared by Paul Dholakia to our OER Expert meeting in Malmö in February. They also had a separate session together with MIT looking at the different publishing models and the underlying business model for the two initiatives. Connexions use the XML format which easily makes it possible to use the same content for print in different formats and digital distribution to different platforms (PDA’s, cell phones). MIT mostly uses a simple PDF format which is easier but much less flexible. The more work intensive XML format makes sense for Connexions since it enables them to work closely with a print-on-demand company selling some of their content as printed materials giving them some revenue.
A Ph.D. student from Utah State University (USU) presented his on-going work on benefits for instructors using Open Courseware. Building on experiences from starting up USU OCW he will conduct interviews and other research among MIT faculty involved in MIT OCW.
Paul Stacey from BCcampus presented a framework or model for analysing and comparing OER initiatives. He used five different categories: legal, business, technological, academic or socio-cultural and policy issues. Within each category he identified a number of subjects to analyse.
View the full programme of the conference and some of the presentations.
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