edna.edu.au

Open Education

There was a small line in the 2008-2009 edna workplan that read "inform, highlight and promote principles of openness and resource sharing within the Australian education community."
As we near the end of this contract I thought back over what we have achieved in the edna team towards this deliverable, acknowledging that this is in addition to other work that other Education.au staff are involved with, eg. Garry Putland.

Inputs

• edna simple search released 2009 incorporating a licence rights matrix
  
• edna collection policy revised to incorporate open education resources as a priority
  
• Policy to publish all edna-produced materials with Creative Commons licence (CC-by-nc as default)
  
• Copyright issues in the digital world online Live Classroom session hosted with presenter Delia Browne, National Copyright Director, 4 March 2009
• Episode 22 Copyright and Creative Commons E-learning Insights podcast with Delia Browne and Jessica Coates (KerryJ)
• Finding free stuff presentation as part of the edna workshop tour presented around Australia, hosted on slideshare
• Finding free stuff handout available for download from edna website
  
• Foundations for innovation paper for ACEC 2008 conference Janet Hawtin, October 2008
• Make mine open workshop for History Teachers Association national conference, 17 July 2009
  
• Paper for Australian School Library Association XXI conference, 1 October 2009 entitled That's my content, that's my creativity, that's my curriculum
• Open Education Revolution on the Horizon Article for ALIA journal Incite, November 2009 [in press]
  
• Open Education Resources for Australian curriculum Article for VITTA journal, InfoNet, November 2009 [in press]
  
• Smartcopying website promoted and referenced on an ongoing basis through workshops, online communities and email lists.
• Wikimedia Australia liaison and involvement on behalf of the education community. The WM-AU president presented at the edna workshop in Victoria.
  
• Creative Commons Australia liaison, promotion of activities and resources and building awareness in education community. The edna team organised the Education.au celebration for Creative Commons 6th birthday on 16 December 2008, including a staff information session.
  
• WikiEducator provides an opportunity to engage with the global OER community.

Key themes/lessons learned

• educators tend to have limited interest in understanding or complying with complex copyright issues
• awareness of Open Education Resources and Creative Commons licences was very low amongst edna workshop participants
  
• educators are excited at the range of open education resources available, particularly images and media content
  
• educators see the labelling requirements of Creative Commons as onerous, particularly for images. We need to consider some automated means of labelling images for use in slides/worksheets etc
• most educators are not yet considering licensing of their own material and publishing online.
  

How do we measure the impact of this work?

• Downloads/hits on websites and slideshare presentations
  
• Proportion of resources in edna collection with open licences.
  Currently this is approximately 4% of the total collection
  This is a benchmark for 2009, and the % should grow as we give priority to this material
  
• Workshop evaluations: increase in awareness and understanding of open education resources
  
• Conversations in our communities. What is the level of awareness? Are people actively seeking out openly licensed content?
• Do we see an increase in the quantity of Australian education material being licensed openly?
  
• Ultimately there should be some reduction in the cost of payments by the Australian education sector to copyright agencies
  

Tags: copyright oer creative commons
Posted at 12:00AM Jul 07, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[1]

Ada Lovelace Day

Well I took the pledge back in January, and finally Ada Lovelace Day has arrived.

According to the Facebook Group which started me on this:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. 

My tributes are very personal, but sitting here in the shadow of the South West TAFE, Warrnambool it is really fitting to remember the woman who first nurtured me on my journey into IT. In 1986, I was not yet finished my Grad Dip in Library & Information Science, I had typed a couple of essays on a Commodore 64 and I won a position at the South West Institute of TAFE Library as a Project Officer. My job (aged 23) was to visit every department in every TAFE College in Victoria and root out any micro-computer software in existence (much of it programmed inhouse), catalogue it and compile a union list for the state.

 TAFE Librarian, Elaine Hosking overrode the many doubts I had and kicked me off on my quest. Her modelling of the importance of embracing innovation, of strong community involvement, and over the top levels of library service have continued to inspire and influence me over the subsequent 23 years.

Elaine died of cancer in 1993 and the library now houses a beautiful tapestry in three panels, celebrating and commemorating her life. I wasn't surprised to read in the information about her childhood that she was one of the first girls from Birchip to go to Melbourne University. She was very quick to encourage, support and celebrate the rural and indigenous women who were battling great odds to study for the first time at TAFE.

And because I'm greedy, a second tribute:
To Janet for the Matrix Post plus the conference papers and the commons game.
For leading me and so many others (including the Australian Government) to a vision for a more open education future. 
A most fitting day (if somewhat ironic way) to be celebrating this.

Tags: ict heroes blogging events open education librarians copyright
Posted at 09:34PM Mar 24, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Rights research

There is so much stuff going on in the area of education copyright and open education resources, thanks to organisations like Creative Commons and OER. No time to comment on it all, but this is the list I have read through or consulted today.

Rights resource list
http://delicious.com/pru_mitchell/copyright

Some of the things I learned from all this reading:

• freemium - the "give away 99% to sell 1%" concept from Chris Anderson in a BBC interview struck a chord as I renewed by flickr and picnik premium accounts this week.
  
• Not for NEALS - logo available for use by NEALS partners where 3rd party material is included in department publication
  
• Public Domain Day, 1 January - could be added to the edna Australian Celebrations Calendar if I could find an authoritative url. A great idea to celebrate all the works that come into the public domain as each year ticks over.
  

Some questions:

1. Where is there an authoritative, Australian definition of public domain that we can use to link to that describes what educators can do with public domain material?
   Smartcopying doesn't have a glossary entry for public domain
   Australian Copyright Council does not permit direct linking to their information sheets.
   
   
2. Which Creative Commons licence should we use as default: the generic or the Australian version?

Product: A draft list of licences for stage 1 is uploaded at:
http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=62736

Tags: open educational resources copyright creative commons
Posted at 10:07PM Jan 17, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Open licensing

As I started work on documenting the users who would use the proposed edna open licence search I received an invitation to an interesting looking presentation description from IGI Global's presentation at ALA Midwinter.

Walking the Usage Tightrope in a Digital World: Publishers and Librarians Explore the Delicate Balancing Act of E-Content Usability

In recent years librarians have grown increasingly concerned with digital rights management tools used by vendors of licensed scholarly resources such as e-journals and e-books. Although some restrictions are necessary to protect the academic material, how will protection measures affect student and faculty use? This showcase will explore the balancing act concerning use restrictions through discussion between librarians and publishers on soft restrictions, hard restrictions, user views, and database analysis.

 The focus on usability is a very good idea. The complexity of copyright laws combined with the problems of authentication and single sign on make this too hard, even for those academics who want to try and do the right thing.

Tags: resources copyright e-content digital rights
Posted at 12:00PM Jan 17, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

ABS going Creative Commons

Great excitement generated in several online communities by a tiny notice on the Australian Bureau of Statistics news page that says "The ABS is poised to introduce Creative Commons licensing for the majority of its web content".

When does 'poised' mean? Perhaps it will be on Tuesday 16 December which is being celebrated as the day Creative Commons turns 6.

It was a huge bonus for Australian education a couple of years ago when the ABS made its statistics free to access. This licence decision increases that value by freeing the use of this statistical information for re-use, re-mixing and online publication by teachers and students across a myriad of subject areas.

The Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence will be included at the bottom of every page on the ABS website.

So the challenge is on to congratulate the next Australian government department to move to the Commons.

Tags: creative commons ict policy statistics copyright abs
Posted at 08:20PM Dec 08, 2008 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[1]