[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion

Wed Oct 6 17:10:32 MDT 2010

On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 07:20 -0400, Susan D'Antoni wrote: 
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> Welcome to the first interaction in our OER Community from Athabasca
> University.  

Hi All,

I am new to this group but not to open content / open source.  

I have been watching the email traffic the past few days and it is very
interesting.  I hope I can contribute some of my experience that may
help with the issues being raised. Since there are so many good ideas in
this thread.  I have decided to just comment in general and to not reply
directly to any individual email.

My comments are from and information systems point of view.  So they are
not directly inline with "teaching" but I see many similarities as far
as open content is concerned.

Sustainability:
This is a crucial issue.  If the program is not sustainable then there
is no point; correct?

One writer has contributed links to and requested more information about
case studies on the value of openness.  The world of software has a
plethora of examples.  Probably the most recognizable is the operating
system, Linux. However, there is an enormous number of applications that
exist for the common good, that are created by a global community in
self organizing groups.  I  will write up a short white paper on this if
you wish.

Away from software and closer to the goals of OER; is Wikipedia.  I am
not recommending the exact model of Wikipedia as one for OER.  But
collaboration in a controlled environment reduces costs on individuals
and organizations by spreading that cost around. Again, there are many
examples of self organizing groups with moderate control that come
together to create and share valuable content. 

Licensing:
Protecting and promoting original authors of all content should be of
the utmost importance.  The most extreme way is to not share it at all.
This is not very helpful in a promotional sense nor in a value sense. 

The next best way is to use a license structure that is internationally
recognized and offers re-use as well as original author protections.
The various Creative Commons licenses are designed for this purpose.
Specifically, an author can elect to share content with everyone.
Permitting re-use, additions, etc.  as well as maybe preventing
commercial gain by others and requiring additions to be submitted back
for inclusion in newer editions. Since these licenses are well
established it should not be difficult to get approval through legal
departments where some academics may be required as part of their
contracts. 

Interoperability/shareability:
Common standards or specifications should be used where available in
order to promote ease of use. For example; when creating content the
Scholarly Works Application Profile
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/SWAP provides for
consistent meta-data formats in order to increase discover-ability. In
turn, SWAP is based on the commonly used Dublin Core Meta-data
Initiative.  

In cases of meta-data exchanges there is the Statistical Data Meta-data
eXchange specification (SDMX) http://www.sdmx.org  There are a number of
subsets being developed specifically for aggregating purposes.  My
research group is working with the World Health Organization on the SDMX
Health Domain (SDMX-HD) http://sdmx-hd.org/ implementation. 

Well, I started this email this morning and just now returned to find 26
new emails.  That is great activity even if many were about properly
using mailing lists. Email is easy, lightweight, easy to sort and view
in different ways and used everywhere.  If your inbox is overflowing you
should learn how to use mail filtering on your client. If you want to
unsubscribe  read the footer.  It is there for a reason. Just my 2
cents :)

Now back to the issues before us.  While following these specifications
may seem to be a lot of extra work.  The reality is that if we ever plan
to get beyond a flat WWW, we have to do the work.  The work that this
group is proposing will yield artifacts that will likely last for
centuries. While we do not have a real crystal ball to see the future.
We do know the errors of our recent past.  Meta-data is one answer.
More are coming. It appears to me that there has been a hardworking core
group at this for quite some time.  The time is likely ripe for
expansion for a number of reasons; technological and social.  Do the
best we can from the start and it is easier to establish norms than
after several hundred or thousands are participating. 

Stephen Carson pointed out and identified visions for OER in his email
dated 10/06/2010 09:37:16 AM 

Those different visions are actually fully compatible.  Again we can
look at how software is being developed globally by an adhoc group.  The
first issue is trust.  The software groups have various methods in place
in order to judge the trust level of an individual.  They generally
consist of a history of contributions via mailing lists that allow the
community to judge the persons subject knowledge and their desire to
participate.  Versioning software is used to house the artifacts.  This
software provides a means to allow those with permission to update
certain files. Non-repudiation is maintained by virtue of a public key
pair where only the author knows the passphrase. Even at this level you
could have a person become malicious.  In that event it is easy enough
to roll back the changes to a known point.  The most popular open source
version control systems are BZR, GIT and SVN.  BZR and GIT are probably
most appropriate in this context.  

This comes down to the matter once again of specifications.  IMHO, each
primary author becomes a defacto project manager for their document.
They of course can choose which format they wish to use.  However I
would recommend something that is an ISO standard.  This could be the
OpenOffice Document format (ISO Standard) which is open source and cross
platform software and is very similar to MS Office from a user
perspective.  But for better long term flexibility using LaTex format
may be best.  The LyX editor is also open source and cross platform.  It
does take a bit of getting used to but it takes the stance that once you
have a template.  The content creators only need to select the type of
content they are entering; e.g. header, chapter title, regular text... 
They never have to worry about any formatting.  If you have ever
exchanged MS Word documents between a large group you have experienced
the constant reformatting issues as well as not everyone having the same
fonts, etc.

I'll close with something I have already seen on this list. Remember
that the goal is to be as inclusive as possible.  This sometimes means
that you or I need to step slightly out of our comfort zone.  But we
will usually learn something in the process; and that is always a good
thing.

Cheers,
Tim 

-- 
***************************************************************
Timothy Cook, MSc
Project Lead - Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling
http://www.mlhim.org 

LinkedIn Profile:http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook 
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