[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion [Responding to Timothy Cook with a view to broader discussion of the issues he has posed]

[Jane Ross]

Timothy Cook provided some useful structure for thinking, pushback, discussion and expanded learning. 

Thank you Timothy.

I am responding to your contribution from the perspective of an academic, board member/manager (in three non-profit non-academic but active learning community settings -- one 'western', and two based in developing countries) and private business person.

Please see my responses within your lines below. 

Jane Ross, PhD

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Licensing:
Protecting and promoting original authors of all content should be of
the utmost importance. Timothy, is this something you are promoting -- or a possibility for consideration? There are numerous documented cross-cultural examples of situations where personal ownership of an idea or piece of work is not an individual value. I would like to see our OER community pressing on to recognize and value social systems where group-created products have equal value (perhaps superior value) with that of individual authors.
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. There seems to be an assumption here that this community work is for "academics". Knowledge and access to learning is much broader than the academic sphere; it is created, used and shared by a varied host of learners and knowledge creators; e.g., : Hole in the Wall project http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/ and methods documented by Sugata Mitra and Community.

Interoperability/shareability:
I think you are assuming the use of "foundational technology"? It would be a shame to create and circulate materials on off-shoot systems, only to lose what the creative commons has created. 
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. The message here is?

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.  Agree! An inclusive "we" that embodies academics, technologists and other kinds of learns. The work that this
group is proposing will yield artifacts that will likely last for
centuries. They may 'last' for centuries -- hopefully our goal is to create artifacts that will be used and have an influence 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. Do tell us more about these methods! 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-

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