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The Open Education License circumvents problematic licensing incompatibility for the remix and reuse of open educational materials. David talks more about this incompatibility in his blog post which also provides a draft of the Open Education License. Kim Tucker, with Libre Learning out of South Africa has a similar license on his site.
Brian pointed out that access to the past is cheaper than access to now. Copyright barriers cause members of the Open Education movement headaches. The push for Creative Commons licensing and the struggle about the non-commercial cause consume our attention and resources. But the issue of copyright is seen as something very different outside this community.
I recently came across a pretty cool bundle of instructional materials produced by an organization called Youth for Human Rights. The produce a booklet that sums up the human rights in one or two words as a heading, an image, and a short subheading. There are pages that say: No Slavery, No Torture, Freedom of Thought, Right to Education… and one that says Copyright.
Coming from an Open Education perspective, seeing Copyright on level with Right to Education just seemed a bit odd.
-Fred Mednick, Teachers without Borders talked about the cross over between International Development efforts and Open Education. He mentioned that they often target “Water, Women, and…” something else I didn’t hear because I was interested in why they target many of their efforts at women in developing nations. Fred told a story about a women’s center in Nairobi where women who were drawn from the streets participate in a project to make handicrafts. These were women who had never been recognized for anything, many of whom hardly responded to their own names.
He told another story about a village elder who became a friend of his. The elder spoke with him and said that if Fred’s organization would help them build a well system in their village, he would let the girls go to school instead of walking 5 miles every day to get the water. There is a lot to talk about regarding why the girls had to fetch the water instead of the boys, but I think there is something more interesting there… The elder knew that he would get some leverage with the westerner if he promised to send the girls to school. Katrina Tomasveski wrote in one of her treatises on the Right to Education about how girls in Afganistan (?) receive a lower dowry if they have been educated past a certain age. As a western woman, this is difficult to understand.
Connections with the international development community are what has been missing from the Open Education movement. We’ve been building content with the hope/assumption that the people who need it will get the content. But without the Fred Mednicks of the world, that may never happen. So happy to see him at the OpenEd conference.
I just attended a session at the Open Education 2007 Conference by Andy Lane on making Open Education educational. He brought up the idea that there is a social/community layer to making sense out of educational content (which is non-revolutionary, but continues to be tremendously difficult to support). Phoenix Wang asked what are barriers to supporting social communities for OER. I think part of our problem has been our approach, which has been to build big, heavy systems that mimic popular social networking sites and expect people to come and talk about education. Instead, we should be out there in existing communities promoting the use of open educational resources. Go to the user in their context instead of expecting them to find their way into ours. Or perhaps use existing systems to support dialogue instead of building our own?
