To summarise David Wiley, open is 2 things:
- Completely free to access
- "Unusually liberal copyright permissions"
These are permissions to:
- Reuse
- Revise
- Remix
- Redistribute
and there are just 2 ways to get these permissions
- Material is old enough for copyright to have expired - in the public domain
- Copyright owner applies an open license
This may seem overly simplified, but believe that often at their most basic level things are very simple.
Eben Moglen and Lawrence Lessig discussed some of the complications. Eben Moglen explained how sharing for educational purposes has become "theft". He also talked about copyright law and the rights of producers versus distributors, the thought of which always makes me a bit hot under the collar (but I've already blogged on that. I don't think we need to go into it again).
I was interested to hear Lawrence Lessig talk about the 2 contrasting eras of Disney: the creative, remixing era of building on the past and the work of others; and the locking in, locking down, preventing anyone else doing to them what they had done to others. I was shocked to hear about the tactics of Lucas to build on his empire with the compliant (and naive?) creative input of the fan-base.
Lessig summarised "openness" by saying that our lives are sharing activities, and within these:
I was interested to hear Lawrence Lessig talk about the 2 contrasting eras of Disney: the creative, remixing era of building on the past and the work of others; and the locking in, locking down, preventing anyone else doing to them what they had done to others. I was shocked to hear about the tactics of Lucas to build on his empire with the compliant (and naive?) creative input of the fan-base.
Lessig summarised "openness" by saying that our lives are sharing activities, and within these:
- we need well protected spaces of fair use
- the ecology of sharing needs freedom to create
- we must respect the creator - through rights directly tied to them.
Enter Creative Commons.
Lessig describes this as a balance of creativity, where we are no longer strung up between "All Rights Reserved" and complete public domain openness. There is now the possibility of "Some Rights Reserved". Most importantly, it is the creators who are able to assign what rights have been reserved and what freedoms attached.
When we came to the point of considering Barriers and Opportunities to OER at our own institutions I was a bit stuck at first. But reading a few posts by the other participants and thinking about what is similar or different at my own institution made me realise that at my institution there are some very real opportunities to improve the students' learning experiences and to find some creative solutions to limitations imposed by intellectual property licensing, particularly for courses offered by distance and where textbooks are expensive.
I'm not sure what barriers there might be, because I don't know what contracts we might be locked into regarding purchase of textbooks from particular vendors, or of encouraging people to join in and actually start sharing. I need to find out more about that.
The #OpenTextbook Tweet was fun as well as informative and I can't wait to have a look for some examples myself.
Fiona: You've written a very good summary here. I think my experience of the class is a lot like yours has been. I, too, was shocked to read about George Lucas taking advantage of his fans. I was also very stuck when contemplating the "Barriers and Opportunities" at my own institution. I think that we so used to doing it the "old way" (i.e. using copyrighted textbooks) that doing things differently is hard for us to imagine. So, we have difficult seeing the barriers or identifying opportunities. This mindset is, in itself, a barrier.
ReplyDeleteThanks Judith. I was struck by how simple the #Open Textbook Tweet was as an idea but how creative and effective. The exercise we were given to do was also so simple, fun and effective. Our facilitators have done a great job of showing us how, with a little imagination - and not necessarily deep, high intellectual thought - we can do new things that are interesting for our learners.
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