Since our last comprehensive update, the School of Open has been creating new courses, planning continent-wide launches, conducting research, and making itself over.

New Web Space

We have a new web space! Previously, communications about our major projects have been scattered throughout the blogosphere and various wiki, Lernanta, and WordPress pages. But today we are happy to announce that there is one place you can visit to learn about and get involved with the School of Open, including newbies who just want to find a course to take.

Our web address hasn’t changed; it’s still http://schoolofopen.org. We invite any and all feedback at our new discussion space.

New Courses

After wrapping our first round of facilitated courses on copyright, Creative Commons, and Wikipedia earlier this year, we continued to develop courses for independent or group study. Here are the ones we recently launched, including a collaboration with Mozilla’s Webmaker initiative!

(Check out all of our stand-alone courses regardless of when they launched.)

→ How to use Open Educational Resources (OER)

Developed by Boyoung Chae and co. over at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC), this course was initially designed to help onboard community college faculty and staff with the CC BY–licensed textbooks coming out of WA’s Open Course Library project. We’ve since worked with them to adapt the course for the general public!

The self-paced modules walk you through how to incorporate open educational resources into your teaching practice, in addition to using open licenses and locating existing OER. One past participant said,

“How to Use OER is a great introduction to this amazing development in education. This will establish a good foundation for understanding the various components of open resources or fill in gaps that you might have. I am grateful the course will remain open after completion so that the materials and discussions can be revisited.”

→ ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America

This Spanish language course seeks to help librarians and library users strengthen their knowledge of copyright laws in Latin America and the challenges that exist to access to information in the 21st century. CC affiliates from Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay, in collaboration with the Karisma Foundation, developed this course in response to increasingly restrictive copyright laws in Latin America and around the globe. The course contains examples, analysis and open models based on Latin American cases and legislation. Read more about the course launch here.

→ Mozilla Webmaker Training for Teachers (and other web users)

Mozilla Webmaker is all about transforming web users into web makers, aka citizens of the web who do more than just consume content, but also create it while leveraging open resources and tools. The new Mozilla Webmaker Training for Teachers embeds knowledge about open throughout its set of self-paced modules that will help you to:

• “Integrate the mechanics, culture and citizenship of the web into your practice.”
• “Bring creativity to your teaching through open, participatory methods.”
• “Connect with fellow mentors and educators (especially those in your local area) to share knowledge and resources.”

New Survey

In collaboration with the OER Research Hub, we’ve been conducting research on the impact of School of Open courses. As part of this project, we invite you to participate in a survey we created for participants of stand-alone courses.

If you haven’t taken a course yet but plan to, the survey is linked at the end of every stand-alone course so you can take it when you do complete it. The survey will remain open through the end of August. If you have ever gone through a School of Open course on your own, please:

Take the Survey

New Plans for a School of Open Africa

Volunteers in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Nigeria are planning for a School of Open Africa launch in September. Each region will develop and run a training program or course on the use and application of open resources. Stay tuned for a guest post detailing plans, and check out the current programs running in Kenya and South Africa for now:

→ School of Open Kenya Initiative
→ Creative Commons for Kids (South Africa)
→ Activate Africa (South Africa)

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Interested in any of the above activities? Get Involved.

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About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, and research. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community for developing and running free online courses.

Cat Johnson at Shareable wrote an excellent interview with CC’s Timothy Vollmer on the Open Policy Network, and the importance of open policy in general.

It seems logical that publicly-funded resources would be made available to the public, but I know this is not always the case. What stands in the way of these resource being made available and how does the OPN plan to address this?

To most it does feel logical — ethical even — that the public should have access to the materials funded by its tax dollars. That’s why our mantra with regard to the Open Policy Network is “publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources.”

Right now this is not the case. In fact, oftentimes the public has to pay for materials several times over before they are granted access to it. Take the example of scholarly publishing. Many university researchers receive grants from the federal government to conduct their work. The public pays for this. The researcher does their work and then publishes in a commercial journal. That journal then sells access back to universities through subscription fees to those publications. I think most people would see that this is not an efficient – or just – use of the public’s investments.

I think what’s standing in the way of systemic policy change right now is “business as usual”–incumbent interests want things to stay the same. They want their business models to endure forever, even with massive disruptions of digital information and the web, which have essentially pushed publishing and distribution costs to zero.

Read the full interview. And don’t forget, applications for the Institute for Open Leadership are due June 30.

Have you gotten your favorite dad a gift for Father’s Day yet? We’ve collected a few of our favorites. There’s bound to be something in this list for every father in your life, no matter whether he’s into classical music or experimental poetry. Those are the two main things dads like, right?

If you buy these (or anything) at Amazon and you’re in the US, then consider supporting Creative Commons through AmazonSmile. If you make a purchase between now and Sunday, then CC will receive $5, in addition to our cut of the purchase.

Kimiko Ishizaka, The Goldberg Variations

CC0

Ishizaka’s excellent performance showed up on numerous best-of-the-year lists in 2012. It’s also in the public domain under CC0, meaning that anyone can use it for any purpose, commercial or noncommercial, with or without attribution. When we interviewed Thomas Bonte about his involvement with the Open Goldberg Variations project, he said, “You either go all the way or you don’t do it. Kimiko wanted her work to be used by a lot of artists. And yeah, mission accomplished.”

Thomas Meyer, Beowulf

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

“Every translation I’d read felt impenetrable to me with its block after block of nearly uniform lines,” Meyer writes. His translation of the ancient epic is many things – a gorgeous reimagining of how works from an oral tradition can look and behave on paper, an idiosyncratic melding of epic and experimental poetry – but it is stubbornly not block after block of uniform lines.

Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It

CC BY-NC 3.0

In the year and a half since its publication, the CC co-founder’s book on money in politics has sparked a major, national discussion on how wealthy contributors influence politicians and policies on both sides of the aisle. You could also consider making a donation in Dad’s honor to MAYDAY.US, Larry’s SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs.

Randall Munroe, xkcd volume 0

CC BY-NC 2.5

The first collection of the best geek comic out there. There’s something for everyone in this volume, whether they’re a lover, a gamer or a mathematician. There’s even something for us copyright geeks, with the complete adventures of Doctorow, Lessig, et al in their complete superhero garb. Review by Jessica Coates

Add your favorite CC-licensed picks in the comments.

Previously: Give open: CC’s holiday shopping list

Read about this course in Spanish on the CC Uruguay blog.

ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America, or ABC del derecho de autor para bibliotecarios de América Latina, is a free, online course that launches today as part of the School of Open. This Spanish language course seeks to help librarians and library users strengthen their knowledge of copyright laws in Latin America and the challenges that exist to access to information in the 21st century.

From the launch announcement:

Public library seeks to provide equal opportunities in access to information, knowledge, recreation, culture, education, reading and writing for all their users. However, there are currently no minimum guarantees that allow libraries and archives carrying out activities related to their mission such as lending books or changing the format of a film (e.g. VHS to digital) for preservation purposes. For decades, protections for authors and/or rightsholders have been increased, while the guarantees of access and inclusion of copyright balances are at the mercy of political will.
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This imbalance occurs especially in developing countries, as many developed countries have already generated standards seeking to better balance copyright.

To address these challenges, CC affiliates from Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay, in collaboration with the Karisma Foundation, have developed a course for librarians, archivists, educators, university researchers, and anyone else in the Latin American region interested in these issues. ABC of copyright for librarians in Latin America is designed to strengthen the understanding of basic copyright concepts through examples, analysis and open models based on Latin American cases and legislation.

The course officially launches online on Internet Activa at 5pm Colombia time today (UTC-5). You can join the launch by filling out this form expressing your intent; however, registration to participate in the course is not required.

The course is also available as part of the School of Open as a self-paced course that can be taken at any time, licensed CC BY.

About the School of Open

The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, and research. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community for developing and running free online courses.

Compatibility with the ShareAlike licenses is now one step closer. After a month-long consultation, we have published our process and criteria for ShareAlike compatibility and are ready to begin evaluating candidate licenses. Licenses named as compatible under this process will be interoperable with the CC ShareAlike licenses, allowing more remixing of ShareAlike-licensed materials with other copyleft materials in the commons.

In the new process, CC will evaluate licenses by publishing a preliminary analysis and then holding a public community discussion. Candidate licenses must have a few basic characteristics, including a copyleft mechanism and some way of handling attribution. Additional considerations to take into account include the license’s treatment of Effective Technological Measures, and any additional conditions that the license imposes.

It has long been a goal of Creative Commons to make our ShareAlike licenses interoperable with other copyleft licenses. Larry Lessig has been writing about the importance of compatibility to the commons since before 3.0 was published, and a compatibility mechanism was included in 3.0 but never used.

We will be looking at the first candidate license in the next few weeks. If you would like to be involved in the discussions, please follow the cc-licenses list.