Dear Friends, please join us as we gather to remember Aaron Swartz on the evening of Thursday, January 24th.

Reception at 7:00pm

Memorial at 8:00pm

at the Internet Archive

300 Funston Avenue

San Francisco 94118

Speakers will include Danny O’Brien, Lisa Rein, Peter Eckersly, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Cindy Cohn, Brewster Kahle, Tim O’Reilly, Elliot Peters, Alex Stamos, and Carl Malamud; there will be an opportunity for brief remembrances.

Please consider RSVPing so that we know how many people to expect. If you are unable to join us, you can watch a live stream of the event.

From Aaron’s friends at: Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Noisebridge, Internet Archive, Wikimedia Foundation, Stanford Center for Internet and Society, O’Reilly and Blurryedge.

Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.

Boundless has an entire section explaining open educational resources (OER) and how they use them. However, you can easily see how it works for yourself by browsing one of their textbooks directly. For example, see their textbook on Biology. At the end of each chapter, sources are cited as a list of links where you can find the original material:

This chapter on Organismal Interactions references a Wikipedia article and several articles in The Encyclopedia of Earth. If you follow these links, you will find that the original articles are OER governed by the same CC BY-SA license.

From Boundless’ FAQ,

Is it really free? How does Boundless make money?

Absolutely. Boundless books are 100% free with no expiration dates like textbook rentals or buybacks at the bookstore. It starts with Open Educational Resources. In the future, Boundless will implement some awesome optional premium features on top of this free content to help students study faster and smarter.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Boundless is already rolling out some of those premium features, including flashcards, study guides, and quizzes. To access these features Boundless requires a free user account. The textbooks themselves are completely open, without registration required, and are accessible at boundless.com/textbooks/.

For further reading, we recommend Slate’s article entitled, “Never Pay Sticker Price for a Textbook Again – The open educational resources movement that’s terrifying publishers.” It does a fantastic job of placing the company’s aims in the context of the current publishing ecosystem.

This week, U.S. News and World Report ran an excellent story about the rise of openly-licensed educational materials. Simon Owens’ article touches on many of the open education landmarks we’ve been celebrating over the past year, including the Department of Labor’s TAA-CCCT grant program and open textbook legislation in British Columbia and California. Owens interviewed CC director of global learning Cable Green as well as David Wiley, the Twenty Million Minds Foundation‘s Dean Florez, and several other experts in the space.

From the article:

Upon its launch a decade ago, Creative Commons was embraced by the artist and literary community, and its iconic logo began appearing on the sidebars of thousands of blogs, web pages, and Flickr photos. By 2005, the nonprofit estimated there were 20 million works that utilized the license, and by 2009 that number had climbed to 350 million. But while the organization has always embraced its grassroots enthusiasm, it continually sought recognition and adoption from larger, more traditional institutions.

The philosophy behind this goal is simple. “The public should have access to what it paid for,” says [Cable Green]. “Free access and legal access to what it bought. The tagline is ‘buy one get one.’ If you buy something, you should get access to it.” And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Creative Commons activists have identified education materials as a prime target for their view. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that student loan debt had surpassed auto loans and credit debt, coming in at an estimated $1 trillion. And a not-insignificant contribution to this burden has been the rising cost of textbooks.

[…]

David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham University in Utah, has been immersed in the OER community predating the creation of the Creative Commons license. He was inspired by a group of technologists who met in 1998 to rebrand the free software movement as “open source,” and he later worked to develop an “open content” license that would allow content creators to share and distribute their content easily. “The only difference was that all of us who were initially involved weren’t lawyers,” he recalls. “We were just making stuff up. It was scary, because there were hundreds of thousands of people who were using these licenses, and if any of them actually went to court, who knows what would have happened?” Imagine his relief then when the Creative Commons license was formed. “I put a big notice on our website saying, ‘please everyone, run away from our licenses as fast as you can. Here are real lawyers that have done something similar but way better.’”

This is sound public policy; taxpayers should have free and legal access to publicly funded educational content.

This is an excerpt from comments we submitted last week to the U.S. Department of Education on the proposed requirements for the Investing in Innovation Fund (I3 program). Creative Commons, along with the Open CourseWare Consortium, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, and the State Educational Technology Directors Association, believe that insofar as the I3 program will use public funds to support the creation of educational materials, those educational materials ought to be made freely and openly available to the public. We urge the U.S. Department of Education to adopt a policy identical to that of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grant program (TAACCCT). That initiative requires that educational content created with DOL grant funds be shared under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

The DOL open policy states (pdf):

In order to ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a TAACCCT grant, the grantee will be required to license to the public (not including the Federal Government) all work created with the support of the grant (Work) under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY) license. Work that must be licensed under the CC BY includes both new content created with the grant funds and modifications made to pre-existing, grantee-owned content using grant funds … This license allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted Work and requires such users to attribute the Work in the manner specified by the grantee.

The $2 billion DOL program’s CC BY open licensing requirement will help maximize the impact of those grant funds, and the $100+ million I3 Program can realize similar benefits by adopting the same policy.

Read the complete comments we submitted at the CC wiki.

2013 starts off fresh with Dan Mills joining the Creative Commons team as our director of product strategy. We are delighted to have Dan onboard and look forward to engaging his leadership. In his new role, Dan will head the Technology Team in the creation of software products to propel the Creative Commons mission forward and enable the growth of the community.

Dan brings a spot on range of skills and experience to his new position. Before Creative Commons, Dan was Product Manager for Identity at Mozilla, responsible for creating Persona, a decentralized Web sign-in solution. He has worked with partners to integrate sign-in and payments into the Firefox Marketplace and upcoming Firefox OS. Dan has served as a spokesperson for Mozilla in many international venues, including Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Kuala Lumpur. He led efforts to engage and grow the open source communities for Mozilla in various countries.

Prior to switching over to product management, Dan was a software engineer at Mozilla Labs and the Firefox team, as well as the open source startup Ximian (acquired by Novell).

Dan grew up in sunny Venezuela. He has lived in the US since going to Duke University, where he graduated with a BS in computer science and minors in economics and Italian. He loves to cook and experiment with his sous vide machine. We look forward to Dan sharing his culinary delights and product vision with all of us at CC!