OpenDock Project

The article raises some very real concerns with the use of Creative Commons attribution to Learning Materials in HE and FE and has particular reference to it's use within repositories. Amongst the issues raised are:

• Do the Learning Materials contain copyright material to which the institution requires permission to publish under a Creative Commons (CC) licence?
• Employers generally own the copyright on the materials produced by their employees. Do the employees have the expressed permission of their employers to publish under a CC licence?
• Does producing materials under a CC licence infringe upon other third party business relationship?
• Certain research materials are proscribed for use in other countries, precluding publishing under the "global" CC licence.
• Are CC licences actually valid under specific national legislatures, ie. no "I agree" button.
• Restricting access to specific groups, ie. students only, is incompatible with the CC licence.

This is a considered and balanced article and should be read by those using the CC licence. My personal view is that this issue has some way to run; it may be of small concern to those producing and publishing their own materials within their own controlled environment but for a project such as OpenDock, covering many institutions, countries and individual situations this may well be an issue we need to address and not simply just accept the CC licence as a universal panacea.

Alan
Knownet Ltd

Back in Barcelona, I am having a look at the notes from the meeting, and I have something to say about the "tagging" for the documents, specially for the UoLs. There is one document provided with the specification called "IMS Learning Design Best Practice and Implementation Guide" which contains some rules for describing a UoL. We may use some of these guides for tagging the UoLs. The point (extracted from the doc) is:

3.2.4 The Design Phase Examined in Detail The starting point for the creation of a design is a use case narrative. For the narrative to contain sufficient detail, it should conform to the following document structure, which is derived from Alistair Cockburn's use case template: Title - a very short description. Narrative - a general description of the use case in educational terms (see below). Primary Actor - student in student led learning, teacher in teacher led situations. Scope - runtime systems involved in the delivery. Level - description of the level of complexity. Stakeholders and Interests - a discussion of the roles and their respective responsibilities. Preconditions - a specification of what is needed in order to provide the student with learning experiences. Minimal Guarantees - role specific preconditions. Success Guarantees - role specific demands for the learning experience to be successful. Main Success Scenario - relate to the runtime systems involved. Extensions - various failure scenarios. The narrative should be structured in the following way Title - a very short description. Provided by - author, institution, etc. Pedagogy/Type of learning - case based, problem based, individualized linear, etc. Description/Context - idem Learning objectives - idem Roles: - the various participants, such as student, tutor, assessor, etc. Different types of learning content used - local texts, internet pages, multimedia DVDs. Different types of learning services/facilities/tools used - external expert, groupware. Different types of collaborative activities - among students, between students and tutors, Learning activity workflow - how Actors / Content / Services interact. Scenarios - e.g., the same content may be used for face-to-face and distance learning. Other needs / Specific requirements - e.g. accessibility, specific target groups, etc.

As you can see, if one intending to develop a UoL uses this guide to seed the information about the UoL, we may get a lot of information about the Unit of learning. This information can be posted attached to the zip file or embedded on the system (that is, using the tagging method provided with the repository). So, I think it would be interesting if UoL designers followed this guide. Well, this is just an approach we could have in mind. By now, I am exploring the possibilities for that "UoL Preview method" that was suggested during the meeting. I will let you know what it is going on with that, and it would be nice if we all keep in contact and comment any point that can appear.

We're great fans of the Creative Commons system for denoting open content licensing. In educational settings especially, the simplicity of CC licensing can cut through a lot of silly obstacles to sharing.

We've now made it very easy to add Creative Commons licensing to knotes weblog content. There are new links in the Manage sidebar for managing a CC license (you need manage role on a weblog to see that sidebar).

KNotations :: Documentation and development plans from the KnowNet development team

I've added Creative Commons licensing for the content in this weblog. See the sidebar near the bottom left ( screenshot at the right of this entry). I chose the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It is easy to change this choice if you have manager role in the weblog. Details / how-to are in the KNotations blog entry linked to above.

I just added a 'Feed Manager' for the RSS from our del.icio.us tag "opendock"; this makes a special sidebar render out with live updates of the RSS. See the del.icio.us/tag/opendock sidebar near the bottom of the left-hand side for the latest 10 items tagged 'opendock' in del.icio.us. Mike, Alan and at least one other person have been using this tag for some time. del.icio.us is a social-bookmarking service which makes it very quick and easy to collect and tag links. Because of its massive user-base, it can reveal very interesting systems effects based on actions like 'who else collected this link?'. If you are not yet using it, I very heartily recommend it.

Live RSS embedding is one of the many "loosely-coupled web" features of knotes, the open-source weblogging and discussion system which KnowNet has been slaving away at for the past year or so. We've just in the past week completed core work on knotes, so we're eager to make use of its powerful features :o) Another very important feature of knotes is its support for a few simple standards - APIs for editing the weblog remotely, for automatically generating links back to content that links into its content, for auto-discovering these API hooks, and for embedding creative-commons licenses. We also deliver very rich "filecasting" RSS feeds. See the bottom left "subscribe" sidebar for more RSS/atom options.

For instance, I am writing this post in "ecto", a weblog-editing API desktop application, rather than from within the site itself. This means that I can paste the screenshots directly into the entry without having to turn them into web images, and also exposes many, many other features which I choose as a user. It also provides an extra hinge point for APIs... for instance via ecto plugins I can easily attach files which turn into bit-torrents when they reach the server, or geo-tag my entries with locations in google earth, even though neither of those are features of knotes itself. It also makes it easy to do one stop tagging - making tags from mutliple sources available for associating with the entry.

I include a screenshot of me typing this entry (see above; click to see full-size screenshot).