Unlocking the Museum Doors

Visiting Amsterdam would be fun. Waiting in front of the Rijksmuseum for the doors to be unlocked would be a moment of great anticipation for any student of art.

Unfortunately, most of us won’t get that opportunity, but the museum has done something that may turn out to be more exciting for art students and their teachers. The museum has made high quality digital images ( currently 110,000 ) of the museum’s artworks available in the public domain. You’ll be able to get a closer look at the work of the masters, and be able to look without waiting for the museum doors to open.

The release is part of the process being encouraged worldwide by the Open GLAM group. GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, and Open GLAM is working to get these kinds of storehouses of human history to open up digitally in addition to unlocking their doors in the morning to the eager people waiting outside.

Further reading: http://openglam.org/2013/02/27/case-study-rijksmuseum-releases-111-000-high-quality-images-to-the-public-domain/

and thanks for the heads-up from @glynmoody on Twitter.

 

OER Twist

As part of my PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network), I follow several people on Twitter. Sometimes they provide direct insight. Sometimes, too, they provide links. I am grateful for both.

Today Ana Cristina Pratas (@AnaChristinaPrts) gave a link to ClipArt ETC which the tweet identified as “Free Educational Illustrations for Classroom Use”. Her link is to her own ScoopIt account and from there it is a click on the popup title to the original site.

On the ClipArt ETC site, The University of South Florida is offering clipart for “free” educational use. They have terms that limit a person from using the clipart commercially without paying them. They also limit a single student/teacher project from incorporating more than 50 clipart items under their free use terms. That sounds pretty liberal until you examine some of the clipart they are offering.

I’m a former science teacher with an affection for plants/botany, so I picked a random image from their category:
ClipArt ETC – Plants – Cellular Botany – Epidermis

Epidermis – ClipArt ETC

This image is like many I’ve seen. It is a good illustration of a leaf sliced through, as viewed through a microscope. It would make a great handout or presentation slide, maybe talking about chlorophyll and photosynthesis.

You can download in several sizes. Wonderful. Botany unit booklet, here we come.

Back to the licensing. They ask that any use of the image be credited back to them as the source. No problem there. But, I examined the illustration’s meta data that they provide. It turns out that this image is from a botany book published in 1914: Nature and development of plants, by Carlton C. Curtis. That would put the book and its illustrations into the public domain, as far as I can tell.

Now, I don’t have any problem citing the ClipArt ETC site and The University of South Florida. Making sources easier to find by others who read through my classroom projects is a great thing to do.

The problem I have is that OER (Open Educational Resources) have a tough enough time being put together. If I were to put a botany unit together, I might actually wind up using more than 50 of the good illustrations I found at ClipArt ETC. Botany is a pretty broad topic. It bothers me that I’d be in technical violation of the site’s term, in spite of the fact that many clipart documents  found there are in surely in the public domain and are legally not subject to terms like the ones on the site. If they have copyright clearance for much of their collection to offer rights-restricted works by their terms, great. That would help teachers and students with their projects. If The University of South Florida is ADDING limitations, then not so good, not good at all.

In your attempts to develop your own OER projects, keep things as truly free as you can. Cite your sources. Give the requested credits, but demand more openness from sources than they currently want to give. Be persistent. The cultural commons doesn’t belong just to someone else. It is also yours.

You might also want to check out The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle. It is available at the linked site as a pdf download in addition to being able to purchase a hard copy.

What do you think?

 

OER – Open Education – 2012 in Review

K-12 isn’t the hotbed of Open Education (yet), but you still will probably find this “year in review” article at opensource.com interesting.

http://opensource.com/education/13/1/year-review-openeducation

Carry on…satisfied with the status quo?

 

Mitigating Dyslexia

Title in OpenDyslexic font

The title of this post uses a weighted font called OpenDyslexic.

Dyslexia is a condition suffered by many people. Those who have dyslexia have trouble reading, in part because their minds flip the letters over. The whole dyslexic problem isn’t that simple, but research has shown that one factor which causes the flip is the style of text. Research has also shown that some of the effects can be minimized when the text is visually weighted, making the letters appear “heavier” at the bottom. Dyslexic readers can use the weighted letters to help them keep themselves from flipping.

The OpenDyslexic font is the creation of Abelardo Gonzales. The font has been released using a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

The beauty of that license is that it allows very broad ability to use the font as long as you give Mr. Gonzales the credit for creating the font. It is also appropriate to link to the OpenDyslexic Web site.

Combining this font with Open Educational Resources (OER) might help many students to minimize their reading difficulties. If educators who are using and creating OER materials also provide a version printed with OpenDyslexic, they’ll potentially better engage the dyslexic students in their classes. That’s a real plus.

Please try it out. Let me know. Leave a comment of your students’ experiences.

Here’s a story A Dream of Armageddon by H.G. Wells that is done using OpenDyslexic.

Update: Good reference with usage links edudemic.com/2012/10/free-font-dyslexic-students-read/

Update: Read the reaction to the the font by a person with dyslexia.

“As a dyslexic, I find this font very easy to read and reduces the effects of visual stress that I experience,” said Arran Smith of the British Dyslexia Association (via BBC)

For the fun of it, take a look at this post done with a Web font implementation of the OpenDyslexic font. Ask your dyslexic students to give it a try as a quick test to see if the font is suitable for your classroom.

Update: A Special Education teacher who teaches half his classes in Spanish asked whether the font had accents for characters like the enyay ( ñ ). The good news is, it does.

 

Free

What do you think when you see a tweet like this one?

If you regularly read this blog or are a fan of the Free Software Foundation, you probably see where I’m heading.

To most people, perhaps even the author of the tweet, “free” means without cost. Now don’t get me wrong. I am all for providing educational resources that students and teachers can access without paying money. School budgets are stretched to the limit as it is.

However, the cost is less important than the freedom to actually use the resource. If my school doesn’t have good Internet access, can I download the resource to make it available on the computer(s) in my classroom?

If the material is good, but it doesn’t quite fit the students’ needs, can I modify it to improve its value?

If my students want to create projects that grab elements from the resource, can they know that they are not breaking any copyright laws, and can I lead them through that creative effort in good conscience?

Education depends on students being creative while working to incorporate new ideas with their current understanding. Students need to be able to mash together bits from all over their experience. The mashup is critical. This tweet gets the essence.

(L_Hilt informs me to credit @jackiegerstein for the quote. Don’t you just love social networking and being a connected educator?)

Students need to make and remake and blend and mashup. Resources that are free of limiting restrictions are more valuable than those which are merely free of cost.

Teachers need to guide students through the process of gaining knowledge and skills while attributing (citing) sources. Fair use rules overcome some of the limitations of copyright, but not enough.

Teachers, students, parents and administrators need to understand the benefits of the cultural commons. Everyone in education benefits when “free” resources are also Free Culture friendly.

Learn more about free culture, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement

 

Photo Pin

Photo Pin searches for Creative Commons images on Flickr. Flickr has an advanced search option for exactly that, but Photo Pin simplifies the download and attribution process.

This is a K.I.S.S.* product, reducing the effort needed to find and credit photos. The primary purpose is described as giving access to photos for blog posts. Unless you take your own photos, you should always use photos that use a liberal license such as the ones available through Photo Pin. Photo Pin connects to Flickr, where thousands of people have posted photos, but only searches for photos that have a Creative Commons liberal license.

The following screen capture documents a search for “books” and the particular image shown has one of the Creative Commons licenses that is pretty restrictive. “Attribution, Non-commercial, No-derivatives.” That means I cannot use the photo for advertizing a product, or sell my blog post with the photo in it, or make changes to the original. I also need to display credit for the photo. Fortunately, that’s one of the things that Photo Pin makes very easy.

In the left column, you see the license limitations clearly identified.

At the bottom, you’ll find a complete credit, set in html code that is typically easy to add to a blog post or other web page. Past the code below the image or at the end of the post, whichever is appropriate for your situation. Just be sure you do the attribution. That’s the basis of the Creative Commons licenses, no matter what other restrictions are applied.

You do still need to verify that your use is valid. There are several licenses under the Creative Commons umbrella. They range from allowing almost any use to very limited use. They do stop short of full equivalence with standard “all rights reserved” copyright. Read the terms and know your use fits before you use a photo.

Always comply with the attribution requirements, too. You are being a good digital citizen, encouraging others to share with you.

While Photo Pin specifically targets educational bloggers, the tool is also valuable to anybody who wants to legally add photos to their digital works.

Give back. That’s next, of course. Share your own photos on Flickr. Use a Creative Commons license when you do. Please consider using the least restrictive license you can. Your work will go further and do more good if you do.

—–

*K.I.S.S – “Keep it Simple, Stupid” which in the case of Web design is a very good thing.

 

Open Education Week

It is Monday of Open Education Week.

In this blog, open education has been the dominant theme. Using open (free as in freedom) software is one element, for sure.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are also central to making education work in the information age. Education has always been about helping kids to interact with a steadily broadening stream of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t owned by anybody, though some will temporarily capture it with copyright and patents.

Sponsored by the Open Courseware Consortium the week is an opportunity to assess where the opening of education is. Many universities have developed courses that they have also presented for free (a few with certificates), accessible worldwide.

The P2PU inaugurated a “School of Education” this year. You can get in touch with great course organizers and engage with peers to deepen your administrator or teacher skills.

You can also directly participate in efforts to make more open materials suitable for schools, teachers and students to use.

One such effort it the Kids Open Dictionary which already has over 9000 words defined by people like you and me. The definitions are specifically identified as public domain. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the definitions in Websters or another commercial dictionary are under copyright? Here’s your chance to make a difference.

You can see that there are a lot more words that can still be defined from the available list. Go to the dictionary builder page and sign up. Even if you only add a single definition, you can pat yourself on the back that you did something to celebrate and participate in Open Education Week.

 

Music in Your Life

If you do video with your students, where do you get the music that helps bring the moving images to life?

One place to start might be Project Zero at http://zero-project.gr/

One beautiful example is by Roberta Volpe, Sulla pelle umida which is an MP3 file. If you have a Flash player, a link click will start the 4 minute piece. Right click for saving options.

You can also see that the artists have paid attention to more than their music. The image below is the (reduced/cropped) cover art for the song.

All the songs at the site are released using the Creative Commons “by share-alike” license.

Go take a longer look and listen.

What other music resources do you recommend?

 

Behind – Ahead

Sometimes I feel like I’m ahead.

Sometimes I’m certain that I’m way behind.

Have you watched this RSA Animate video? As of this Thanksgiving morning, the Youtube video has been watched 6,070,127 times.

The video was made from a speech given by Sir Ken Robinson in 2008. That’s three years ago. I think today was my first time watching it. In “Internet years“, I am somewhere between 21 and 30 years late watching the video. Behind!

By contrast, I’ve been involved with free software since the 1980s. Back then, it was called public domain or freeware (mixed in with shareware). Some of it wasn’t really as open as we see today. The GNU General Public License (GPL) has formalized and supported a movement to make software a core element of an open society. (Note the geek-friendly numbering.)

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Our view of education needs to be informed by GPL freedoms, OER and the open channels of the Internet. It will also help if our view of education embraces the four freedoms of the GPL.

• The freedom to use the knowledge of our world for our own purposes
• The freedom to examine the sources of our education and to make improvements which suit us as learners
• The freedom to pass our learning to others, perhaps as teachers who make it a life’s work
• The freedom to engage our communities with the educational changes we think are important and to be unfettered by top-down, one way or the highway thinking making a goal of steady improvement a goal which trumps someone else’s (too often arbitrary) standards

We might also want to ensure the four freedoms from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Just as Thanksgiving in the United States is a day of gratitude, let us be thankful we can use free software and the open channels of the Internet to express our opinions and to share our excitement and to make contributions to the common wealth.

 

Commons vs. Copyright

TechDirt published an article which discusses the increasing restrictions of copyright done with law changes, which in some cases are putting works already in the public domain, back under copyright restrictions.

To contrast that, the article pointed out the work of others, notably Wikimedia Commons and Flickr which have made created the conditions for and promoted Creative Commons licensing of images.

I’m in the middle of a P2PU course examining the methods of using and remixing Open Education Resources (OER). OER depends on the availability of liberally licensed materials. Making a lesson targeted at a particular grade level involves rewriting text, accumulating images, finding audio and video resources, etc. Teachers do this kind of thing naturally. Teachers are professionals at sharing. Sharing is the primary job of a teacher. What OER provides is a way to go beyond the stale textbooks that the district purchased which are often many years old. OER gives the creative teacher a legal way to make activity packets and worksheets which incorporate up-to-date materials.

OER isn’t on most educators’ radar screens, though.

Maybe some have heard about all the open courseware like the college level courses offered online by MIT, Stanford, and others. But these materials aren’t geared toward third graders or middle school students, maybe not even advanced high school children.

Maybe a few have had students read current events from newspapers or have appropriated materials from YouTube to show in class, but to date, not many have actually participated in the creation of OER materials.

Why should OER for K-12 happen?

Teachers know how to share. OER makes it legal. By contrast, if a teacher takes that current events news story and makes copies of it, the best they can hope for is a “fair use” exception to copyright. Educators can make timely use of such material. The problem happens when the teacher decides to include the same stuff in a second semester, or the next year. That set of copies distributed to a new, later set of students has a far less clear fair use exception to the copyright rules.

What will make teachers, particularly at the K-12 level, embrace OER?

✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦✦

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111010/09554316284/fighting-back-against-public-domain-erosion-growing-commons.shtml