Open Educational Resources: March 2009

3/29/2009

Free Software for Schools by Open Source Victoria

3/27/2009

http://www.youtube.com/edu

3/26/2009

Irving ISD uses online textbooks, so unused copies state must buy sit in a warehouse

Wow...

Thousands of textbooks and other materials worth an estimated $4.6 million sit unused in an Irving school district warehouse. No one knows how many $50-$75 textbooks sit unused in school bookrooms or storage warehouses across Texas.

3/24/2009

Why We Need OER Textbooks (Geoff Cain)

Geoff Cain is spot on in his blog post.

"I want to make sure that when we are discussing OER textbooks that we are not just talking about doing this because of the financial crisis. This is an opportunity to not only solve a problem, but to redefine textbooks in such a way that they include up to the minute research, instant corrections and updates, and community."

3/20/2009

Opening Up Education--The Remix

Posted March 17th, 2009 by Toru Iiyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar

Excerpts from Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.

Campus Technology Article

MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate

MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate

MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy

Passed by Unanimous of the Faculty, March 18, 2009

The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.
WOW!

MIT makes research available on the web: Esteemed school joins others in advocating open access to research as the price of journals rises

3/14/2009

CC Zero: A New Tool to Push Your Work Immediately Into the Public Domain

Did you know that written, scientific or artistic content you create is automatically put under copyright protection under US law - whether you want it to be copyrighted or not? That's not good for a culture of collaboration and building on each others' work - quite the opposite in fact.

Today, the Creative Commons Foundation is announcing a new tool called CC Zero. CC Zero isn't another legal license from the group, instead it's a legal tool that lets content creators give up the rights claims they are given by default and instead send their work into the public domain.

Read/Write article. Go CC!

OER Campus Promo Kit

More great resources from CCC OER: http://oerconsortium.org/campus-kit

Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data

TED Video

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.