Just saw this on the BERLiN Blogsite and was very impressed:
http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/cczss1/files/-1/825/OER+Terms+of+Use.doc
We will need to develop something very similar shortly and I think this would make a very good starting place.
eib
Very useful online session today with Simon Ball from TechDis. Full of useful and sensible material for our partners about making our OER resources as universally open to everyone as possible.
The six videos used in the presentation are openly available from the following URLs
Happy viewing!
Ed Bremner popped over to University of Wales – Newport on the 22nd of December for a meeting with Prof Simon Haslett and Jonathan Wallen, who has joined the team at Newport to work on the re-purposing and copyright clearance of their resources.
The meeting started with Ed giving a review of progress and the learnings made by the other partners on which it is hoped that Newport will be able to build. Then some time was spent reviewing the proposed materials earmarked for release. On the whole, it was good too see that Newport’s content does not rely so heavily on Published Diagrams or other 3rd party copyright as does other partners materials and therefore will hopefully be a bit easier to copyright clear.
Much of Newport’s material is in the form of either videos or images and they intend to store this material on either YouTube or Flickr and use JorumOpen as a sign-post towards these resources.
This should be a very interesting approach and seems to sit very well within the intentions of the OER project. It is bound to bring up other elements to research; for instance, how do we tag the resources in such a way that their metadata can stay with them after they are downloaded from their repository.
With Images, this could easily be done using internal file-tagging systems such as XMP, EXIF & IPTC. Further discussion around image tagging considered how we might be able to insert geo-tags on the images to extend their usefulness. This may also be a useful way to explore the pedagogy of using geo-tags as a whole.
So a very interesting meeting and a great way to round up work on the Climate Change Project for the year.
eib
The latest version of the C-change Rights Managment Workflow is now available on the Documents pages of this website.
It is available in two forms, both as an interactive mindmap in PDF and as a simple image of the mindmap.
c-change_rights_management_workflow_player 3b
c-change_rights_management_workflow_3b
To fully view the interactive version of the mindmap, you will need to click on the (+) on each arm to open it up. To view the text within the arm, simply hover your mouse over the text icon on the arm you wish to read. Do be aware that there is another part of the mindmap working its way up from the bottom, which you also need to open to have the full map.
It is still in a pretty draft form, but getting better – any thoughts would be appreciated.
eib
Attended the HEA Scottish Practitioners’ Forum. During discussion on current and upcoming issues, that of ESD and citizenship (and graduate attributes for the 21st C) were high on the agenda.
The C-change project was introduced, and participants were particularly interested in the ‘process’ part of the project, i.e. the investigation of copyright etc.. Colleagues from English, Law and Psychology in particular were aware of the potential pitfalls, and very pleased that these were being properly tested and investigated, rather than just ‘assuming that things would be ok’ until proved otherwise. Good feedback for our approach.
The Law colleague mentioned SCRIPT – a law and technology research project at the University of Edinburgh specialising in intellectual property and law as a possible contact for expertise. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/
Mark Treagust and Ed Bremner went down to Southampton for this one-day event on IPR for the OER, organised by the HumBox Project http://humbox.eprints.org/
It was a good oportunity to hear about how things are going at Southampton and the LLAS Subject Centre, with details from Alison Dickens about the HumBox project and from Erika Corradini about the ongoing practical issues of IPR in their OER project. This was followed by a lively key-note address from Hugh Davis (despite having a broken leg and dislocated shoulder) giving us a better understanding of Southampton’s EdShare project.
In the afternoon Diana Galpin from the Research and Innovation Services at Southampton gave us an overview of the IPR law that effects us in the OER projects and wisely warned against taking a too ‘easy-going’ approach to our clearance, especially of any high-risk items belonging to commercial organisations. They are out there….and watching the OER closely. If a project steps too far out of line, there is always the chance that somebody will become the basis of a test-case.
Before the day finished with a panel session there was time to hear from IT third year student Will Fyson, who for his major project is in the process of developing a tool that takes a Powerpoint file and strips out the images and allows you to either copyright clear them or find alternatives (with a search in Flickr Commons). When you are finished the cleared or new images are put back into the Powerpoint file. Very clever and slick. I look forwards to hearing more about this project. I would like to see it be able to read and write the XMP/IPTC image-file tagging/metadata so you could see other copyright owners and mark images as CC (if they are!).
Their were a couple of off-key chords in the day…
I was a bit worried in the panel discussion, when:
We were discussing how much easier it would be if the copyright clearance was done at the time of creating the resources, but pity this was outside remit of current OER Programme.
When someone from the OU, said that wouldn’t really work as in their experience it took 6 months to get the clearance (I think OPENLearn can do it in less) anyway. I am not sure I would disagree with this…..but on the other hand, we just don’t have 6 months.
Also when discussing the problems with asking publishers for open release of their diagrams and other copyrighted material, someone from JISC Legal suggested we (the OER program) were just 3 years too early …..again I think that may well be right, but we just don’t have 3 years to wait.
On the whole I am still surprised that others don’t seem to find this as worrying as I do!
eib
C-change partner – Professor Simon Haslett from University of Wales – Newport has just launched the Google Earth Climate Change Education online resource last week. Here at the GEES Subject Centre, we are delighted to see the results of this project that we funded. As a result of this Simon will be writing a paper for Teaching Earth Sciences, present an exhibit at Techniquest in Cardiff, and he gave an interview on Radio Wale’s Science Cafe programme that was broadcast last Sunday.
The press release can be seen at: http://www3.newport.ac.uk/news/displayStory.aspx?story_id=438
The online resource is available at: http://idl.newport.ac.uk/celt/sandsoftime/
You can list to the radio interview, until next Sunday, at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p4ymq/Science_Cafe_06_12_2009/
Simon’s bit is just after 22 minutes into the programme.
There is also a brief description on the BBC website at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/sciencecafe/updates/20091206.shtml
I hope we will be able to persuade Simon to come onto the Climate Change Forum to tell us a little more about the pedagogy behind the project in the near future.
eib
We are mid way through the C-change project so yesterday (Dec 7th) we held a meeting with Subject Centre colleagues to take stock of what we have achieved so far, what issues we have and what is still to come. After an overview of the project so far we focused on one of our big concerns – securing clearance from publishers. As is evident from other blog posts here it’s something that has been preoccupying some of our partners and us for some weeks now. When requesting clearance we are getting one of the following:
a) our partners get caught in a loop between the online clearance request systems that, once you mention CC, refer you to a generic email – the response from which often sends us back to the online clearance request system.
b) we get a no
c) we get an ambiguous yes (ish)
d) we have yet to get a clear yes
Because of the short time scales inherent in this programme at some point very soon we may need to change our approach and spend our energy on sourcing an alternative or, more reluctantly, putting in a link / ref to the item in a publication (at least for now).
I’m curious as to why this project seems to be getting so many issues with this while some of the other similarly structured or cognate subject strand projects are only seeing a relatively small amount of this kind of problem. Is it the theme we have chosen, or that we just happen to have a lot of level 3 material, either of which might mean our resources contain more figures and diagrams from current or recent research? Speculation at this point but worthy of further investigation.
Here is the link to “Prezi” presentation from the session: http://prezi.com/icqlsitxhx88/
Partners, especially Southampton and Keele are right in the middle of the copyright clearance process at the moment and to be honest, the news is ‘mixed’ at best.
On one hand we have been told by SCORE and others that Elsevier is freeing up its approach to allowing its material to be used in OER…..but then we find that our attempts to ask for clearance are being channelled through their web-based ‘Rights-Link’ software, which asks us for a payment of £106.00 for the 8 figures required.
The big challenge here is getting through to the right person. It may well be that ‘Elsevier’ and other publishers would be happy to release some of their copyrighted material on CC license, but we don’t seem to be able to get past the ‘Rights-Link’ software to find anybody to actually ask. Attempts to get in touch are simply diverted to ‘Rights-Link’, which is obviously not able to provide the clearance, so diverting us back to contacting by email which is then often simply ignored or receives the following:
Elsevier will only reply to reuse request emails if the work you wish to use content from is not available online. No response will be made to messages involving publications available online.
Again, we hear that the British Geological Society is working towards freeing up their material:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8398451.stm
They have made their data and resources open access – free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. The description is here:
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/about/copyright/non_commercial_use.html
But again we will have to see how this works out in practice. Really, unless the permission allows use, automatically, without contact, we are unlikely to of really moved forwards far.
Meanwhile, although we have had some successes in clearance, it would seem that we have also had a larger number of failures than we had hoped, including: Palgrave MacMillan and Blackwells.
Sooner or later, we are really going to have to think about how best to take this forwards and whether we may have to accept that putting in links to the resources may be the only viable way forwards.
eib
Last Thursday saw me attend the above conference in Edinburgh. The conference programme summarized the event as follows:
“We are now halfway through the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable
Development. The Decade aims to promote education as a basis for a more sustainable society and to integrate sustainable development into education at all levels and all areas of life. The Scottish Parliament passed the Climate Change Act in June. This will require wide-ranging and significant responses from further and higher education if we are to meet the Government’s targets for a low carbon future.
This conference will consider the contribution that Scotland’s colleges and universities are making to the targets in the Climate Change Act and the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.”
The afternoon session had two hour ‘workshop’ sessions, one of which looked at the issues of integrating ESD into the curriculum. Two Subject Centres, GEES and Psychology, presented on their work on ESD. As a major part of our work in this area, I introduced the C-change project, in particular the CoP on the pedagogy of climate change and sustainability. I invited participants to visit the website and get involved with the CoP.