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OLDaily

OLDaily is currently being produced by Barry Dahl (BD), Harold Jarche (HJ), and Gary Woodill (GW).

by Stephen Downes
July 17, 2008

Free Learning
In this talk I combine my thoughts on freedom and free learning with a discussion of networked learning and connectivism. I additional discuss my reasons for prefering a 'non-commercial' license for educational materials. Presentation by Stephen Downes, Free Knowledge, Free Technology, Barcelona, Spain, [Link]

Richard Stallman: Free Software and Beyond
Note: this item should have been in yesterday's newsletter.

One view from the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology - Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008. Recap of remarks by Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, including: a) Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers, b) Electronic book readers are evil, c) Free content for a free life. From the Q&A section - Stephen Downes: should we make it compulsory to share our software at classrooms? does this apply or extrapolate to educational resources? Stallman: sharing should be a fundamental value to be taught at schools, so yes, sharing software should be compulsory, and same applies to content. -BD Ismael Pena-Lopez, ICTlogy, July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Richard Stallman, Newsletters, Books] [Comment]

Sorry, We're Open
Jim Groom responds (along with several commenters) to Tuesday's article referenced in OLDaily about Blackboard and Sakai partnering. Jim is "getting more and more confused with the term "open" when used in the context of educational technology these days." He continues, "Point is that an announcement like this has very little to do with open source innovation, and everything to do with a marketing strategy to linguistically co-opt the term open. The word is used 21 times in this article, and while BlackBoard is working with the IT staff at Syracuse University to create a "dongle" (I refuse to call it a bridge) to connect with Sakai (hardly revolutionary),the actual language in the article is what's important." -BD Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Marketing, Open Source, Paradigm Shift, Blackboard Inc.] [Comment]

Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects
Via Mark Oehlert is David Wiley's presentation on Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects given in Vancouver. This 36 minute presentation covers some of the background on how learning objects came about. David discusses how tags, blogs, RSS and Google have usurped much of the earlier work done with repositories. -HJ David Wiley, Open Content, July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Google, RSS, Learning Object Repositories, Learning Objects, Web Logs] [Comment]

Mandatory IR Deposit As of 2009 for National Research Council Canada
Excellent news that will result in NRC work becoming accessible to all Canadians. From an internal email (with permission):

"[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC's intention to deposit these publications in NPArC."

This is something I've lobbied internally on for years, so I'm happy about this final result. There's no official release yet but the story has already broken on Science Library Pad, Digital Koan, eprints.org. -- Stephen Press Release, ational Research Council Canada, July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Books, Canada, Accessibility, Research, Open Source] [Comment]

Community Curriculum - Eight Days Into the Course.
Dave Cormier discusses how his group of adult learners has developed a reverse curriculum. "The reason i like to think of this as a reverse curriculum is that it tends to develop out of the interests that the students show during the course and they get to record and create the material as part of their daily practice." This is well worth the read if you're considering new approaches to the traditional course. A similar approach to curriculum building, using a map instead of objectives, is presented in this slideshow from Ray Tolley. -HJ Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Adult Learning] [Comment]

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