OLDaily

Actually, the UNESCO Recommendation Makes Most OER Impossible
David Wiley, toward openness, 2020/03/10

This is the first of a series being posted this week by David Wiley. He is again discussing the UNESCO OER definition and maintaining his view that it "makes most OER impossible". He argues that the UNESCO definition requires a permission it cannot grant - no-cost access. He also argues that it is missing a permission that needs to be granted - permission to make a copy.

This is David Wiley tying himself in knots for no good reason. The first is essentially the 'non-commercial' clause. If you charge money for it, it's not an OER, and if it's an OER, you can't charge money for it. That's really simple. As for the second, as Wiley himself states, "without permission to make a copy, it is quite impossible to exercise the permissions to adapt, re-use, and redistribute." Well, right. Thus the permissions to adapt, re-use, and redistribute include the right to make a copy. So the right that OER needs is granted, because any other interpretation is nonsense.

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Subscribe to Open: A Mutual Assurance Approach to Open Access
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2020/03/10

I just skipped past this item because it seems like such an obviously bad idea for institutions, but then I say that Jisc announced its support, so I dredged this item from the discard pile. Here's the model: "if all libraries continue to subscribe, then not only will those libraries have access to the content for their users, but Annual Reviews will also make the content openly available to non-subscribers as well and apply a CC-BY license to the articles. Second, if all libraries do not continue to subscribe, then those that do will still receive the discount — as well as access to the content — but the content will not be made available to non-subscribers." Stop subscribing and it's no longer open access? That's some lock-in! I can hear the publishers now (in their best villain voice): "It's not us you're hurting, it's the community."

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What is education’s responsibility to society? An open, futures course
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2020/03/10

This is an announcement for an upcoming MOOC being offered by George Siemens and Dave Cormier " on the SSHRC challenge “Truth under Fire in a Post-Fact World,” and the question of how education should respond." Nice topic. Dave Cormier writes, "I used the word ‘host’ earlier deliberately. This course will not be taught by George or I. We are looking to host a conversation, and test out a model for futures discussions that will, hopefully, be an interesting way of looking at how we do strategy for education."

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Build resilience in children to help them stay safe on social media
Shima Islam, UNICEF, 2020/03/10

This article overviews a UNICEF report (72 page PDF) on building resilience in children to help them use social media safely (which, probably, is the only effective approach in the long term). The focus is on the use of online media by young people in east Asia, and there's quite a lot of background on what they're using and what they're doing, as well as a discussion of data privacy. The report also includes a good discussion of potential risks and harms, especially those specific to the region. There are four major recommendations:

1. Improve support for digital parenting, and parenting in a digital age
2. Foster online and offline resilience in children
3. Ensure that messaging and responses by teachers and adults are based on evidence of patterns of use, and what works
4. Technology companies should make profiles private by default, change default options for new contacts to ‘friends of friends’, and block photos from being sent by people outside contact lists.

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