Monk Quest 4

The dilemma over license compatibility in the OER world (and trying to mix content) gives me a headache and I can tell from reading other postings that it gives headaches to others as well. This dilemma affects the remixing and licensing of the learning objects. It seems to me (and I wouldn’t consider myself to be the most informed person around on this subject) that Web 2.0 tools have facilitated content mashups perhaps more than in other times. It’s simply easier and the tools are more widely available for individuals to create them. From materials I have read, the OER world recognizes the potential for mashing content (legally) and then being able to license the work in some way that pleases the creator (although this is debatable because of predefined restrictions such as the share-alike license).
David has a point when he said

You should next notice in the CC compatibility graphic that there is only one license that is compatible for cross-license remixing with all Creative Commons licenses (and with the GFDL, although the graphic doesn’t show it): the Public Domain license. Technically, this isn’t a license - it is a dedication of copyrights to the public domain. It is a formal rejection of all restrictions, and a complete freeing and opening of content. It is the ultimate expression of the ideals of openness and freedom. So why do we settle for only four freedoms? Why isn’t our goal to have all OERs eventually exist in the public domain? If we really care about ease of reuse, if we really respect creators of derivative works, and if we really want to see the open education movement succeed, we should have the public domain as our final goal.

In Stephen Downes’ comment to this, he reported an analogy that depicts the dilemma.

If you support democracy, what do you do when someone uses democracy to campaign for something that is not a democracy? The question of using one’s freedom of speech to argue for intolerance has been an issue from the first days of freedom of speech.
Your response is to say, essentially, that democracy means allowing anyone to say anything, to campaign for anything, even if it involves the election of a government that destroys the democracy.

Those that live in the “public domain” world where we would like to make content freely open and shareable and relicenseable (no matter what – even if works are sold for profit, etc.), it is difficult to convince the rest of the “all rights reserved” world that this should be the goal. It seems that the CC licenses provide the baby steps for individuals to begin participating in the “some rights reserved” world while still feeling like their works are protected. Because of the radical nature of opening up content (contrary to the messages sent by the rest of the world) these baby steps are the beginning.

While we proselytize to this “all rights reserved” world, it would do us well to level the playing field in a way that we can more openly mix and remix materials with varying license types. I think everyone agrees with this point. I wish I had a brilliant solution of how this is to be done, but the world of Web 2.0 tools will not stop while we try to figure it out.

Next Quest (not sure which number it should be)

Jared, Aaron, and I started looking for resources related to language arts, more to check the feasibility of it. I started looking in the OER Recommender (which I highly recommend) and my hopes grew. When I began looking for resources, I found a very few items that were actually usable because they weren't actually open (even with those license options selected within Google). As I began searching using OER Recommender, however, the materials I found were at least open. As I began looking for materials for the standards and objectives, I have been able to find some. I am not a pro yet, but I do enjoy looking for materials.

When I was teaching my ESL class, that is one thing that made be really excited - finding resources that would help my students improve their learning. I must confess that I was not as careful about copyright as I should have been, but as I have grown and matured, I have become a lot more careful. Mostly I just rationalized that it probably fell within the realm of Fair Use. However, as we are creating an Open Course, this is something that I must be more aware of (I think this is part of repentance, right?).

At first I didn't think I was going to be able to find anything useful for language arts, but after more searching and with the help of OER Recommender, I am way more hopeful. There are people who have provided resources openly. I am really excited by the possibility of designing something that will hopefully actually get used. If I know it is something beyond an academic exercise, it makes all the work worth it.

Reconsidering the NonCommercial Clause in CC

Maybe we should reconsider the default license that we wrote for the CTL and replace it with a By-SA license. One of the moral dilemmas in the use of the CC NC is that the definition of NC is nebulous and ambiguous and one of the things that it really limits is the compatibility with other CC licenses. It severely limits the shareability among resources that are “open” but are not really “open” because of license compatibility (Mackintosh, 2006).

In addition, the same license can have differing meanings. Wiley (2007) “CC [best practices guidelines] and MIT OCW have diametrically opposed interpretations of the meaning of the NC clause of CC’s own licenses.” In reflection on the articles I read about the NC clause, there seems to be a good reason to not use it because it really does prevent the combining of resources especially in situations where they are non-compatible licenses. This also goes against the idea of OpenSource Free Software, which was created to openly share with anyone and the whole worked to make it better, whether commercial or non-commercial (Hill, 2005).

Wayne Mackintosh in response to Wiley's (2006) article regarding the NC clause stated “You may be restricting useful services that would aid the distribution of free content to people who need it most. For example, the NC restriction would not legally permit local community institutions to package print versions of an online OER for resale on a cost recovery basis for the printing and repackaging. The NC restriction would seriously limit the scaleability of distribution channels that cannot be replicated or afforded by public education institutions.” In this way we would be limiting the good that can be done with open content just by the license that is placed on it.

Wiley (2006)said “these additional steps [of trying to convince a licensor to change a license or to grant permission for the work to be used] significantly increase the transaction costs associated with reusing content” and this is part of the difficulties that arise in sustainability.

Möller (2005-2007) in his article, The Case of Free Use, noted “Indeed, to make a substantial profit with your work, a company will have to provide added value beyond what is available for free. An -NC license stops any such attempt to add value; this may be the author's intent...Commercial use can be highly mutually beneficial where it does occur. The Share-Alike principle, while not applicable to monetary benefits, does protect the content from abusive exploitation without forbidding experiments. These experiments, however, are essential to build a true, innovative economy around free content. Especially when dealing with collaborative works, -NC makes such commercial experiments practically impossible, as every single contributor would have to give explicit permission...Prohibiting commercial use except by special permission, on the other hand, puts you on the fringes of the free content movement, where the beer is free, but the philosophy is shallow. You lose much of the potential for your work to be improved, combined, aggregated and shared by those who believe in unrestricted freedom of use. You exchange the opportunity to be part of a dramatic shift in the ideology of ideas for a vague sense of security. At the same time, you give up much of the opportunity to make money the old-fashioned way by making the content in question perpetually available for free.”

The articles suggested that the use of the NC clause really should be about the intent for which the content is used, but unfortunately would be difficult to be upheld in a court of law (Wiley, 2006) but the clause is at the same time a part of what content providers wish to be used. In the case of the CTL, I can see why they would like to have an NC clause, but I question if it is making a limitation on the good that the OERs we provide can do if others are able to use more openly and/or contribute – especially if users “refrain from using NC material” (anders, 2007) strictly because of the NC clause. I am leaning a lot more on the side of BAN THE NC (in most cases) because it really doesn't help the cause of openness as we think it may have when CC was organized. Maybe NC just needs to be redefined, but we need to address the good that this clause actually does. This clause by itself will probably be one of our biggest challenges as we begin to pull resources together for the Open High School project.

The Confession of a Monk

This monk has been a very bad monk and has not done her work as diligently as necessary and this is the confession with full repentance to come. You can expect a full report in the coming week.

CTL Open License

The Creative Commons License has been used by many institutions and faculty members, such as Stanford Law, Harvard Law, Yale University, and MIT in an effort to share their educational resources with others. This license is recognized throughout the world and allows works to be openly shared and modified in a way that these educational resources can be accessed by others.

The Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike (by- NC SA) license is defined as providing users the freedom to share and to remix the work under the conditions that

1. Attribution
If individuals choose to use or remix materials created at Brigham Young University Center for Teaching and Learning, they must give proper attribution to the original BYU Center for Teaching and Learning and the faculty author(s). Please use the following citation format:

Brigham Young University Center for Teaching and Learning, [Name], [OER Title]. http://ctl.byu.edu (Accessed [Date]). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

2. Non-Commercial
They may not use this work for commercial purposes. This means that they may not sell, profit from, or commercialize this work or derivatives of it.

3. Share Alike
If they alter, transform, or build upon this work, they may distribute the resulting work only under the same license as this one.

A Monk's Quest into the Legalities of Licensing

Hmmm…Maybe I should have gone into law when I got back from teaching in China…Then I would be able to explicate a little bit better the ideas that are swimming in my head. Unfortunately, you will have to muddle through some rambling as I try to share some of the highlights from the monk’s reading for this quest.

First, regarding licenses and contracts, The GPL is a License, Not a Contract article helps us understand that the GPL really was written to be a license – it was not designed to be a contract. Therefore it is dealt with under copyright law and not under contract law. In the article, an example of a fishing license is used to help us understand that when we go fishing, we must have a current license, which grants us permission to fish in certain areas, for certain kinds of fish, of certain sizes, and of a certain number. If we are not in compliance with the terms of our license, then it can be revoked and we lose the privilege of continuing to fish. So if we use software from the GPL beyond the terms of the license, then we lose the privilege of using that software.

Related to the GPL (General Public License for software licensing) is the GFDL, or Gnu Free Documentation License, which is used to license other materials beyond software. The GDFL “applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License.” Within the terms of the license, a user may freely distribute verbatim copies of the work, including the license, notices, etc. that are included in the original, but may not add additional licensing terms. There are limitations if you want to distribute more than 100 copies which require that text be included in the front cover and back cover text. If you distribute “opaque” copies, i.e. paper versions, you must include where transparent copies (html, xml, easily editable formats) are located. If you are going to produce large quantities, contacting the original author is always a good idea, although not required. A document under the GFDL can also be modified and distributed. Modifications can include a different title (the same title can be used as the original, but permission must be given by the original author). The names of those that modified the work must also be included with the original authors and the publisher of the modifications must be listed. Then the copyright notices also need to be included. There are a number of other areas such as acknowledgements and dedications that must be included in the modified version. It is also possible to combine works into one work, provided they all have the same license as well as form a collection provided that the works are verbatim. Translations of the work are considered to be modifications, so they must fit in the requirements for modifications (listed above). These are some of the basic ideas listed under the GFDL.

Free Cultural Works, by definition are “works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose.” A term used to help me understand the basic nature of these communities of artists of many kinds is an ecosystem. This metaphor of everyone working together for the good of the system enlightened me as I thought about the nature of open education. We really are trying to work all together. Within this Free Cultural Works definition, the “free” refers to being free to use, free to study, free to make and redistribute, free to make changes and improvements. In this short article, the authors stressed the importance of the terminology used and to not use words such as Open Access or Open Content because they do not carry the same meanings of “free.” The licenses include being able to freely use and perform the work, studying the work and applying the information, redistributing copies, and distributing derivative works. All licenses of Free Culture Works must contain these same freedoms. In order for the work to be considered free, the source data must be available, free format for electronic works (meaning that there must be a free version of a software available (free of patents) to open up the work, must have no technical restrictions, and there must not be any other restrictions or limitations, such as privacy.

Open Source is focused on software distribution and has the following criteria: 1. It must allow for free redistribution. 2. The source code must be provided. 3. Any modifications or derivatives must be available under the same licensing terms as the original. 4. The derived work may require a different name or version number to distinguish it from the original work to protect the original author. 5. It must not discriminate against any groups or people. 6. It must not discriminate against any field of endeavor, or any particular purpose. 7. The rights for the use of the license must apply to everyone that uses it so the product is not closed, compelling others to have a nondisclosure agreement. 8. The individuals who use the software should have the same rights as the original software provided. 9. The software must not place restrictions on other software, so that distributors can make choices regarding their software. 10. The software must be technology neutral, and I didn’t really completely understand this one. So these are the basics of the open software initiative.

Next are the Creative Commons Licenses. These include:CC -by, which provides someone the ability to share or remix the work as long as they attribute the original author and following the guidelines the original author requested upon creating the license. This one is the least restrictive of all of the Creative Commons Licenses. Next is CC-by-SA, which means you can share or remix the work by attributing the original author (same as previous) and it must be released under the same, similar, or a compatible license. The next one I’ll discuss is CC-by-NC-SA, which means that you can share or remix the work by attributing the original author, you may not use it for commercial purposes, which means “commercial advantage or private monetary compensation,” and it must be licensed under the same or similar license.

Finally, there is the Open Publication License. With this license, the work must include the appropriate copyright notice, which copyright is owned by the author or designee. The scope of the license includes that if any part of the license is unenforceable, then the rest of the license is still in force and there is no warranty – in other words, they are given “as is.” Modifications under this license include “translations, anthologies, compilations and partial documents” and must follow the guidelines that follow: the modifications must be labeled and the modifier must be identified and the date that the modifications were done must be included. The original author must be included and the location of the original work must be identified. The use of the work must not suggest that the work is endorsed by the original author. With this license, it is not appropriate to distribute “substantively modified” modified works without the permission of the author. these “substantive modifications” include “a change to the semantic content of the document, and excludes mere changes in format or typographical corrections.” The license also prohibits the publication of the work or a derivative in book form for commercial purposes unless there has been permission granted by the copyright holder.

These are the general licenses relating to open content. As I did the reading, I wondered if I really wanted to be the monk, but by now, I think I do. The process of writing this has helped me firm up the general principles from each in my own mind. I hope I can remember them now.

The Issues of Sustainability

How does a group continue to be able to function after the outside funding and support leaves? In one of the articles I read for this section, Benkler talks of the "common wisdom" that comes from the collaborative effort of sharing resources. As I read the article, I reflected on a collective production experience I had when I was teaching ESL at the English Language Center. The first class that I taught at the center was the advanced (Level 5) reading course. I was able to teach it probably two or three times and as I did, I created a number of materials that I used to help my students as they read the novels I had chosen for the class. I loved the books and I loved creating the materials for the books and was pleased when I used them in my classes. I went on and taught various other courses in other levels and so I passed along the materials I created (many in their digital formats) to a friend of mine who began teaching Level 5 reading. I watched her throughout the semesters she taught and enjoyed seeing her use my materials and was pleased that she found them valuable as I had. What pleased me even more though, was about three years later, I was teaching as a full time instructor for the last semester and I had the opportunity to teach Level 5 Reading one more time. I immediately went back to my friend and asked to borrow back the materials I had given her to use. As I went back through the materials and found the ways she had modified them, I was even more pleased with being able to use them because they were even better than what I had given her. Through our collaborative efforts, we created some powerful materials that assisted a number of students who went through our courses, but it was because of the collaborative efforts.

Sustainability, then, needs to occur within a community of practice when we are working together for the common good and we are creating materials that will assist those that we work with while at the same time being able to create these "happy accidents" when we help others beyond our circle. By participating in this community of practice, we are able to continue the collaboration for the common good because we all see the benefits that come from the collaboration. This not only supports us as faculty, but also benefits the community as a whole. It really does us good all the way around when we're able to help someone else. Creating this vision of collaboration among peers and among colleagues and then among students is what will help motivate the producers to continue producing. It is a way that can help the projects continue long after the money and extras are gone.