Licenses can be a dry topic for some but have been key to my teaching. Any of my students and colleagues during the past twenty plus years know me as the teacher who was always pushing the use of Linux, Eclipse, Apache Emacs and other open source tools that use open source licensing. This is an important part of my practice and my tool set and remains so. Read on to get a view on how my teaching has changed to include more focus on open data and open practices.
WWW and Licenses
When Tim Berners-Lee had his first visions of what we now know as the World Wide Web, the key was the linking of data across the internet via the hypertext transfer protocol. He and we want to see data linked so that we can discover data relevant to our work and follow the links from that data to related data or sources relevant to our search.
While doing the reading and video views for this week, I remember back to a workshop that I gave on Open Education Resources at our campus in Querétaro in 2015. Before, during and after that session I had curated various links to share with the faculty which included a link to this Tim Berners-Lee article on Linked Data. In this article, Tim lays out the 5 stars or Open Data, I include a table from that article here below:
★
Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be Open Data
★★
Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)
★★★
as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)
★★★★
All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★
All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context
Another page for a good resource on the five star deployment scheme is 5 star data (the content of this page is available under a CC0 license). That page includes this graphical step view of the 5 stars to help explain the escalation of openness:
Original at http://5stardata.info/en/
David Wiley’s 5 Rs
The 5 star model came back to me when looking at the 5 Rs of open content as defined by David Wiley:
Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
When thinking about open licenses, we can view the 5 star model of open data as enabling the 5 Rs of open content, or perhaps the 5 Rs are in fact guiding or choice of licenses for our data in a 5 star model.
Creative Commons Licences
That brings us to the Creative Commons and the licenses that they provide for us to use with our work. We can look at how each component (or option) of a creative commons license applies to the 5 Rs of open content:
Attribution (BY) – Here we have the base, that one gives the right to reuse, remix, revise and redistribute our work but requiring that credit is given to the original author.
ShareAlike (SA) – adding what we know in the Open Source Software license domain as a viral component to the license. Anyone using (remix, reuse, revise, redistribute) a work with this component SA must also license their work based on the work in question under a similar license. This is similar to the GPL and CopyLeft as put forth by Richard Stallman.
NoDerivs (ND) – This is a way to freeze the work. Redistribution is fine (with attribution) but removes the ability to remix and revise the work.
NonCommercial (NC) – Another restrictive component that can be placed on a license is to restrict the use of the work in question to only noncommercial uses. I struggle when to place this restriction on my work and currently all of my images on my Flickr account use NC.
Licenses to Remix All the Things
When I had that first exposure that I had in 2003 to Creative Commons licenses in a talk by Lawrence Lessig (see my first post in this series), the word that stuck with me most was “remixing”. Larry used examples of musicians during his talk. When choosing which license to put on your work, this excellent chart from the Creative Commons website can help you decide what works best for you and the work in question:
Source: https://creativecommons.org/faq/
As I stated in my post from last week, I was aware of open source licensing models and the Creative Commons licenses over the span of most of my years as an educator. I would like to use this post to think about reach and highlight what I have learned in recent years, how open licensing has had a direct impact on my work as well as questions that I have that I still am searching for answers to.
My Reach for you
Over the past few years I have been working with educators via workshops and my own cMOOC on the topics of flipped learning, open educational resources and innovation in education. In all of these spaces I have encouraged them (or pushed them in the case of the cMOOC) to start and continue to write in their personal space. While reflecting on the writing of this post I realize that only in that single workshop in Querétaro did I specifically talk about the advantages to using an open license for their blogging.
I want to say that my answer is that I do try to reduce the load of “too many new things/tools” that I can run into while working with teachers. I’ve been a computing nerd since the early 80s and I learned (quite recently) to be aware that not all teachers adapt to new technology as quick as I do. Open licensing is more philosophy than technology but getting into the details of Creative Commons licensing can definitely add to teacher’s cognitive load during my work with them.
So when it comes to my reach working with other teachers, I need to re-evaluate how and when I insert the discussion of open during our conversations. I believe that open practices are core to my andragogy and pedagogy and perhaps I can make that more visible in my upcoming sessions.
My Reach for me
I have actually spoke on this before that anecdotally I believe that invitations to work with others as well as invitations to speak internationally are a product of my working in the open. I have not (yet) published a book or even a journal article. I have some academic publishing in the area of software engineering that has generated a small number of references but none of it in the academic areas that I am being invited to participate in.
So I ask myself why I have been noticed? I don’t particularly think my work is novel nor well written. When I get contacted by researchers who admire my work I am at first dismissive and the few times that I have pushed these colleagues about why they say nice words their answers are about how I share my practices, work and opinions of my students in the open. Feel free to dig for more on my blog but I will take this opportunity to point out two posts in particular that I feel speak to this:
So this gets me thinking on the conversation between David and George about the craziness of the academic publishing mess we have and the point that David drove home (I am paraphrasing here): “Open work has more impact since it by definition removes the traditional barriers to access it (the paywall)”.
So my publishing in the open on my blog as well as having discussions in the open on Twitter and other social media platforms must have some impact on my personal reach. Perhaps this is some sort of open and organic Klout score. Whatever happened to Klout? I haven’t checked on my “score” in ages.
Reach of my Employer
I wonder what the stance of my employer is on ownership and rights to my work while at my desk as a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Henry Trotter talks of this in the ROER4D video “OER creation and the policy landscape: what questions to ask“. I believe that I have the right to put licenses on my work without need to pass this through the legal department and machinations of my system but I have a few open tasks and questions:
* Am I right with my assertion that academics (and other workers) at my institution control their works?
* How can I become more active educating and promoting open processes in my institution?
* At a national level, what is the status of the Creative Commons community and how can I help there?
The fact that this was led by David Wiley and George Siemens sealed the deal. Ever since I stumbled across their work a few years ago (more about that below) I have admired the work of both of these pioneers in open education.
You will also notice the ¨redundancy¨ of using Open in the title when it already says ¨MOOC¨. More below.
The Way Back Machine
I have been teaching since the mid 90s; first as a graduate students at the University of Washington´s department of Computer Science and Engineering and since 1995 as a professor of Computer Science at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México.
My formal training is as a computer scientist and particularly in software engineering. I took an interest in Linux as an operating system for my own machines (and later all of my server setups) back in 1993 when we would install Slackware from multiple 3.5 inch floppy disks. I was an early adopter of open source software and brought that to my students.
So I guess in a way I made open software a key to my teaching early in my career. My students from the 90´s still reference my push about anti-piracy and pushing them to look for open solutions. Let me explain why the mention of piracy besides the fact that it tends to be rampant for students. Many of us pirated software during high school and college, this author included.
This is where I make my key point about Open for myself: my open is about freedom (the Spanish translation being ´libre´) and not about the ¨free as in beer¨ (´libertad´) with a nod to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
Open is the freedom to share my work and practices to allow others to benefit from it.
Open is the freedom for others to critique my work.
Open is the freedom for others to build on my work.
It led to my attending #OpenEd16 (blog posts here and here) and in a way #OpenEd15 through the work of Tannis Morgan and the award winning #UdgAgora project that she organized and I had the fortune to participate in via an invite by Alan Levine. You can view my story about this in original form or in Alan´s keynote.
Why did I not seek out this community earlier? We won´t know but I sure am happy to have found these people. You all make me a better educator.
I find it interesting that my first formal introduction to #OpenEd and #OpenLicenses was in Anaheim in 2003. This week I return to Anaheim to attend #OpenEd17 and help coordinate the VConnectingonsite presence of another important community Virtually Connecting.
We are excited to connect with participants at the Open Education Conference 2017 in Anaheim, California! We are facilitating conversations between people onsite and offsite who would like to connect at this annual conference that focuses on multiple aspects of open education.
Colophon
This blog post was publishing use WordPress, images prepared using Gimp and written on my home KubuntuLinux desktop machine. All of those being open source projects
