OER@UCT

The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners.  These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.

In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright.  We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely.  Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials.  Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright. 

This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material.  If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!  

We are pleased to share the news that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town Dr. Max Price has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge.  This marks another milestone in UCT’s move towards open practices in scholarly communication.  Furthermore it represents UCT’s commitment to increasing access to education and knowledge in Africa. 

From the declaration’s preface:

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.

In signing the declaration, UCT joins a number of other leading institutions around the world committed to supporting open access to research and knowledge produced at the university.  UCT has joined a global community of educators and researchers who recognize the enormous opportunities presented by the internet.  Signing the declaration indicates a commitment to supporting open practices by:

• encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm.
• encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet.
• developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice.
• advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation.
• advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.

Open advocates from #UCT were all smiles before VC Max Price signed the Berlin Declaration!  Viva! 

 

 

 

CC on Orange by Yohei Yamashita (CC-BY 2.0)

We still get many questions regarding Creative Commons licenses from academics looking for ways to share their teaching materials.  In fact we run entire workshops going through alternative and open licenses and introducing academics to Creative Commons.  Unfortunately we don’t always get everyone in the room at the same time, and so sharing the open ethos widely is still a challenge.

I have just stumbled upon a wonderful video introduction to Creative Commons from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.  The five minute video introduces the need for alternative license, the process of applying the license to your works, and appropriating open content into your own creative works.  It goes on to explain the various license elements, how the various elements can be mixed, and finally explores where one can go to find openly licensed content.  

The video can also be downloaded for sharing in your department from here.  Thumbs up from South Africa to New Zealand!  Will chat about the rugby later… ;) 
 

Yesterday the Mozilla Drumbeat organization launched a new tool to help content users reference openly licensed Creative Commons content.  Referencing openly licensed content has been slightly ambigious in the past with many people adopting their own methods. The OpenAttribute project aims to make referencing of openly licensed content as simple as possible, highly accessible within the browser, and super useful!  

Whenever I use Creative Commons content I always try to include a link back to the webpage where I found the content as well as a link to the Creative Commons license deed online. I have used various open licensing referencing tools in the past, including the Xpert Project Attribution tool which actually embeds the license text and urls into the image - this has been useful for putting images into Powerpoint or some other offline program.  I have also used and blogged about Imagecodr which gives an HTML version of the license with links to the content and the license deed - this has been useful for putting openly licensed content on my blog and other websites.  These tools have been great in helping me get the proper references, but they required that I go visit another site to get the job done. 

Using Open Attribute

What I love about the Open Attribute project is that is a web browser plugin.  So I do not need to navigate elsewhere to extract the code I need to attribute a Creative Commons work.  Once you have installed the plug in (on Firefox, Safari or Chrome) the plugin will automatically sense when you are on a Creative Commons licensed webpage.  

 

In the image above I am viewing a picture from the World Economic Forum.  The picture is licensed under Creative Commons, so on the right hand site of the URL bar a little CC icon appears.  

 

When you click on the CC icon a drop down box appears. 

 

From here you can 'Copy Attribution' as plain text (for documents) and as HTML (for webpages).  You can also click on more information to get a more detailed view of the license panel.  

For this particular image the exported references look like this: 

Plain text reference:
Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 /     World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/) / CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

HTML reference:
<span about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/3613744771/in/set-72157617685533519/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"><span property="dct:title">Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009</span> / <a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName" href="http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/">    World Economic Forum</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></span>

This HTML will show up as displayed below if embedded in a webpage: 

Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 / World Economic Forum / CC BY-SA 2.0

 

The Open Attribute tool makes it really simple to extract references from webpages licensed with Creative Commons content.  Great work on the part of the Mozilla Drumbeat team!  This is a real contribution to the Creative Commons movement! There is a lovely summary of the origins of the project on Molly Kleinman's blog.  

Nathan Yergler from Creative Commons has created an interactive visualization representing the three conceptual layers of a Creative Commons License.  I presume that many people do not realize that when they use a Creative Commons they are in fact getting:

1. A human readable license - which shows the familiar Creative Commons icons
2. Machine readable metadata - that software systems, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand
3. A legal deed - the type of lingo that lawyers like to use in contracts and legal docs.  This protects the content owner from others violating the terms of their Creative Commons license.

 

This visualization is quite useful in conceptually understanding the Creative Commons license and its many useful facets. When you use a Creative Commons license you are not only ensuring your work is 'shareable', you will also ensure your work appears in search engines when people are looking for material that they are allowed to reuse, and you are getting a legal document that will protect you if the Creative Commons license terms are violated. 

 Be sure to check out the interactive visual here.

 

I may have mentioned before that my favourite tool for searching for images online is Compfight.   With Compfight you can search Creative Commons licensed images using keywords specifically by tag or description.  Compfight is great because it usually returns lots of image results for any search.  Here I have searched for Cape Town and uncovered over 11,000 images licensed under Creative Commons that I can use. 

Once you have found the image you like a single click will take you to the Flickr page where the image resides.  

 

The terms of the license for the image can be found on the right side of the page slightly down from the top.

This particular image is licensed under a Creative Commons-Non Commercial-No derivatives license.  This means I can not use the image for commercial gain nor can I make any derivative versions - the image must be used as is, non-commercially.  

Once you have found the Creative Commons image you want to use and you have checked to ensure the license terms are appropriate for use, I suggest using ImageCodr to extract the license.  

 

Select ‘Get Code!’ from the top of the page and copy and paste the web address for the Flickr image.  

Imagecodr will give you a small piece of HTML code that you can use to display the image with the Creative Commons logo bundled together as one.  It also creates the link back to the source photo on Flickr as well as to the Creative Commons license terms.   

 

You can select at what size you would like to display the image.  The code in the box at right can be copied and pasted into any blog or webpage. 

If you are sourcing images for Powerpoint, documents or offline work, I find it works quite well to simply select the image and license which ImageCodr creates for you with your mouse and copy and paste it where you want to have it used.  Sometime this requires a little bit of tweaking to make it look just right.  

Selecting the image and license text.

Copy the image from your browser and paste it into any applicaiton you want to display it in!  

 

We are delighted to share this great story of openness!! One of our recently added open educational resources has been selected for publishing in an academic journal.  Yes, you read that correctly.  One of the teaching and leaning resources which had been shared under an open license was found by a journal editor who wanted to publish it in their journal!

Matumo Ramafikeng designed her learning module on occupation focused conceptual frameworks for her own teaching practice.  Her materials were intended to be used by the students in her course at UCT and met an instructional objective.  We were happy to have met Matumo early on in our project and share with her the idea of open educational resources.  Matumo was happy to make her teaching material open and have it used more widely by sharing on the UCT OpenContent directory.  The material was used in the class as usual but also made available for others to use.  The OpenContent directory stores metadata about the teaching material which makes it more discoverable through web search.  

So the Journal of Occupational Therapy of Galicia contacted Matumo through the site after viewing her teaching materials.  They indicated that they were interested in the material and wanted to publish it in their journal.  Matumo agreed to have the article published and the process began.  The article was then translated into Spanish and published in the September 2010 edition of the journal!!!  According to the journal editors the article would be the first of "The Model of Creative Ability" published in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries (Latin America, etc)

This is a great example of how openness can lead to benefits for people working in academia.  It’s not all about giving it away for free; it’s about operating transparently so that others can see all the great work we are doing.  Operating openly allows us to make connections with other people and have opportunities that would not be possible in a closed system.  The internet enables this openness; we just need to embrace it!  

In this case someone found Matumo’s teaching materials and considered them so valuable that they wanted to share them more widely though the journal.  Matumo still gets all of the credit for the article and can add a publication her list of accolades!  

Congratulations Matumo from the entire OER UCT team!  

By the way, this is big news and the story also made it on the University of Cape Town news feed.  

The OER UCT blog has been quiet hasn’t it?  In fact it fell off the list of top blogs here at UCT.  Although the blog has been quiet, OER activities on campus and abroad have continued and we are excited as ever about openness on campus.  

October brought the return of Open Access Week as institutions all around the world celebrated the changing nature of scholarly activities.  The internet has enabled us to collaborate and share our research and teaching practices with the global community quickly and easily.   Open Access Week is a chance for researchers and scholars to share their experiences with Open Access, explore the benefits of being an open scholar, share what they’ve learned from other colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

UCT joined the international research community in celebrating Open Access week arranging a series of workshops to raise awareness of openness on campus.   Janine Dunlop spoke about the launch of the DigiTool online platform for sharing media collections which is coming to UCT.  Local social media guru Dave Duarte gave a talk about the Open Access movement and why strategically UCT should be embracing this new philosophy.  We also had a short workshop where participants could learn about Creative Commons licences, DigiTool and UCT OpenContent.

Another great story of openness, and one that is well themed for this amazing time in South Africa.  My colleague Andrew Deacon in the Centre for Educational Technology attended the Algeria versus England Match in Cape Town last Friday.  Naturally he snapped a number of photos to capture the moment and remember the game.   A selection of the photos were shared on the popular photo sharing site Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

A week later Andrew noticed that his photo was being used in the Wikipedia article which describes the match.  He didn’t put it there deliberately; it was in fact found by another user, somewhere in the world, and added to Wikipedia as a suitable image to represent the match!

 

We then noticed that the image had also been applied to the page which represents the Algerian national team to describe their performance in the 2010 World Cup. 

 

So Andrew’s photos are being used on Wikipedia because they were licensed with an open license and shared online.  Had he not stipulated an open license, or left that to ambiguity, he would have assumed full copyright.  That would mean his photos would have never been used in this manner.  The Creative Commons license let the person who discovered his photo online know that he could reuse the photo, while giving credit to Andrew in the process.

This is another great example of the potentially unforeseen benefits of ‘openness‘!  Andrew does not lose anything in the process.  In fact he gets to see that his work is considered useful to someone else and is likely to be seen by many more people.  

Update: Cool - Another one of Andrew’s photos has been used for the ‘Sun-dried Tomato’ article on Wikipedia!!

 

I often get asked,

How do I find openly licensed images that I can use in my teaching materials, which I can also use towards the creation of OER?

Openly licensed image repositories are quite commonplace these days.  With a few billion people taking photographs around the world, one can quite easily find a picture to match any need.  As more and more amateur photographers are adopting open licenses such as Creative Commons we can easily find an openly licensed photo using the right search engines. 

My personal favourite general image search engine is Compfight.com - compfight searches through Flickr (a widely adopted image hosting website) for images which were specifically designated under the Creative Commons (CC) license model, which means you can use these images under the approachable terms of the CC license. 

Here I have searched for Fynbos which brings up almost 1000 openly licensed images which I can use in my teaching material and for the creation of OER.  

 

If you are looking for images specific to Health Sciences the Gray's Anatomy database of images in Wikimedia is a fantastic place to start.  All of these images appear to be in the public domain so should be easy to use and share.  

Also for Health Sciences is the database of images from Patrick Lynch from Yale University which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.  You are therefor free to use these images as long as you give attribution to Patrick Lynch. 

Well it’s been two weeks since we launched the new UCT OpenContent website.  We have had numerous visits and have generated quite a bit of buzz in the UCT community as well as around the world. We are still tweaking the site to provide the best experience possible and welcome any constructive feedback the community may have.  

I often wonder how the site appears and is interpreted by the visitors.  I am most wary of the UCT student, who can visit the site and log in, but is not able to contribute be default. 

Here is my call to students, if you want to share teaching and learning resources please get in touch with us via the feedback form and let us know.  We can find a way for you to contribute as well. 

Particularly student groups such as SHAWCO which certainly have a wealth of community based learning resources.  Use the feedback form on the site to reach us.

While many additional UCT academics have expressed an interest to share their teaching and learning resources, we are faced with the challenge of intellectual property and ownership of teaching materials.  Please know that while the OER UCT team believes these to be real and challenging issues, we do not believe them insurmountable.  We will work with you to ensure that your material can be shared using an open license.  We are actively engaging with the Innovation and Intellectual Property Management unit at UCT and they have been very supportive of open educational resources at UCT!

T-Shirt says: I gave away intellectual property at UCT and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!!!  A collectors item for the original OER UCT contributors. 

 

The Centre for Educational Technology is pleased to announce the launch of the OpenContent open educational resource directory at the University of Cape Town.  The directory is the culmination of a years worth of project work, funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, with aims to help UCT academics share their teaching and learning resources on a grander scale. 

The OpenContent directory is a place for UCT staff and students to share their teaching resources with the rest of the world. Often teaching material resides on our computer hard drives, or on our local learning management system-Vula where it is only available to select members of the UCT community. The OpenContent directory provides a space in which to share resources beyond UCT, so that others can use them in their own teaching and learning environments.

Open content is also referred to as 'open courseware' or 'open educational resources' (OER). They are openly licensed educational materials (usually digital) that can be used by anyone, shared freely and adapted to suit a particular educational purpose. 

The global nature of the internet and its ever-increasing culture of sharing have enabled the growth of the OER movement. Teaching and learning resources that were once only shared within departments and communities of practice, or at a cost, can now be made freely available to educators and students worldwide. Furthermore, in this age of abundance where it can be difficult to find suitable high quality resources for teaching and learning, OER offers educators and students access to top quality materials that can be adapted to suit their specific needs.

We are thrilled to share this new website with the UCT community and the world at large.

Visit the OpenContent website! 

 

A couple months back we created a screencast which was aimed at assisting OER producers at UCT in getting a Creative Commons logo onto their teaching and learning material – most often offline yet digital files like Powerpoint presentations and Word documents. 

I made the video available to the UCT community and then on Youtube under an open license.  I was quite pleased when Creative Commons International caught wind of the video and included a link on their wiki page of Creative Commons relevant videos.  Creative Commons representatives in Germany, Guatamala, Switzerland, the United States and Greece took note of the video and suggested we make it even more accessible by adding subtitles. 

Claude Almansi from Switzerland took the liberty of transcribing my voice to audio subtitles so that the video could be interpreted by the hearing impaired.  She then went a step further by transcribing it in both French and Italian so that we now had the original audio plus three caption tracks!

I have uploaded the captions to the original Youtube video file so that viewers can choose to watch with subtitles in either English, French, or Italian.  We intend to add additional language tracks in the near future so that anyone in the world can make use of this video! 

This demonstrates the amazing potential that open licensing has in improving and enhancing online content.  I initially made this screencast to satisfy a local need, but it has now reached the world in a number of languages because like minded people in six countries used the power of the network.  Another great example and motivator for this movement of openness and the idea of open educational resources. 

On Thursday, November 5, 2009, Creative Commons founding board member Lawrence Lessig addressed a general session at the EDUCAUSE 2009 Conference in Denver.

“It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right.”

In this talk, Lawrence Lessig will review the progress of the “open access” movement in education. He will make a call for educators to finally resolve this issue in a way that enables the potential of technology for education.

I found this presentation so compelling and relevant that I wanted to share it with the UCT community.  I have downloaded it and am hosting it locally on Vula.  So you should not have to worry about bandwidth and long download times.  The file is about 200mb and the presentation lasts one hour. 

Love to hear your comments regarding the video below.  If anyone is having trouble seeing the video please leave a comment and I will get in touch with you.  

Locally hosted video (200mb - Right-click save as)

Also available online at http://blip.tv/file/2827842

 

 

20 October 2009  The OER UCT project run from the Centre for Educational Technology in collaboration with Creative Commons South Africa recently hosted a high-level workshop on institutional engagement with alternative licensing and open educational resources. The event – attended by representatives from the UCT’s Research Office, UCT Libraries, Research Contracts and Intellectual Property Services, and other academics active in the area of OER – was addressed by Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Prof. Daniel Visser, who described the OER UCT initiative as ‘one of the most exciting things happening at UCT’.

      

Other presenters in the three-hour workshop included Prof. Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, who provided an overview of the ideological, technological, financial and legal aspects of OER, and Tobias Schonwetter and Andrew Rens of Creative Commons South Africa. Schonwetter provided a practical overview of the CC licensing process, while Rens engaged with the history and place of institutions in influencing access to intellectual property.

             

The level of engagement and agreement around the need to participate in rapidly evolving electronic research and teaching environments exemplified UCT’s commitment to remaining a leading presence in the global knowledge economy.

             

The OER UCT project thanks everyone who attended and looks forward to continued contact and discussion around open sharing of research and teaching resources at UCT.

Click this link to download Prof. Hodgkinson-Williams presentation, On Common Ground.

Click this link to download a pdf of Tobias Schonwetter’s Creative Commons / Legal presentation.