User:Jtneill/Composing free and open online educational resources

Participant notes for Composing free and open online educational resources, 2008.

Content

 * Week 1 - Introduction
 * Week 2 - March 10th: Introduction to LeMill and Wikiversity
 * Week 3 - March 17th: Philosophical Background

Week 1 to 3
I joined Composing free and open online educational resources in Week 3, March, 2008, participant number 70.

So far the main value of the course has been that it provided a conscious entré to Wikiversity. I am now active on WV, whereas I wasn't before.

However, the main catalyst for becoming active was the eternal frustration of trying to do anything sensible in the way of open educational resources as a lecturer at the University of Canberra using the university's tools. This has driven me in further search of how and where I might optimally place electronic teaching materials in future.

I have been pondering the wider implications of free culture for academia, and I guess I'm now a free culture evangelist. For some early thoughts, you might be interested in my notion of 4 pillars of free and open teaching.

I have been active on the wikiversity-l (postings) and WikiEducator (postings) mailing lists this week, and the Wikiversity Colloquium, particularly trying to learn more about the relative advantages of Wikiversity compared to WikiEducator. In the process, I've learnt a lot more about MediaWiki, the WikiMedia Foundation, and the WM Foundation sister projects, particularly Wiki Commons and WikiBooks. I like the wider family of the WM Foundation projects, whereas WikiEducator seems to be an experimental place trying some interesting things, but not the optimal archiving location. I haven't look much into LeMill which was suggested. My initial impression was of a small, WikiEducator-like semi-regional (European) 'teacher-friendly' wiki for OERs. I noted that LM was built on Plone which is written in Python, which provides a powerful platform, but is not as widely available as the architecture which MW runs on (e.g. Apache/Php).

I got in touch with several Wikiversity users and custodians and have received more technical support in a week than at my university in years. Thanks in particular to Erkan, Cormaggio, Mu301, McCormack, Countrymike, User:SB_Johnny, Terra, and Remi (and Leighblackall as always). I lost my IRC virginity on en-Wikiversity - much more fun than my first visit to Second Life! And have added ChatZilla as a useful Firefox extension. One of the projects that interests is me in helping out with the Wikiversity flyers and posters - I want to plaster them up and down the corridors at the uni :).

Meantime, back at the coalface, this semester I'm teaching Survey methods and design in psychology, a 3rd year f2f unit with 80 students. The course teaches about how to design social science survey studies, how to create surveys (questionnaires) to measure psychological constructs, and how to use SPSS for managing data, descriptives, graphing, correlations, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, multiple linear regression, multivariate ANOVAs, as well as how to use effect sizes, confidence intervals, and power. I am going to gradually phase in use of Wikiversity, and wean myself off university systems. This week I created a 10-item quiz on Wikiversity on Linear correlation. I think the quiz feature is very promising and intend to keep experimenting with it. Over the next fortnight, we'll be looking at Exploratory factor analysis.

Another area of interest is outdoor education. I edit the http://wilderdom.com domain which attracts 15,000 to 20,000 visitors a day. But its 2000 pages of disorganised html. Yikes. One day I want to convert the material into something more wiki-like, and I'm hunching a bet at the moment that it's going to be MW. So, I'm keen to learn as much as I can about MW before heading that direction. Some of the material could be converted to a book, so I popped over to wikibooks, and have set up Outdoor Education, sketched out a plan, and had it accepted, ready to go.

Responses

 * I am impressed by the participation level of James so far - he is by far the most active from the group, using all the offered means in a good way. Wish you much fun around here. Erkan Yilmaz uses the Wikiversity:Chat (try) 10:10, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Content

 * Week 4 - Copyright and Alternatives

Licensing
After much ummming and ahhhing, I've recently applied a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license to my work. I almost opted for public domain, and perhaps could still be persuaded in this direction. An Attribution Share-Alike license was also considered, and is still an option. More broadly, what matters I think is that the licensing is copyleft and approvable as a free cultural work.

History of copyright law

 * History of copyright law

Free culture

 * Free Culture (book)
 * Free culture (Lessig, 2002, presentation)
 * Free culture movement
 * Permission culture
 * Remix culture

Licensing and creative commons

 * Licensing and creative commons: Towards a global learning commons: ccLearn (Bissell & Boyle) (pdf).

A Fair(y) Use Tale

 * A Fair(y) Use Tale

Freedom defined

 * Freedom defined