Tom Caswell

Listen. Share. Learn.

Category: OER

  • Open Education Tools: The affordances of openness

    Paper list of BBS numbers laying on a keyboard. Top of page says, "Don't Modem Without It!"
    Old BBS list. "Don't Modem Without It!" CC-BY believekevin

    I remember back in the old days, in the early 90’s, when the Internet still seemed like a fad to most people.  Back before America Online started flooding the world with its endless stream of AOL CD offers, and you couldn’t just assume everyone had email. Back in the days of dial-up. Back then, posting something online was reserved for computer geeks. It was a real novelty to have your own website, and it usually required special software and special access to a server. More and more people we getting online, but mostly just to read content. Producers were different than users.

    The advent of many Web 2.0 sites blurred the lines between Internet consumers and producers. Sites like Blogger, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter allow us to easily post our own content to the web. A host of web-based tools became simple enough to facilitate sharing, and the web hasn’t been the same since. Now we expect to be able to leave a comment or a rating almost everywhere we go online – even as we read the day’s new. The Internet has gone from being a one-way street (producer to consumer) to a four-way street (producer to consumer, consumer to producer, consumer to consumer, and producer to producer). Or you could say that we have all now become online content producers. Many online retailers allow users to share customer reviews to help steer others away from poor quality products and towards better values.

    So what caused the shift to Web 2.0? Most folks probably would have commented or blogged sooner if the means to do so had existed. It seems obvious that if there were no comment boxes on web pages, there would be no comments. The comment box adds that affordance, to use Don Norman’s term. The same is true for Amazon’s video reviews and many other new ways we as users are now able to share our perspectives online.

    Now let’s apply a similar logic to Open Education and ask some questions. At the end of a most excellent 2010 Open Education conference, David Wiley talked about what open licensing does for content. He asked us to set aside the digital nature of the content and think about the specific affordances of the open license. I think the idea is that understanding the specific affordances of open licensing allow us to better understand the nature of Open Educational Resources. Here’s a quick list of the affordances of openness:

    • tracking content use
      • keeping track of licenses for reused content
    • allowing practitioners and students to create and modify derivative works more easily
    • providing accessible formats (derivative works) and allowing others to do the same
    • others?

    So how can we make it easy for newcomers to engage? Let’s face it, most educators don’t know or care about using RDFa to embed a Creative Commons license, in the same way that most bloggers today don’t know or care about inserting an image using HTML.

    If you know of software, web sites or tools for creating or sharing OER that are particularly useful and easy to use, please add a comment below. Are the current tools good enough or do we need better ones?

  • Setting the Default to “Open”

    I just started a new job as Open Education Program Manager for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC). My main challenge is getting up to speed with a major project that has been under way for several months. The Open Course Library is taking the top 81 highest enrolling college courses in the state and to creating high quality, openly licensed curriculum for each course. There are dozens of people involved: course developers, designers, librarians, and many other experts. All the challenges of course development come into play, plus some additional things that come with creating a course in the open: content licensing, copyright clearance, and designing for reuse. It’s all there, and it’s a little like trying to grab on to a moving train. But I love it, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

    It’s kind of hard to leave off each day. I kind of want to skip Thanksgiving and keep working. Reminds me of when I taught Computer Science at Redlands High School and let my students create a video game as a class one semester. I had to kick them out of my classroom each day because they didn’t want to stop what they were doing. Some of the other teachers were frustrated at me because my students were so focused on my class. I even found one student hiding in the corner of my room, two hours after class, working on creating his part of the game. That’s how I feel here.

    But it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and everyone else has gone home, so I’ll leave with my favorite quotes/ideas of the week from a recent OCW Consortium webinar on open access in education and policy given by Reuven Carlyle, State Representative from the 36th District of Seattle, Washington:

    1. If the public taxpayers fund something, it should be open and accessible.
    2. “If we are successful at nothing else in the next year or two, let’s set a goal to fundamentally change the dynamic so that the expectation is one of complete openness … as opposed to openness being the exception. We have to change the social dynamic to one of openness.”
    3. Position open access as a cost savings and one of the most disruptive new approaches, to say nothing of the increased learning that comes of this.
    4. Have a clear, simple message about this. This is not a techno-gadget.  Be clear on the value drivers.
    5. Make the financial case for openness in how it avoids duplication and lack of coordination. We’ll pay for open content once, but we aren’t going to pay for it a thousand times.

    Education and Policy (Webinar Nov 2010) from OpenCourseWare Consortium on Vimeo.

  • What Video Auto-Captioning Means for OER

    Ever since YouTube’s official auto-captioning feature launch in early March 2010 (with a private beta back in November 2009), I can’t stop thinking about the enormous significance for OER and for the web in general. It’s huge.

    As you probably know, David Wiley was recently able to convince Sal Khan of the Khan Academy to start using a CC-BY license on his 1200+ educational videos. Since all of Sal’s Open Educational Resources (yes, we can call it OER now) are delivered via YouTube they benefit from Google’s yummy, new auto-transcription and auto-translation features. I have experimented with viewing Sal’s video mini-lectures with both English and French captions. The English audio transcription seems fairly accurate, and the French translation (auto-generated from the English subtitles) has a little more that is “lost in auto-translation.” This definitely deserves it’s “beta” label, but it is impressive nonetheless when you consider it is all auto-generated.

    So what does video auto-captioning mean for OER?

    • accessibility (readable by someone with a screen reader or braille output device)
    • discoverability (easy for others to find you via Google, etc.)
    • searchability (easy to find the specific part you are looking for – i. e. searchable video)
    • low-bandwidth access (if text transcripts are made available separately)
    • translateability (I think I made that word up)

    Once you have an easy way to transcribe video content, several new possibilities open up. While not perfect, the auto-captioned content is definitely more accessible to users with visual and/or aural disabilities. (I just hope future iterations of auto-captioning will allow the content author to invite/approve users to edit these auto-captions, similar to the dotSub model.) But increased accessibility is only one way we can benefit. Now that you have captions, you can search them. Auto-captioning will make it possible to find a particular video on the web, or even a particular segment within a video using a keyword search. Soon you will “Google” through video for a particular scene. MIT is already doing video search (see their Lecture Browser and Spoken Media Project). Finally, raw text video transcriptions use less bandwidth than the original video content, which meets another critical need: access in low-bandwidth areas or places where the cost of bandwidth can be prohibitive. I’ll stop there for now, but it is clear to me that with the explosion of online videos and related rich media, video auto-captioning is a major step forward for the web.

  • OER Access and Accessibility Session Live and on Twitter!

    I will be conducting a panel session on OER access and accessibility in about an hour. It will run from 11:15am to 12:45pm CDT (UTC/GMT -5 hours). If you are not present at the OCWC Conference in Monterrey, you can connect via Elluminate web conference here: https://globalcampus.uiowa.edu/. To join the room, click on the “WiderNet eGranary Partnerships” (first link) and enter your name (no password required). This will start a java download that may take a few minutes, so please allow some time before the session.

    You can also join in via twitter: #OCWC09wsaccess and #OCWCglobal2009

    Here is the page that is pulling feeds together for the session: http://conferences.ocwconsortium.org/index.php/ocwcglobal/monterrey2009/paper/view/49

    Panel members joining via Elluminate web conference are encouraged to sign on 15 minutes early (at 11:00am CDT). Others attending the webcast of the session are welcome to participate or listen in, but please save questions for the end. Comments may be submitted via chat during the session, but please be respectful of the speakers. In case you miss the session we are also recording it, and I will send out the link when it is available. Here are the details:

    Session Focus: In this exploratory session we will discuss assistive technology efforts as well as projects to improve access to OER in developing countries. What projects are under way to improve accessibility and access to OER? How are accessibility and access challenges similar and what strategies might offer solutions to both problems?

    Format: 90 minute session
    Brief welcome and introduction by Tom Caswell

    Panel Speakers, in speaking order (8-10 minutes each)
    1. Tom Abelas (Sagacity) :: What is the future of OER within the context of the future of education?
    2. Tom Caswell (OCWC/eduCommons) :: Overview of accessibility efforts within eduCommons project
    3. Cliff Missen (WiderNet.org/eGranery) :: Overview of eGranery, with a focus on providing access to OER
    4. Ahrash Bissell (ccLearn) :: Thoughts on content licensing considerations and their impact on global access goals
    5. Jonathan Whiting (WebAIM.org) :: Introduce WebAIM efforts for web accessibility. What resources exit for those new to accessibility?
    6. Dean Jansen (Participatory Culture Foundation/Miro video project) :: How does access and accessibility impact the future of  video? What is being done in these areas? Future directions for Miro
    7. Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge University) :: Additional comments on video and access. Introduce Access2OER group (email list) to OCWC members. Where do we go from here?

    Questions for panel members (using chat and audio)
    Wrap up

    Panel Member Biographies:

    Tom Abelas has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, former tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the area of renewable energy, environmental science and liberal studies. Using distance education delivery systems for over 40 years and international consultant on dist-education and e-learning. Edit the international academic journal, On the Horizon, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm which is a foresight journal focusing on education preK->gray with an emphasis on post secondary education. On the editorial boards of other academic journals from sustainable agriculture to world peace. President/Chairman of Sagacity, Inc an international consulting firm in renewable energy and the environment.

    Tom Caswell is eduCommons Project Manager for the OpenCourseWare Consortium. eduCommons is an open source content management system designed specificaly for OpenCourseWare. Tom has also worked on the eduCommons project at the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University. He is a fourth year doctoral student studying open content and instructional games at the secondary level.

    Cliff Missen is the director of the WiderNet Project and an instructor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa.  The WiderNet Project works to improve digital communication in developing countries through the development of human capacity and program planning.  With over 24 years professional experience in computers, networking, multimedia design, teaching, and applications development, Missen oversees the development of the eGranary Digital Library, an innovative way to deliver the world’s knowledge to people and institutions with inadequate Internet access.

    Ahrash Bissell is the Executive Director of ccLearn, the education division of Creative Commons, which focuses on removing the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to open education, digital scholarship, and the growth of the global commons. Prior to his current position, Ahrash was at Duke University, where he was Assistant Director of the Academic Resource Center and a Research Associate in Biology. He has a Ph.D. in Biology (Evolutionary Genetics) from the University of Oregon and a BS in Biology from the University of California, San Diego.

    Jonathan Whiting, M.S., is the director of training and evaluation at WebAIM. WebAIM is a non-profit organization based at the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. It is one of the most influential Web accessibility groups in the nation. As an instructional designer, Jonathan has published dozens of articles, tutorials, and other instructional resources. He has also traveled extensively to train hundreds of higher education Web developers, content creators, and other professionals who develop or maintain Web content. In addition to training, Jonathan has also provided Web accessibility evaluations and reports for several higher education institutions.

    Dean Jansen is Outreach Director for the Participatory Culture Foundation. Dean is currently focused on co-organizing the Open Video Conference, which is slated to take place in New York on June 19-20. The conference will be asking big questions about the future of video; for instance, how do we effectively preserve our right to free expression in a world of consolidated commercial video gateways? Additionally, Dean helped draft the Open U proposal, which would be part of a fully open, end-to-end distribution system for educational resources. The Participatory Culture Foundation is a non-profit organization with a media reform mission. They foster bottom up economies and promote openness and decentralization in the online media ecosystem. Miro, the free and open source HD video player and distribution system, is their flagship project—you can check it out at: www.GetMiro.com

    Dr Björn Haßler (University of Cambridge) has been working on educational issues for the last 8 years, including research on diagnostic testing for undergraduate mathematics education, widening participation and access through ICT, as well as volunteer engagement in media production. Since 2006 Björn holds a senior research associate position at CARET, working on educational aspects of new media. He has extensive experience in teaching multimedia, both within Cambridge and internationally, and has contributed to a number of best practice guidelines, including UNESCO National Commission reports. Further information at http://www.sciencemedianetwork.org