Open Access

The question I have from the discussion today: Gideon Burton noted that peer review is one bottle neck in getting knowledge from scholars to the public. How can we further promote the distribution of available open access materials from peer-reviewed journals while maintaining quality?

Personal Experience: During law school, I was a member of the BYU Law Review’s Editorial Board. My position required me to review professional submissions and select what the journal would publish and what it would not. I had to open a new, separate e-mail account simply to manage all of the submissions we received. Even if that position would have been full-time and even if I had not required sleep, food, etc. during law school (which some of my classmates did not seem to require by the way), I could not likely have read the entirety of each submission. We accepted and published a spoonful of the lake of articles we received.

We justified the limited number of articles we published because of (1) restraints on the number of editors who could prepare the article for publication; (2) the cost of printing the journal; and (3) we only wanted high-quality articles associated with the BYU name. While we have largely overcome the second hurdle by publishing the journal online (we still print off copies for the library), I wonder how to increase publication of available knowledge while maintaining quality of information.

Random Note: Gideon Burton mentioned "Dance Your PhD" on YouTube. I looked at a few selections. Genius.... :)

Open Content:

First of all, I cheered (internally) when I saw David Wiley's name on the Wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content

Second, here are a few favorite references I found for future reference on Open Content:

• This is the link to Dr. Wiley's blog, containing what he terms some of the "better things I've written." http://opencontent.org/blog/articles
• Example of Open Content include C-Span's decision to share its archives available: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/arts/television/16cspan.html

Third, a personal story:

My mother recently sought my opinion regarding the legality of sharing publicly-available content (e.g. videos, music) in her classroom. She frequently wanted to drive a point home with a pertinent clip, and she was afraid of doing something wrong or, worse, get herself or her school into legal trouble. After this occurred with my mother, I realized there are a large number of educators, etc. who have these same questions and who are not familiar with copyright law, Open Content, etc. and I wanted to provide them with basic training on this topic.

Open CourseWare

Open CourseWare has a number of uses. One idea that draws my attention is that Open CourseWare could facilitate a revolution in the way in which class curriculum is presented. A current theory percolating through education world is the concept of a "flipped classroom." Advocates of the flipped classroom include proponents of Khan Academy, Mazure of Harvard, and others. Khan provided the following explanation, students could download instructional videos, etc. (e.g. from Khan Academy's website) and teachers could then skip their lecture and use class time to apply the content learned.

In this way, students may absorb the uniform lecture content of "classwork" at home at their own pace and with as many repetitions as necessary. Likewise, students may do their "homework" in class where they have greater resources (e.g. teacher, classmates, T.A.s where available) while they work to apply the content. Open CourseWare facilitates such a flipped classroom atmosphere by providing online content for use for (1) a set of specified, intended student beneficiaries (e.g. Open High School of Utah), (2) a formal group of students/teachers using the available materials for the flipped classroom (e.g. Khan Academy), and (3) any informal learning environment.

Open Educational Resources

Definitions: At first, OER seemed like a rather straightforward matter to define and explain. Research showed, however, that there are a variety of definitions and foci. For example, Guntram Geser claims there is no established definition and, instead, provided three core elements for OER (link provided below):

• that access to open content (including metadata) is provided free of charge for educational institutions, content services, and the end-users such as teachers, students and lifelong learners;
• that the content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed;
• that for educational systems/tools software is used for which the source code is available (i.e. Free Software/Open Source software) and that there are open APIs and authorisations to re-use Web-based services as well as resources (e.g. for educational content RSS feeds).

Geser, Guntram (2007-01). "Open Educational Practices and Resources. OLCOS Roadmap 2012". Salzburg, Austria: Salzburg Research, EduMedia Group. p. 20. Retrieved 2010-11-06.

Comparing OER to the Reformation: As a former history major, I enjoyed David Wiley's comparison of policies surrounding the initial distribution of vernacular copies of the Bibles to current policies surrounding open resources. This is an interesting choice of comparisons. In some ways, I can understand the threat the Catholic church felt towards vernacular copies of the Bible more than I can understand the current fear of open resources.

It seems that reverting to an "opt-in" copyright system rather than our current "opt-out" system would allow protection for those who would like to profit from their work. At the same time, this would foster the use of the vast remainder of the resources for educational purposes (e.g. share, modify, combine, re-purpose content).

I wanted to memorialize a few resources I discovered regarding open source to assist with future explanations regarding what open source and the Open Source Initiative entail. The results are below, including, a key link to an old picture of of Richard Stallman I unearthed. Enjoy!

Layman’s Definitions

o Source Code: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/source_code.html

o Open Source: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question435.htm

Open Source Initiative: http://www.opensource.org/

Picture of Richard Stallman (before the beard and long hair): http://www.google.com/imgres?q=richard+stallman&hl=en&sa=X&rlz=1C1LENP_enUS455US455&biw=1627&bih=935&tbm=isch&prmd=imvnso&tbnid=Na1STSwEyoGAZM:&imgrefurl=http://techrights.org/2009/09/26/richard-stallman-smeared-for-truth/&docid=dhLtrwh7HfaPMM&imgurl=http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/richard-stallman-young.png&w=480&h=332&ei=wmsQT7OkB8OOiALarfTYDQ&zoom=1