OpenEdMOOC – Nate Angell

From 5R Permissions to 5R Practices

Nate Angell on 22 Oct 2017

Cropped from Open Monumenten Dag 2010 by Jeroen van Luin licensed CC BY.

I’ve been working with open resources for some time and have recently wanted to make a profound shift in the way I think about open permissions, or “the 5Rs” (Retain, Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute) as they are known. TL;DR: Let’s move away from thinking of the 5Rs as qualities of artifacts and instead think of them as tools we use in the activities of opening knowledge practices.

Opening the Citizenship Commons

Nate Angell on 15 Oct 2017

Painting of a sheep lamenting the death of a lamb surrounded by crows.

Anguish by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck in the public domain.

As a part of participating in the #OpenEdMOOC, we’ve been asked to reflect on copyright, the public domain, and the commons and I’m inspired to link these topics to the thinking I’ve been doing on opening knowledge practices (OKP).

One of the fundamental assumptions I’ve been making is that OKP must be centered in public institutions like schools, colleges, universities, research groups, libraries, and maybe in some cases, nonprofits. Why? Because — at least in the US — only public institutions have both the track records to house persistent practices and are mostly aligned with the values that infuse OKP — in their missions if not always in their practices. For-profit, commercial organizations may certainly make invaluable contributions to OKP, but have not shown themselves to have the lifespans nor sufficient alignment with OKP values to be primary stewards.

Why Open Matters

Nate Angell on 8 Oct 2017

Silhouette of a woman against a sky holding her hand out.

Stand Alone Complex by haribote licensed CC BY-NC.

There are many efforts to “open” education and scholarship: open access, open data, open educational resources, open licensing, open pedagogy, open scholarship, open science, open source, and more. But why are we opening all these things?