Opening Education

Jupyter BOAT

by
Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on some water on top of page ornamentation with an image of the planet Jupiter in the sky.

Collage of "Hubble Spies Spooky Shadow on Jupiter's Giant Eye (color)" by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, licensed via CC BY 2.0 and a detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I’m now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a list of basic information about a collection of works.

Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT) 1.0 (now 1.4)

by
Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on water on top of some page ornamentation.

Detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured license/attribution statements.

Open Licensing Over TV Dinners and Smoothies

by
Image of a TV dinner in a foil tray with different Creative Commons licenses badges on the different food items. This work, CC TV Dinner by Nate Angell is licensed under CC BY, and is a derivative of tv dinner 1 by adrigu (https://flic.kr/p/6AMLDF) used under CC BY, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

An offhand, only half-serious comment I made in the Creative Commons open education slack channel in response to a very worthy question from BCCampus’ Amanda Coolidge led to a new (?) metaphor to help explain the different open-licensing implications between collecting and redistributing a group of works with different open licenses versus actually remixing several works to form a new, derivative work: hereafter known as the TV dinner vs the smoothie.

Read more

Opening Education: A First Walk Through Campus

by
An old one-room schoolhouse in a field under a cloudy sky.

Dist 29 Schoolhouse by Lane Pearman licensed CC BY.

A lot of change is happening in education these days that has me thinking about where it’s coming from and where it’s going. What have been the openings and closures that have shaped and are shaping the social machine of human education?  As I collect research and thoughts, I’ll be posting them here under the general category of Opening Education.

When I want to learn something beyond the obvious about a topic I know very little about, I like to pick a random entry point and just dive in. To start a new exploration on the history of education, I decided to dive in to learn about the built space of schools and after only a short time, I started to connect some rather interesting dots.

Read more