Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time last week to offer up their ideas on their favourite Open Textbook example. You can see all the submissions to the Google form so far.

In conversation with some esteemed peers this week, though, it became clear that there are multiple ways to approach this issue, not just ‘what are the best open textbooks’ but also ‘in which courses would a quality open textbook have the biggest impact?’

So for folks here in BC - what course(s) in your institution would an open textbook have the biggest impact on? This might be the highest enrollment course, meaning savings for the largest number of people, but it might also be the course with an inordinately expensive text, or one with both an expesnive text and room for quality improvements. Please let me know in the comments below. We’ll definitely be looking into this same issue at the system-wide level in BC, but I am interested to hear from specific people/institutions where they think the highest impact might be. - SWL

So I really appreciate the folks who spent the time offering links to what they felt where the best Open Textbooks. In addition to some twitter replies and emails I received the following submissions through the Google form.

These are really valuable, but I also feel a bit sheepish, like I shouted out for feedback before doing enough due dilligence myself (it’s ok, I can forgive myself if you can, I no longer can keep track of the number of balls in the air, plates spinning, irons in the fire or whatever metaphor for headswimming busy-ness you might care to choose.)

Because when I did some digging of my own, I found an enormous amount of helpful material already being produced by people focused in specifically on Open Textbooks (I am but a Johnny-come-lately.) So to make amends, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found, lbeit not overly digested or analysed. Share early and often, right?

The first thing I found quite useful were two sites that laid out some criteria for assessing Open Textbooks. So from a Community College Open Textbook Collaborative page on Conexions I found the following criteria:

• Quality of content, literary merit and format
• Timeliness
• Favorable reviews
• Permanence/lasting value
• Authority: author
• Scope
• Physical quality
• Format: print, CD-ROM, online, etc.
• reading level

while from the Open Textbook project at OER Commons I found this set of review criteria:

• Clarity of course materials
• Absence of Content errors
• Appropriateness of course materials
• Interface
• Content usefulness
• Consistency of course materials
• Suggested changes
• Exemplary features

as well as

• Cultural relevance
• Reading level
• Readability in terms of logic and flow
• Accuracy
• Modularity (or the ability to take apart, mash up and remix the content)
• Universal accessibility (thus permitting all populations - no matter the physical constraint - to access content)
• Color printing and graphics as an available option, in all print materials
• Meet as many specific course articulation requirements as possible
• Ability to transport content to modalities other than print (cell phones, and other portable devices, for example)
• Content should be as interoperable on as many platforms as possible
• How does this open textbook compare with the best commercial textbook available in my discipline, and/or the commercially published textbook that I am using for my course.

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These are all for me useful starting points in identifying “quality” Open Textbooks, a job made easier by groups like the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative providing this list of “endorsed” textbook content from the Connexions site, as well as more detailed Reviews on their own site. The Assayer is another site that is attempting to provide reviews of ‘Open Textbooks’ (understood a bit more loosely, hence the scare quotes.)

The other thing that should have been obvious to me but that only became clear as I began to dig into this a bit deeper,is that in addition to providing cheaper textbooks, we can do a service to students by pointing them to free copies of original source texts that are studied in many courses, especially in the humanities. So in addition to the VAST amounts of academic content being freed by the likes of the Open Content Alliance, and the trailblazing work by the pioneering Gutenberg Project, we can now look for (and suggest to students) free eBooks and digital versions from sites like feedbooks, manybooks, and more!

This is just the start of this for me, so expect more regularly over the next year, but I wanted to give back some of what I am finding, especially since I should have done more of this to begin with. - SWL

Last February, in the run up to Northern Voice, a bunch of us in BC post-secondary got together on the UBC campus to meet and discuss the various ways in which we were starting to use Wordpress (and WPMU) on our campuses. I had some high (unrealistic) ambitions for the meeting, and while I felt like we didn’t necessarily meet those, it did feel like it was a good start to the conversation here in BC that allowed people to meet each other, see what they were doing, get inspired & encouraged about their own work, and share some of the issues we face in common.

I’ve been wanting to do a follow up, and since this year’s ETUG Spring Workshop is happening June 7-8 at the University of Victoria, some of us thought we’d try to organize another “WordCampEd” around that event, given that it typically brings together many of the interested folks.

So, three questions in this informal poll, which you can reply to in the comments below (and please circulate this as widely as you like; we’re not “exclusive” though it is likely to be mostly folks from BC post-secondary attending.)

1. Does this sound like something you’d like to attend? We’re not asking for you to sign up yet (it will be free), just a show of hands to help us figure out what size/type of venue we need to find
2. The ETUG event is on a Monday June 7th and Tuesday June 8th. Yes, I know, weird. In terms of doing this kind of session, should we be looking at:
   • full day session? half-day? less?
   • Sunday the 6th? (might have to be off campus.) During the ETUG meetings (potentially as a proposed session)? Afterhours on either the 7th or 8th? Or the day after, Wednesday the 9th?
3. What would you like to focus on? Do you want scheduled talks? Unorganized collaboration time? Self-forming interest groups? Something else? Think about what we can usefully do in a face to face session that we couldn’t just do online (and the answer might be “nothing,” which is ok too.)

Let us know. I’m not “leading” anything, just starting a discussion. So far I know there is interest from UVic, the hosts of the ETUG conference, and a few others who were instrumental in the earlier gathering have also indicated interest. You should all consider yourselves part of the organizing committee. Indeed, somebody please jump in and take over, I’m happy to help but would much prefer those with a bigger stake in their WP installations to lead the charge. - SWL

I hate to use war metaphors, not only because they refer to a practice I abhor but because they are so trite. But I am getting tired of people blindly accepting the official line of copyright and intellectual “property” as some sort of eternal right, rather than the modern (and increasingly faltering) invention it is. The relationship between “content,” “owners,” “culture” and “folk” morphs and fluctuates over time, and whilst the people who have built up whole industries on selling you content would have you believe that the only role you have is as a consumer, an empty vessel into which they can pour their contenty goodness, it’s time we fought back. So join the not so secret revolution, share your content, use those non-rivalrous goods to make the world a better, more beautiful place. This one’s for you, Jimbo Groomie!

http://u.nu/7awv4

2010 promises to be the year of the Open Textbook here in BC as we turn our attention to helping existing open textbooks get adopted by institutions in our province, help our system partners get involved in existing projects and potentially start new ones.

As part of this, I am really interested in hearing about the best examples already out there of Open Textbooks. If you know of a great example, can you take 2 minutes and let us know via this google form?I promise all results wil be shared.

I know the avant garde of ed tech will gripe loudly about the content-centric nature of this request, and while I don’t philosophically disagree, given existing practices in institutions, Open Textbooks represent a near term all-round win (well, except for maybe the publishers, ahem) that we need to help entrench the philosophy of openness and sharing in our public institutions. - SWL

It has begun

Last week I got to attend the Educause Learning Initiative meetings in fabulous Austin, Texas (my new favourite American city!) Rather than do a “trip report” (which likely no one would ever read, )my boss Paul Stacey made the creative suggestion that I instead produce a video documenting the trip, perhaps using the launch of the NMC Horizon Report as a way to structure it.

I have been playing with video since last summer when I bought a Kodak Zi-6 pocket-sized HiDef camera, so this really caught my fancy. Below is the result - thanks to all who volunteered, my poor video skills do not do enough justice to their wisdom (or beauty - Cole, you hunk! Hope you enjoy! - SWL

Back in December I had another one of my half-baked ideas that I want to run by the larger community before doing much more on it. One day, while reading a wikipedia article, I thought “This is a well known topic (I can’t recall which now) - wouldn’t it be great if students could automatically be prompted that there were full, scholarly BOOKS in their library on this topic in addition to this brief wikipedia article?” (Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE wikipedia, and to get the overview there is often nothing better, but in some instances it offers only a  brief glimpse of a deep subject, as is an encyclopedia’s proper role.)

Now you all know of my fondness for client-side mashups and augmenting your web experience with OER; this passion was kindled by projects like Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet (annotate Amazon book pages with links to your local library to see if the book is in) and COSL’s OER Recommender (later Folksemantic, a script that annotates pages with links to relevant Open Educational Resources.) What I love about these and similar projects is that they augment your existing workflow and don’t aim at perfection, just to be “good enough.” In all cases, what these types of automated annotation services require are two things: 1) some “knowledge” about the “subject” they are trying to annotate (in the LibraryLookup case the ISBN in the URL, with folksemantic - I’ve never been clear!) and; 2) a source to query  (your local library OPAC/a database of tagged OER resources) hopefully in a wel structured way with an easily parseable response.

So what struck me while looking at the wikipedia page is that (following the Principle of Good Enough) the URLs by and large follow a standard pattern (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%page_name%) where %page_name% is very often a usable “keyword” for a search of some system (condition #1 above) and that library OPACs contain a metric shitload of curated metadata including both keyword and title fields (close to condition #2 above.)

So the first iteration of the idea was “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links to your local library catalog of books on that subject.”

Now one of the weaknesses of the LibraryLookup approach was the need for a localized version of the script for each OPAC it needed to talk to. Means it doesn’t spread virally as well as it might and is often limited to tech savvy users. So the next obvious (well at least to this non-librarian) iteration was

“Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links to query WorldCat instead”

in the hopes of performing a single query that can then be localized by the user adding their location data in WorldCat. But… as a number of librarian friends who I ran this by pointed out, WorldCat is pay-to-play for libraries, and in BC at least does not have wide coverage at all. Still, a step in the right direction, because further discussion brought me to the last iteration of…

… “Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a combined LibraryLookup/Folksonomic script that annotated wikipedia pages with subject-appropriate links that instead of annotating with an OPAC/book references, used fully open resources, but instead of OER (which folksemantic already does), use a service like OAIster with it’s catalogue of 23 million Open Access articles and thesis.”

Liking this idea more and more, I then realized that OAIster had since been incorporated into WorldCat (though I must admit, not finding it very intuitive to figure out how to query *just* OAIster/open access resources).

So this is where I got to, but I was fortunate to talk through the idea with two fantastic colleagues from the library world, Paul Joseph from UBC and Gordon Coleman from BC’s Electronic Library Network. And I am glad I did, because while they didn’t completely squash this idea, they did refer me to a large number of possible solutions and approaches in the library world to look at.

While it’s not “client side,” (which for me is not just a nicety but actually an increasingly critical implementation detail) a small tweak to WorldCat’s keyword search widget embedded in mediawiki/wikipedia looks like it would do the trick.

Paul pointed me towards an existing toolbar, LibX, that is open source, customizable by institution, and extensible that could (and who knows, maybe already does) easily be extended to do this by the looks of it.

Paul also reminded me of the HathiTrust as another potential queryable source, growing all the time.

And the discussion also clue’d me in to the existence of the OpenURL gateway service, which seems very much to solve the issue of localized versions of the librarylookup bookmarklet and the like.

So… is this worth pursuing? Quite possibly not - it seems like pretty well covered ground by the libraries, as it should be, and it’s the type of idea that if it hasn’t been done, I am MORE than happy for someone else to run with it. I am looking for tractable problems like this to ship code on, but I’m just as happy when these ideas inspire others to make improvements to their existing projects. The important things to me are:

• approaches which meet the users where they already are (in this case Wikipedia or potentially mediawiki)
• approaches that don’t let existing mounds of expensive metadata go to waste (heck, might as well use it!)
• approaches that place personalization aspects on the client side; increasingly we will be surfing a “personalized’ web, but approaches that require you to store extensive information *on their servers* in order to get that effect are less desireable; the client is a perfect spot, under the end users control (look, I’m not naive)
• approaches that fit into existing workflow in the “good enough” or 80/20 approach

I think this fits all of the above; if you have other criteria I’d love to hear them (certainly these aren’t MY only ones either.) If you do know where this idea has been implemented, please let me know. And if my unschooled approach to the wonderful world of online library services ticks any librarians off, my sincerest apologies - I’ve always said that “librarians ae the goal tenders of our institutions” (I was a defence man, this is a big compliment) and my only goal is to bridge what feels like a massive divide between educational technologists, librarians and, most importantly, learners. - SWL

http://twitter.com/eduWOTD

Back in December I found myself regularly immersed in wikipedia articles late at night (ok, I am a nerd) which would prompt me to post the occassional word into my twitter stream in an effort to share some of the learning I was doing. I find many words can be powerful connectors, containing complex ideas, the exploration of which, especially in a hyperlinked environment like Wikipedia, can lead to an unfolding of a much deeper and broader topic.

But posting these into my personal twitter stream felt a little like a disruption, like they were even greater non sequitars than my regular ravings(!) So I decided to set up a new account, eduWOTD, through which to post a vaguely education-related word, definition, and link, each work day. I say “vaguely” because to me, it is difficult to think about education, learning or teaching without also thinking about psychology, philosophy of mind, theories of knowledge and all sorts of things that impact how we approach education. So while the words might seem a little random once in a while, I do think if you go down the rabbit hole you’ll discover some interesting connections.

When I first launched this, other than a few DMs to friends asking them tweet it if they found it useful, I didn’t really announce it. I simply created the account and followed about 180 people. I wanted to see if it would grow organically, through people finding it valueable and retweeting it, and keeping my own name out of it as much as I could. Today it broke 100 followers, which feels like a minor milestone, and I am breaking the semi-silence to announce it here. At the end of the day, this is as much a personal exercise in capturing words that have sparked my own learning, but doing it in a way that others can benefit if they chose. So I will keep doing it regardless of the number of followers, simply as part of my own practice. But if it is of interest, feel free to follow along, and if you are also passionate about learning and words, feel free to suggest new ones for inclusion too. - SWL

This is another totally off-the-cuff not-well-thought-through idea (one wonders if I have any other kind!) but I do trust that smart folks out there will promptly tell me if it’s a terrible one, which is why I’m tossing it out here before I actually spend any more effort on it.

I want to put to the side ideological and theoretical debates around OER for a second because I am driven by a specific problem - it’s *my job* to help instructors and institutions in BC share online learning resources and in general to promote awareness of OER and their reuse. So I am always thinking of ways I might help people find useful resources.

Now I often make the mistake of thinking everyone is exactly like me, and so much of my effort has been in helping people help themselves. This often takes the form of technological interventions like teaching instructors how to grow their own PLN’s, or my work around client-side augmentation.

But a couple of things have given me pause to reconsider whether there are other ‘hands-on,’ ‘high touch’ approaches I should also be considering. One is the (disappointingly stillborn) Findanoerafrica twitter account that Dave Cormier setup at the Open Ed ‘09 conference. The other was the experience last night of watching a friend wonder out loud on twitter about good resources on gardening for K-4 students, and within minutes seeing a fantastic reply from another friend and OER curator-type which seemed to exactly fit the bill.

So there could be no better example of informal learning networks “just sharing” than this, and I know enough about this network stuff to know that institutionalizing it can be the kiss of death, but both of these did make me wonder if there maybe isn’t some role for an “Ask the OER Virtual Librarian” service to help faculty new to the idea of finding and reusing open resources get off to a start. Maybe a twitter account or email address that would be easy to monitor as part of one’s normal workflow but that would allow a higher touch response. I suppose this is often the role for instructional designers, but in my experience not every faculty developing a course gets the chance to work with instructional designers (and certainly students don’t, and I wonder the extent to which *real* librarians avail themselves of OER versus more traditional sources.) So…

Is this a dumb idea? Would this be tantamount to admitting that OERs (as any sort of distinct thing) are a failure? (Certainly it would seem like acknowledging the current way of developing and sharing them might be.) Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference (and to be fair, it is important to distinguish OER aimed at educator reuse and OER aimed at student self-study). Please let me know. I like this idea simply because when I see this happen in my networks it brings me joy to observe, but it may be trying to squash the round peg of institutional roles into the square hole of personal networks. Wouldn’t be the first time… - SWL