Tag Archives: Open Movement

Generally related to copyleft, open content, open source software, or other inititiatives in freedom of knowledge.

Canada’s New Copyright Act May Be Most Restrictive Yet

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On his recent speech to the Canadian Federation of Students, Michael Geist writes,

After highlighting the remarkable array of new developments for content creation, content sharing, and knowledge sharing, I have emphasized the need for copyright laws that look ahead, rather than behind. In particular, I have pointed to the dangers associated with anti-circumvention legislation, to the need for more flexible fair dealing, to the desirability of eliminating crown copyright, and to the benefits of open access and open licensing. I typically conclude by stating that this can be Canada’s choice and that we must choose wisely.

In case you are unaware, anti-circumvention legislation would mean that a if the manufacturer has implemented a copy protection scheme, any attempt to bypass such a copy prevention scheme may be actionable. This could mean just about anything, simply creating backups for your music (ripping to .mp3) or making your purchased music playable on other devices, could be against the law. If you missed Lessig’s “How Creativity is Strangled By The Law“, this would be a good time to review this important message.

Then Geist warns,

Sometime over the next two or three weeks, Industry Minister Jim Prentice will rise in the House of Commons and introduce copyright reform legislation. We can no longer speak of choices because those choices have already been made. There is every indication (see the Globe’s latest coverage) this legislation will be a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The industry may be abandoning DRM, the evidence may show a correlation between file sharing and music purchasing, Statistics Canada may say that music industry profits are doing fine, Canadian musicians, filmmakers, and artists may warn against this copyright approach, and the reality may be that Canadian copyright law is stronger in some areas than U.S. law, yet none of that seems to matter. In the current environment and with the current Ministers, politics trumps policy.

I just noticed Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing is also covering this story. He warns,

If this law passes, it will mean that as soon as a device has any anti-copying stuff in it (say, a Vista PC, a set-top cable box, a console, an iPod, a Kindle, etc), it will be illegal for Canadians to modify it, improve it, or make products that interact with it unless they have permission from the (almost always US-based) manufacturer. This puts the whole Canadian tech industry at the mercy of the US industry, unable to innovate or start new businesses that interact with the existing pool of devices and media without getting a license from the States.

If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you’ve got the right to record a show to watch later — or to record a politician’s speech so you can hold him to account later — the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.

If this law passes, it will make Canada into a backwards nation, lagging behind the UK, Israel and other countries that are passing new copyright laws that dismantle the idea of maximum copyright forever and in all things.

What can you do about this? Last year Geist wrote a letter listing 30 things you could do to stop the former bil from passing. The specifics may be a bit different now, but the strategies are the same. Geist stresses that the most important of these is to write a letter (not an email) to your Member of Parliament, the Ministers of Industry and Canadian Heritage, and the Prime Minister. I know I will be.

Fight for these freedoms while we still have them.

10 Worst Consumer Tech Trends – Education Edition

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PC World has released an instantly popular list of the “10 Worst Consumer Tech Trends“. As soon as I read the list, it was easy to see the parallels in education. Thus, here’s my educational take on the list.

10. Closed Source Technology – I’ve been an advocate of FLOSS for quite a few years now, in fact, my dissertation had much to say about the topic. While we are nowhere near a world where Linux is ubiquitous, we’ve made a lot of progress through Firefox, Open Office and newer software like Google Android for mobile devices. In my courses, I make use of our Windows and Mac machines, but introduce many open source apps on the desktop. As well, Linux Live CD’s are used often to get beyond the tyranny of the desktop.

While we have a long way to go, my best indication of how far we’ve come is that the terms “open source” and “free software” (not simply a the “free in beer” sense) have become much more common in conversations with my non-techy students and colleagues. I think there are many experiencing a mental shift, however, we need to catch up through user interface and viral marketing approaches.

9. Over-promising and under-delivering: I’m still convinced that salesmen do more educational technology planning than educational administrators. I know of institutions locked-in to student administration systems like SCT Banner for periods of more than 10 years when (I’ve been told) there are other open source solutions available. I hear nothing but complaints from institutional users of Blackboard, people who’d rather learn Moodle on their own than go with the supported, Blackboard “solution”. IBM Learning Village is a common “instructional portal” in many school districts, one that has been abandoned by many teachers in favour of flexible, free environments, services like Ning.

And while we’re talking “over-promising, under-delivering” we can go beyond the issue of proprietary software. Larger, conceptual frameworks like course/student/learning management systems or just about any monolithic learning “solution” (or learning theory for that matter) can be critiqued in a similar manner.

8. Fanboys: “The definition of fanboy (or fangirl) is an individual who harbours a fanatic devotion to something without logical reason.” While at times I might be considered an Apple fanboy, I’d argue that I’m promoting a particular concept more than an specific product. I wrote a while back re: the Apple iTouch and the potential implications for learning. And while I love my iTouch, I was more critical to the fact that I needed to Jailbreak it before it actually became a usable, personal learning device.

And in relation to this point, I’m witnessing a disturbing trend in some parts of the edublogosphere as of late. I’ve ditched several, (once) trusted blogs from my reader in the past few weeks due to their less-than-critical, over-promoting of certain Web 2.0 tools and services. Note to those (few) edubloggers: if you’re on the take, your readers deserve full disclosure.

7. Region-encoding: I couldn’t think of how this applied to education in any significant way. Any ideas?

6. Licensing fees: Put simply, I do everything I can to avoid any content or products where licensing is required. I promote freely available media through such sources as the Creative Commons and Archive.org. As well, I nurture a learning environment where learners become producers nearly as much as they are consumers. At the same time, I do recommend exemplary copyrighted works, and do understand this livelihood model. However, the bar has been raised in relation to what I will spend money on. In this abundance economy, I need a strong demonstration of “value-added” before I ever consider pulling out my credit card.

5. Format wars: I haven’t much to say on this topic other than getting into a rant on the Open Document Format, and others have said it better. Anyone?

4. Proprietary file formats: Most proprietary products produce proprietary formats out of the box. Whether it’s a .doc, AAC or even .mp3, these formats can cause a huge issue, proprietary file format lock-in.

3. Annoying web ads: I won’t get into a rant against web-advertising. I am one of those people that pays to make my learning environments ad-free. For instance, I pay about $20/month to turn the ads off in my Ning groups, and I pay a smaller fee for my Wikispaces pages. For those in K-12, it’s great that you can turn off the ads in both of these services for free.

2. High cost of wireless data plans: It’s remarkable how many of my students have mobile phones. Even when I visit K-12 classrooms, the number of cell phones is high. For now, I can only dream of the possibilities for mobile learning. Our data plans in Saskatchewan and throughout Canada are simply too expensive to do anything creative. And beyond that, we’re not even at 3G yet. Maybe someday.

1. DRM: If DRM has done anything for our education system, it’s helped to nurture authentic, problem-based learning activities in our hacking communities. DRM does not work. It will never work. The system has to change. We are now seeing the power of an emerging, decentralized era. See Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

That’s it. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Grad Course Movie Trailer – Take #1

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Here is the first draft of the movie trailer for the Grad course I’ll be teaching in January 2008, EC & I 831. It’s important to note that all of this footage was taken from archive.org. The use and building upon the public domain and Creative Commons will be important topics for this course. In my opinion, teachers should begin to demonstrate the learning potential of existing archives like these, and encourage students to participate in copyleft licensing.

Hi quality version here.

There’s a lot of this course that is invisible at the moment, but some course information is available at the course wiki. MUCH more to come.

Internet, Democratization & Prosocial Change: I Could Really Use Your Help

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I’ve been asked by a colleague to speak to students in the Graduate course, “Social Justice and Globalization from an Educational Perspective.” These are the two general questions I’ve been asked to address:

1) Is the Internet a democratizing agent?
2) How does/can technology be an tool for prosocial change?

While I have many ideas, trying to come up with answers to these questions by myself wouldn’t make much sense. I would really love to see what kind of responses I can get to these questions from my network. Please, if you have a few minutes, let’s attempt to get something going here. I’d love to show the group how powerful the network can be. Through the content of your responses, and in the very act of responding, I’d like to bring an authentic demonstration of the power of these connections and the strength of weak ties.

I hope to hear from you, many of you.

Open Social: Social Applications Across Platforms

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Open Social is launching tomorrow, and it’s being announced all over the web and via twitter.

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

    “Containers” — social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and…
    “Apps” — applications that want to be embedded within containers — for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

Open Social is very similar to the Facebook Platform announced a few months back, however, Open Social is a standard that can work across all adopting services.

My favorite part:

Open Social — by making this exact same kind of opportunity available to any other social network or container and every app developer and site on the web, in an open and compatible way — will prevent Facebook from having any kind of long-term proprietary developer lock-in. Developers will easily write to both Facebook and Open Social, and have every reason to do so — in fact, 100+ million reasons to do so.

When proprietary standards are threatened, I am a very happy guy.

Reference.

Teach, Don’t Preach

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My friend Peter Rock at gnuosphere always does a great job at voicing important issues that I’m sometimes weary to touch. Peter is confrontational on many important issues of freedom, such this one.

Peter reacts to a post from Teacher Jay who writes on his reflections in his classroom as he teaches his students why it’s wrong and illegal to download music content. Teacher Jay writes:

When the concept was explained that they were obtaining a product that they did not pay for and it was essentially stealing from the artist and the recording company they (the students) seemed to understand […]

Peter reacts, writing:

They “seemed” to understand because they’ve been told a subtle lie. What students need “explained” is that they have violated 20th century copyright law in need of reform to fit our 21st century technology. Then they need to see the difference between physical objects and intangible information. Then they need to see how Big Media ignores this difference every time it claims downloading to be “stealing” and that “piracy” must be fought to “protect the artists”. Students need to see that the analogy with sensate “products” is deceptive propaganda used to encourage thinking of copyrighted works as “property” when nothing could be further from the truth.

I may get some bashing here, but I agree with Peter. If you decide to react, read his point carefully. To describe the issue of music downloading without bringing in the contextual issues of corporate power over creative processes (read: culture), and simply telling your students that “it’s stealing, it’s illegal thus it’s immoral” is theft in itself. In very real terms, you are denying your students the liberty and freedom to critique issues of power in our society. Instead, what about being critical of the very idea of “intellectual property.” Or, what about discussing the potential benefits of free culture? No matter how you approach the topic, whether from a copyright or copyleft approach, critical debate on this topic is necessary. The world is changing for our students, there are many challenges ahead, and they need the tools to solve these issues themselves.

Additional note: I just noticed that Downes mentioned the book “The Starfish and the Spider” today on OLDaily. I read this a while back, and chapter one does an excellent job of explaining the need for decentralized leadership, and uses the music downloading developments since Napster as a key example.

Apple, Open Up

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I’ve had many computers in my life. I grew up with the Commodore Vic-20, the Coleco Adam, the Apple ][ series. In particular, I spent most of my adolescent and teen years on an Apple //c, in fact, this same computer took me right through my early University years.

Apple //c

I remember exploring my computer as a kid. My //c had a few hardware issues along the way, and instead of asking my parents to fix these issues, I turned first to my own experimentation. Without any knowledge (or thought about safety), I took my //c apart numerous times and was always able to fix any issues.

So in a sense, maybe this has been Apple’s strategy all along. If you keep things locked up, eventually adolescent boys will want to “get in”, play around and fix things to make them work better. It seems to be working. After all, it took only a 13yr old hacker to unlock the iPod Touch. OK … I’m thinking that hypothesis is quite unlikely.

My New iPod Touch - PerfectioniPod Touch. I must admit, Apple designs beautiful products (even the //c was amazing for its day). Out-of-the-box, I was able to do the following with my new device:

    – play music, podcast and video files,
    – browse Youtube directly,
    – browse iCal (calendar) events, contacts,
    – browse the web via Safari, and
    – use a few other basic applications (e.g., clock, calculator)

Things I could not do out-of-the-box include:

    – checking mail through Mac Mail mobile application,
    – adding calendar items,
    – viewing weather data,
    – using a notes application,
    – browsing a mapping application,
    – checking the status of my current stocks, and
    – add any third-party applications.

The iPod Touch is capable of using virtually all iPhone applications, but these have been disabled. I understand Apple’s business model, and I assume that they are doing this as to not cannibalize the sales of their iPhone. However, in doing so, they are missing out on a huge opportunity for educational uses of these devices. More so, we’re missing out (i.e., faculty, teachers, students) on what this could bring for mobile learning

Within about a week of owning my iPod Touch, I felt that I could no longer be locked down. It is my right as the owner of this device to use it in anyway I wish (of course, without harming others). I understand that it is not within my rights to distribute the code. Therefore, I am not distributing it, but simply, linking to it.

Unlocking and adding third party apps to the iPod Touch is incredibly simple. The process is automated through downloadable software called iJailbreak. There is a slight possibility of “bricking” your device, but this can be corrected through a firmware restore process. Once the jailbreaking process is complete, you will now have many of the iPhone apps on your iPod Touch. Additionally, you will have greater control of your device, will be able to automatically (and easily) install any new apps and also be able to FTP in to your device.

The only thing that was not resolved by the Jailbreak process was the Calendar function, the ability to add events to your Calendar from the Touch. While it has been widely reported that this was a bug and that Apple had intended to allow this functionality, the “fix” shows pretty clearly that this was intentional. Enabling this feature involves nothing more than getting into plist code, and changing a preference to “true”.

So, Steve, why do we have to play these games? The iPod Touch is an amazing product. For just over $300, Apple has designed a beautiful mobile device which features rich multimedia, web browsing, email and data entry. For the price of 4-5 fat clients in a classroom (an approach that is popular in my parts), you can equip 20 students with these devices. There is so much lost potential here. C’mon Apple, open up!

Update: Even an easier, one-step iPod Touch/iPhone hack has been developed. Simply point navigate your Touch/iPhone to http://jailbreakme.com. Read about this here.

Freedom Sticks For The Classroom

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I’m working with teachers in a small-town Saskatchewan school. My role involves getting these volunteers to begin using current forms of technology in the classroom, to research the process and to begin a technology-related mentorship program. These teachers will eventually become mentors to others in the division. It’s important to note that these teachers are very new to technology in the classroom and are beginners in this area.

After some initial conferencing, I decided that blogging would be a great place to start. The following documents the process with the first teacher.

I thought I’d start at WordPress.com. It’s been really reliable, and although (philosophically) I prefer edublogs.org, it has been buggy for me and my students in the past. I found out quickly that WordPress.com was blocked by the school filter. So, we tried edublogs.org. It worked!

We started the sign-up process. Everything went well. But, when we went to check the authorization email that was to be sent from edublogs.org, we realized that the school mail filter rejected the message from edublogs.org. Uggh. We tried again, but first I had the teacher sign-up with a Gmail account. This worked, but we had to choose a new userid and URL for edublogs. But that’s OK, we’re getting there.

In edublogs.org, I had the teacher change the presentation (theme) and the temporary password. When we came to create our first post, I noticed something missing. The ONLY browser on the school computers was IE 6. For some reason, the visual editor in WordPress did not show up. This was another big issue, but at least we could post basic messages.

Next we tried attachments. We could upload files in IE6 in edublogs, but when you went to attach the file to the post, it would not work. Another IE 6.0 issue it seemed. Then we went to embed a Youtube video. Nope, YouTube blocked. Oh, we could get to TeacherTube … but, wow, no Flash player installed on these machines either.

So let’s go through the list of things of issues:

  • Filtering blocked some really important, educational sites.
  • No visual editor in WordPress because of IE 6 (it seems).
  • No ability to attach files to blogposts.
  • No Flash player.

Frustrating!

Solution:
I setup a wireless network (probably against board policy) in about 10 seconds using my Airport Express. I take this tool with me everywhere, to every classroom I work in, to every hotel I stay in and to every conference I present at. Setting up a wireless network is idiot-proof with this tool, and this is by far the best $100ish I have every spent.

While on the Wireless networked, I noticed that I could get to any site using Firefox on my MacBook Pro. As I had a few USB sticks with me, I thought I’d try installing Firefox Portable onto a stick and see if it would work on the school computers. If you don’t know much about portable apps, basically these applications run from a USB stick with no need to install on the local computer. In placing this USB stick into the school machine, I quickly realized that we were now able to do everything we wanted to do including bypassing the school filter. For some reason, the entire web proxy system was closely tied to IE, so when we used Firefox, we no longer had limits. Edublogs.org now worked perfectly on Portable Firefox. We now had the visual editor and could attach files. We were free!

I quickly realized that it would be useful for these teachers to have their own sticks. Thus I purchased 8 sticks (one for each teacher) and included the following apps, most of them available at portableapps.com.

  • 7-Zip Portable: Compression utility (WinZip equivalent).
  • AbiWord Portable: MS Word replacement.
  • Audacity Portable: Audio-editing utility.
  • FileZilla Portable: FTP utility.
  • Firefox Portable: Web browser.
  • GIMP Portable: Imaging editing app (Photoshop-like).
  • Open Office Portable: Includes Write, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw, Math (MS Office replacement plus).
  • VLC Portable: The best cross-platform video player (plays almost everything).
  • Opera USB: Another web-browser. I added this because it seems to have the Flash player built in the browser, Firefox Portable doesn’t.

There are a number of other portable apps which I did not include simply because I don’t think the teachers needed the apps (too techy), yet.

Distributing these USB sticks to teachers is done as an interim measure. For now, this will allow these teachers to get to many great resources and will allow them to use powerful Web 2.0 tools. Teachers will also be able to show their students the resources they choose and deem appropriate. I have dubbed these loaded USB devices “freedom sticks” as this was exactly what was gained from this experience.

80 Open Education Resource (OER) Tools for Publishing and Development Initiatives

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I received notification of this resource from Jimmy Atkinson quite some time ago, but I finally have found some time to explore it.

“… the list below — arranged in alphabetical order — includes 80 online resources that you can use to learn how to build or participate in a collaborative educational effort that focuses on publication and development of those materials. Although some choices focus solely on publication, development, or tools used to accomplish either effort, some provide multifaceted venues that offer communities a space to collaborate on one or all of these efforts. Collaborators can include institutions, colleges or universities, educators, students, or the general public.”

There are many excellent resources here. I am sure many of you are familiar with most, but there were a few that I had not heard of. Thanks Jimmy!

Link: http://oedb.org/library/features/80-oer-tools

Open Thinking Launched

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I posted this earlier but my service provider had a bit of a meltdown, and took my blog down with it.

Openthinking.ca has recently been launched. The idea for this online community emerged from a discussion that Rob Wall, Heather Ross and I had at a recent conference as we tended to our open source software booth. Rob Wall has set up this Drupal-based website to discuss ideas around openness and open thinking in education.

In my dissertation, I defined open thinking in the following way.

Open thinking is the tendency of an individual, group or institution to give preference to the adoption of open technologies or formats in regards to software, publishing, content and practice. Open thinkers critique, question and seek to reject technologies or formats that compromise the power of adopters, especially in the freedom to use, reuse, edit and share creative works and tools. Open thinkers value group-based problem solving and give preference to tools that enable social collaboration and sharing. Open thinkers actively strive to replace adopted technologies and formats with open alternatives. Open thinkers advocate for the adoption of open technologies and practice.

Certainly, it’s not a perfect definition, nor is it meant to be. However, it’s something that appeared in my data analysis and I think it helps to capture a certain view of openness.

If you would like to share or discuss issues around openness and open thinking in education, we welcome you to openthinking.ca.

OpenThinkingBooth

Dr. Couros, At Last!

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I’ve successfully defended my Ph. D. dissertation, and I’m incredibly happy. It feels absolutely terrific to be done!

I have a few minor edits to do, but I thought I would share the (just about) finished dissertation.

The Open Movement: Possibilities and Implications for Education.

This dissertation reports the results of a two-year long research study focused on describing and coming to understand the perceptions and beliefs of a group of educators immersed in open source culture (OSC)

I was lucky to have the help of great participants throughout this study, many who are mentioned by name in the dissertation. Thanks to all of those who participated and for helping me get through this important stage in my own education. I hope that this document is helpful to others, and I expect to have a LOT to say about my findings in the next few months. And of course, thanks to my committee and my advisor Dr. Cyril Kesten for getting me through this.

Happy holidays everyone!