OER Links

A few weeks a go I put together a resource ("paper") outlining an economic strategy related to Open Educational Resources (OER) and mobile compatible resources. The purpose was to kickstart and provide ideas for the organization I work for to consider alternative models of information maintenance and dissemination. The following links are more or less my list of references which did not make into that paper.

Economically (in terms of information economy), the problem I see with CommonCore as it is implemented in the USA across grades 1-12, is that law and policy affect the kinds of resources being produced and subsequently also shared in these curriculum development co-op endeavors (OER). I think the impact is greater than originally anticipated (or perhaps not, perhaps this is a foreign policy move affecting exports of knowledge). The indirect impact of CommonCore on the consumers of these OER materials, is that when people from other countries consume Open Education Resources, they are consuming CommonCore. Thankfully, there is a lot of OER work going on at the university level and outside of the scope of CommonCore.
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Open Change

I was recently looking at licenses for databases and discovered the ODbL license. This license was pioneered by the OpenStreetMap Project. I was reading their introduction to why the change was needed. This introduction outlined what the change was, what the change would allow them to do, who agreed, who disagreed, what the cost of the change would be, among other things. I thought it was a very open, engaging and confidence building way to move a group of volunteers through change. It allows for more kinds (also different kinds) of product use. It is well worth the look at not only if you are interested in the open licensing of data in databases and why CC-BY-SA and CC0 licenses do not work for data [also as PDF], but also how they are answering the questions of the community as they are moving the community through change.

Selected Works™ & BePress

Bepress is an internet based service from Berkeley Electronic Press. They basically allow a user to display their work. i.e. a Professor’s CV which has a list of publications, those publications are then displayed by Selected Works™ & BePress as downloadable PDFs. These works can then also be described, downloaded, their bibliographic references can be downloaded, etc. Berkeley Electronic Press archives the Documents and presents them in an understandable, accessible, usable format. They have integrated Google search. Seems like lots of Love all around.
This kind of thing would be really good for an organization like the one I work with.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.


This is a picture of a page. See this page live.

BePress has a lot of features, it integrates with a lot of other services too. One service which looked really cool was their service for working with the editorial process used in working papers.