Evaluation and Feedback

I just need to say that this course was just excellent. Maybe creating audio and video was that important but on the other side, If we´ve didn´t doine this we wouldn´t need to upload stuff under CC restrictions. One won´t learn if You don´t practise it and that is the most important part of this course, to create and understand how important it is to think different and i would say NEW.

Thank´s for a great course...i especially like week number 3: Philosophical Background. That was really enlightening.

Thanks again!

/Janne

Week 8-sharing Video

Boy am I late :-(. Anyway...now is the time otp finish this splended course and I start with embedding a thoughtfull movie from teacherTube about the relation between USA and India and China.


Here is my film that´s just a short introduction to the Swedish language.


And here is the result with Subtitles:



When posting to YouTube there wasn´t any alternative for posting the movie as a creative commons material. One might wonder why that´s so? Other video sites offer this and this indicates from Youtube that copyrights aren´t that important. It seems like there are a big missunderstanding about what copyright means and does not mean and therefore some just ignore these rights.

If you would like to use a material that´s not under CC one get´s a lot of trouble. At our university a lot of our teachers uses material that are copyright-protected and it´s very difficult to get the authors permissions, if you´re not willing to pay a lot. I have tried several times to get permissions from publishers and a would say that in 99% of the cases they say NO letting teachers using the materials in education.

Week 6 - April 14th: Taking and Sharing Pictures

This weeks assignment was also fun...but using Odeo´s service wasn´t an alternative because it was too complicated so I went to Switchpod instead. It was easy and I liked the interface of this service. You´ll find my Podcast on this link but it is also embedded at this page.

Week 6-taking and sharing pictures is just fun

Well...I´m really late with my assignements but I will catch up becuase now it´s just fun. I just uploaded my picture at Wikimedia Commons (se picture and information here). I also uploaded a bunch of photos, tagged and mapped them (se those at Flikr here).

I´m quite satified with my picture taken today in a clear and warm springday in the afternoon. I live right next to this pond.

I also found some other photos from Falun. The pond above are part of a World Heritage area connected to Falun Copper Mine. There where several hotos from the mine area but none from this pond that is quite important in the mines history.

Anyway. It´s feels in a way good to share pictures under the Creative Commons license and with the knowledge of copyright that we´ve read earlier in this course one understands that this is the right way to share our digital information. I´m looking forward to se what Wikimedia Commons will think about my description of the pond :-)

Week 5-WikimediaF: when the impossible can be done

I´m still amazed about the Wiki idéa and after reading the Interview with Beesly, Bauer and Naoko many of My notions about Wikipedia was bound to be reevaluated. When I read about the organisation and all those people that are involved in the monitoring of the information at Wikipedia one understand that this isn´t a little project for enthusiasts, it´s a huge organisation and controll system. My impression and conception was also that the more people engaged in a article the better. But when reading the interview they all say that this isn´t the fact. There is a interesting idea that some of the contributors are "experts". My question in...what defines an expert in Wikipedia....what do I have to be to become an expert?

In the article "The Hidden Order of Wikipedia" they examine the procedural side of Wikipedia which is interesting. One might think that the rise of articles and later Wikipedias strucure could be somewhat anarchistic but one understands later on that rather than encouraging anarchy, many aspects of wiki technology lend themselves to the collective creation of formalized process and policy. I think that many still think about Wikipedia as a place for youngsters where anything can happen...and happens where there is no control.

Finally I got acquainted with the Wikimedia Projects page and found Wikisource that I never discovered before. It´s similar to another project called Project Gutenberg and the Swedish initiative Projekt Runeberg which all has in purpose of publishing original texts on the web. Whith this initiatives We are in the beginning of liberating litterature and information that can make a significate impact on education. Wikisource has as a criteria that there shouldn´t be any copyright protected sources at Wikisource. In Sweden there´s now a new site that does the oposite and is named Student Bay in purpose of spreading copyprotected litterature but with commersial purposes.

Anyhow...all this Wiki-projects are just in the beginning in a new era of liberating information and in another ten years our education-resources will be more accessible and therefore it´s so important that the Wikimedia Foundation are creating all this project so that the commersial actors needs to reevaluate there approach to there costumers and the educational institutions.

Copyright och copywrong?

It´s quite understandable that the printing press and the possibility of copying litterature and other works easily makes people wan´t to regulate this. The issue here concernes money...as always. It´s so obvious that the easier it´s to copy somthing the regulations are getting stronger and stronger. We see this all to clear today when filesharing has become a culture and the movie and music companies are trying to prosecute every other little youngster that has donwloaded a movie och CD. It wasn´t that easy before to copy musik and movies when we had casette tapes and VCR´s. This is what interests me and when reading the history of copyright one can notice that technical advances hurry up´s the need of regulation. After listening to Lawrence Lessig´s presentation it´s clear that our history in copyright-thinking needs to be reevaluated so that the copyright-advocaters will narrow and lock in important material and only grant access of this information for those who can pay for the information. As We saw in the Walt Disney example the material has been more regulated today than it was before. Lessig´s refrain is important to remember: Creativity and innovation always builds on the past and The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. When thinking of this one understands that control is bad for creativity and that it´s shattering for creativity.

When reading the text of Ahrash Bissell and Jamie Boyle one see the difficulties combining policies and licences. In Sweden we have a speciell licence in copying books (not digital copies though) where students and institutions are allowed to copy some of the material in books. But nowadays when more and more of our information and litterature are digital we´ve seen that nothing from the other principles are usefull in the OER-discussion.

At our university we´re now trying to create an overall policy regarding the material in regarding lectures, powerpoint etc. but it isn´t easy and there are many of our colleges that doesn´t understand the benefit of showing and sharing this information to the world, or at least in Sweden.

I think that the Copyright discussion has gone completely wrong and therefore the copyright privilegies has been transformed into Copy"wrong"rights.

Week 3: Philosophical Background

about Enlightenment

Thinking about the enlightenment one cannot forbear that talking about the internets impact on subject like democracy and liberty really are quite similar with the development of the human situation in the time of the enlightenment. One talks about the posibility of the free man and the democracy aspects. Nowadays when talking about digital open resources the same discussion is present again. One talks about every mans posibility and ability as a thinking person and today we´ve got the same situation when talking about Web 2.0 and that everybody can make a change and also improve new thoughts and solutions. We´re nowadyas in a global situation and we´re not any longer bound to our nations thoughts or idologies, that means also that we have the oportunity to try new thesis and to reevaluate old ones.

By letting other see lectures and other learning materials we´ve also exposed our thoughts and ideas so that other may test them as well use them. It´ll take quite a time before everybody accepts them (it took the Catholic church quite some time to accept that the earth was circuling around the sun) but in our time it will go much faster for the new ideas to meet acceptance...but we´re really in the age of the digital enlightment for the moment.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

I didn´t expect readingsuch an interesting article in this course. A article that´s so filled with thoughts and where the main issue deals with the fact that even though we´ve got a long and important history, like the ancient greeks and the philosophical and religious work in understanding what life and science is about, we need to understand what the history tells us and find a way to deal with this knowledge history provides us.

In terms of OER I see at my University that our culture and also practise is much based on a long lasting tradition in over 500 of years. Our ways in teaching and using the posibility in the term: Standing on the shoulders of giants when they use new technologies succesfully when usign the knowledge of academic tradition but using it in different ways. We´ve got at lot of teacherrs that really uses media in all kind of forms in widing the students perspectives and also letting them use the information in various ways. Like using Wikis and blogs in education. Thats is practising Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Origins of the public library as a social institution

There is a race nowadays to become the first university with new and exciting ideas. MIT may be considered the first university that embraced the venture of letting everyone see and use the material from that university. But what does that mean in practise? Is this the start of the library of the digital age or is it something else? Could a digital library be something more and is this the origin? I don´t think that. Using open software and other digital material is just the beginning of something much bigger. Therefore i think we´ve need to define what is what. We did that in the first part in this course but as I see it everything is so new and we´re just in the beginning in a new era of digital development. So when talking about the origin We need to wait a couple of years before we can define what we´re talking about.

Popular education and Folk High School

If we combine Folk High School and Popular education we´ve got a interesting combination where the Folk High School works as a alternative way of getting higher education, but still not in the university kind of way. My experince of Folk High School in Sweden is positive where I can see that there is a lot of students in these schools that really study there subjects in a Popular Education way. A lot of the Swedish Folk High Schools are connected to a special church denomination or a political ideology. The students that attends on these courses are getting quite sceptical to the society that they are placed in, they try there ideas on eachother and are often commited to enviromental, ideological, religious or cultural issues.

When thinking about this and trying to understand where this philosophical background and Popular Education and Folk High School connects to creating OER one understand that this is all about making a change. Making an educational change in using open software and educational resources in a quite positivistic kind of way. By studying and embracing ones differences and rethinking our knowledge there´s possible to make improvements and make the educational resources even better. One uses the digital techniches not only to improve the material but also to enchance the pedagogy in a collective kind of way.

This is so interesting...what also interesting is it doesn´t matter wheter you are a university professor or just an undegraduated scholar as long you make a differance. It´s not your title that is important but what you are doing with the material.

Free Software Movement

The idéa with the free software movement is: "to give freedom to computer users by replacing proprietary software under restrictive licensing terms with free software,^[2] with the ultimate goal of liberating everyone in cyberspace.^[3]"

^{Thinking about the previous discussions (see above) our history is filled with ideas of sharing and creating materials in purpose of spreading great ideás over the world, or at least the neighborhood or local community When the Internet become real this mission could be a global mission. We see it for example in the Microsoft Office alternative Open Office or in Linus Torvalds Linux system. Maybe the shareware and absolutely the Freeware tendency was the first step in thinking much bigger and more open. I know that the open software debate started earlier but i also belive that Freeware was a important step in this direction.}

^{Anyway...when "standing on a giants shoulder" one see much further and new possibilitys are getting more visible. We´re just in the beginning on this wonderful world on thinking wide and new. But wa also see that we´ve got a long history that has been important for this development.
So.I´ll stop here and will think about his quota from Wikipedia and Free software movement:}
Some people only consider Public Domain as free, and thus do not consider the "Free Software Movement" as free.

Some people only consider Public Domain as free, and thus do not consider the "Free Software Movement" as free.