Week 6: Background Readings in Copyright and the Public Domain

Understanding the importance and value of the public domain, how much (what percentage) of this value would you estimate is realized when works are licensed with a Creative Commons or GFDL license?

I think that the value of the works licensed whit CC or GDFDL have about the 80% value.

To what degree would the open educational resources movement (and therefore the world) be additionally benefited if OERs were simply placed in the public domain? Please explain.

I think that in more cases, it is the same licensing OERs under CC than under public domain. I think that the author have to earn money and if all this materials are licensed under public domain this OERs might not exist.

Week 5: Example Open Education Projects

To answer this question I took a look at Jennifer Maddrel’s four week post. Her matrix is very clearly and summarizes the most important characteristics of the open education projects mentioned.

What do these representative open education projects have in common?

What they have in common is their purpose, share free educational material.

What differentiates them?

Their focus area, their licensing, their contributors etc. I think that they only share their purpose.

In the context of open education projects, what does "quality" mean?

To my mind quality can be measured in the terms of how a material can help a learner to learn. I mean, a educational material can be very beautiful with a lot of colours and pictures but may be it is not useful to a learner. However a simple plain text may help a learner to learn more than those materials.

As I Jennifer’s post seems very interesting to me I want to comment some of what she says.

“I question why (in this day of Google and other search engines) efforts aren't moving away from repositories - or specific OER directories for that matter? Wouldn't our efforts be better spent on properly categorizing and tagging the original content so that it can be "found" by the increasingly sophisticated search engines? Why should learners and teachers be forced to travel from one site to another to find content? Shouldn't they be able to pull in the content that is properly identified and tagged?”

What would happen if you have a material in a repository and a reference pointing to it in a directory and the author of the material modifies its content? What would happen if the repository’s URL changes? In both cases you will have your metadata out of date. For doing it well you will need to check your metadata periodically.

And apart of this problem you have to take into account that search engines like Google only index the content of the resources no its metadata if you would want to search materials attending to its subject you will surely find nothing.

A few of spam here:

In the University of Alicante we are working on a new e-learning platform called LOR@. It is also an Open Education Project, you can try our content manager, Rockl2, here. Note that it is a beta version and all suggestions are welcome. (For entering to Rockl2 you have to register yourself , push the Register button).

Week 4: Background Readings in Open Education

What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report?

All of these overviews talk about the re-use of Open Education Resources from different points of views. The first one, Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, talks about OERs in higher education the second talks about the role of OERs in education, who should produce it and also gives us an overview of some standards that allow us to build public learning object repositories. And the third is mainly focussed on the economic part of Open Education.

Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did?

I think that this three reports are focused on the same way, they suppose that every one wants to share his or her Educational resources but neither of them have asked to a simple teacher if he or she wants to share his or her educational resources. I think that, specially in the University at which I studied, the teachers were very afraid of anyone plagiarizes theirs teaching materials so many of them decided to put them in a private virtual campus. To my mind this organizations should focus first on explain the benefits of OERs to the people who will produce it and who will use it instead of lucubrate of the implications of the OER movement. (If they want that the OER movement becomes a reality)

For me the third report is which spoke the most clearly because it studies a real case like the MIT OCW project.

Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?

As I say before what I think is that the Open Education movement should focus first on changing teachers mentality and achieve the purpose of that every person who can generate Education Materials want to share it. I think that when we achieve that we will have done the most difficult part of the job.

OpenEd: Week 1 Why Open Education?

- In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right? Why or why not?

I think that primary education should be a human right for everybody (children or not) but the question that arise here is, what is primary education? To my mind what primary education is depends on the development level of the country. A person who lives in a more developed country need more knowledge or simple need different knowledge than those who live in a less developed country.
But it's difficult to achieve the purpose that every person can get a primary education because there are many different situations in the world that makes this task nearly impossible, for example there are a lot of nomadic people living in the desert or in the mountains. And attending to the question "What is primary education?" I wonder what primary education is for those people, may be reading an writing?
Although I think that primary education is a human right I think that it is not a basic human right there are other more important like the right
to be free or the right to life, liberty and security.

In my opinion the example of South Korea (detailed in Box. 3 of Tomasevski Removing obstacles in the way of the right to education book) is the right way to introduce education in a country which lacks of it. That implies that education (basic or not) should be adapted to the state of the country.

-In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate* education through a certain age or level?

I think that primary education should be mandatory and free for everyone. But I question, again, in Tomasevski books it is said that in undeveloped country nearly half of the population is in school age, the question is: if this situation happened in a developed country , would this country be able to face that expenses? I think that the answer is NO.

Let's take a look at the populations pyramid of developed countries and undevelped ones.
In that page: page, we can consult them.

Let's look at USA population pyramid there are much more people over 25 years than between 0-25.


Let's take a look at the Spanish population pyramid too.



We realised that there are much more population betewn 25 and 69 years than betwen 0 an 24.

Now let's see a population pyramid of an undeveloped country, for expample Somalia


As we see there are much (much) more people between 0-25 years than 25 and above.


In order to see that this happen in the majority of undeveloped countries let's see an other graphic from a South American country, for example Guatemala.


So in conclusion I think that offering a free and high-cuality basic education is imposible for undeveloped countries, they need help for doing that task.

On the other hand there is the question: should be mandatory to go to school until the working age is reached?. A few years ago, in Spain, going to School was mandatory to the age of 14 and the minimum age for working was (and is) 16. So what happened with those people who didn't want to go to school? They learned an occupation or simply stated at home.
Now it is compulsory for everyone to attend school till the age of 16, and what happened now is that there is a lot of people between 14 and 16 who don't want to go to school and they are causing a lot of discipline problems at schools.

For ending I would like to comment other people's opinions:

- I'm agree with Andreas Formiconi when he says "education is not a positive concept per se" and he puts the examples of his father.
During Spanish's dictatorship education was used to promote the regime too, there was a subject call "Formación del espiritu nacional" which it's only purpose was to promote the dictatorship.

-I'm agree with Jennifer Maddrell when she says "increasing age and educational level, the responsibility for educational attainment begins to shift from society to the individual learner" but I would like to add that not everybody want to learn so if you force a person who doesn't
want to learn to go to school he or she will spend his or her school time disturbing other pupils who really want to learn.

Me

First of all I'm going to introduce mySelf. My name is Nuria, I'm from Alicante (Spain)
and I'm working as a programmer for Virtua in the University of Alicante.
I like photography, i'm thinking of openning a flickr account, I like video games
(specially World Of Warcraft, have some characters ;) ). I like rock music (Queen, Keane,
etc) and I love gadgets :D

I have openned this weblog in order to do my homework of "Intro Open Ed Syllabus" course
although i may write some other non-related posts.

Ah! I want to apologise myself about my bad English, if you see any mistakes or do not
understand something please post a comment pointing to it and I will try to solve it.