Jeroen's Openness - #ioe12

Open Data

2012-02-22T22:57:00.000Z

In his TED presentation, Tim Berners-Lee first talks about how he invented the World Wide Web 20-some years ago. He was frustrated with all his colleagues' different computer systems and software and data formats. There was so much unlocked potential. Linking documents on all these computer together. He asked us to put all our documents on the Web and we did. That went pretty far no?

Now Tim wants us to put data on the Web. There is still so much unlocked potential. He refers to another TED presentation by Hans Rosling, who uses boring data to combine it into something more interesting and presents it in interesting info graphics. The basis however is a large amount of data.

He proposes 3 rules for linking data:

http names not just used for documents but also used for things that are documents are about: people, places, numbers, etc.
when looking up such an http thing, important data in a standard format are fetched
data have relationships; the other things it is related to are also given http names

The more they are linked the more powerful they become.

Christian Bizer, Freie Universität Berlin, discovered that there are lots of interesting data in wikipedia. He developed some software to extract information from wikipedia and put it in a database--dbpedia. And the data are linked to other sets of data, "and so it starts to grow" ...

Diversity of data - Some examples

Government data. Barack Obama said he would make government data available on the Web. Important for transparency, and it also shows a lot about how USA ticks.

Raw data now!
People hug their data, even if it was paid by tax payers.

Scientific data. Curing cancer and Alzheimer's, and the worlds economic problems for example. Scientists who are going to solve these problems are having their data hidden on their computers. Scientists start to discover the power of sharing data.
Social networking sites. Every time you do something, add a friend, like something. The network uses it. And the different social web sites do not link their data (JB: at the time of the presentation)
Open street map. Everyone does their bit.

And that is how open data are going to work according to Tim; everyone does their bit and if everyone does their thing, power will be huge.

Data.gov/Open Data

This is a (US based) community of policy makers, technologists, and data owners, who want to get information from governments around the world to the people who need to make decisions every day.

JB: And as any community of practice, it needs people with drive to keep it going. Which appears to be missing at the moment ....

Open Data Commons
As with other 'Open' topics, one thinking has gone into a legal framework for the sharing of data. And this has been pulled together under some commons licenses. There are three licenses:

Public domain for data
Attributions for data
Attribution and share alike for data

Where to find open data on the Web?

Sarah Perez, in the popular technology blog 'Read Write Web', summarises a long list of places on the Web where we can already find open data. For example:

CKAN - A registry of open knowledge packages and projects.
Infochimps - assembles and interconects raw data.
Freebase - An user build and maintained shared database of the world's knowledge.

The New York Times

This newspaper boasts they have maintained one of the most authoritative news vocabularies ever over the past 150 years. And since 2009 they started to publish this vocabulary as linked data. The Times uses approximately 30,000 tags to power their topics pages, and all these tags will be published.

JB: And I have yet to find an example that shows what this means ... anyone?

Linked data

This is about using the Web to connect related data, or to lower barriers to linking data that are using different methods. Basically the result of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for linking data.

JB: It is obvious to me that I have entered realms that are further and further away from my bed (as we say in the Netherlands). The concepts in this topic are very far away from my experience and knowledge base. So on one hand, a lot to learn, on the other hand, very hard to grasp. Let's see what I can pick up in this course :)

Open Science

2012-02-22T21:15:00.000Z

Michael Nielsen
In the TEDx presentation "Open Science" Michael Nielsen tells several stories about successful and less successful open science projects.

First he talks about Tim Gowers, a UK mathematician, who posed the question on his weblog if massively collaborative mathematic is possible. He posted a difficult mathematical problem on his blog, and his ideas, inviting others to post their suggestions in the comments of the blog. After a few hours people started to contribute. In 37 days, 27 people posted more than 800 comments, building on each others work, to solve the problem.

This so-called polymath project shows, according to Nielsen, that we can use the Internet to build tools that expand our capability to solve difficult intellectual problems. For science in general, this could mean an expansion and acceleration of the way we attack a larger variety of problems.

Another example Nielsen uses shares is the Qwiki, the Quantum Physics Wiki. This was supposed to become a repository of specialist knowledge in quantum computing. Written by the users. And although there was excitement when it was announced, no one was all that interested to contribute to it. Everyone hoped someone else would contribute.

Many similar science wikis wave failed. Also social networks of scientists have not brought what people expected of them. As reason for these failures, Nielsen argues that young scientists have to compete for jobs, and are forced to write scientific (i.e. peer-reviewed) papers. This is valued higher than the most brilliant contributions to an open science web site. The polymath project might have had an innovative method, the result was still a scientific paper.

The Bermuda Principles
An example from the 1990s where a different approach was successful was the human genome project. Data were openly shared on the Internet. They had similar problems at first. After a meeting in Bermuda, leading scientists discussed this problem and came up with the Bermuda Principles:

Once human genetic data is taken in the lab, it should be immediately uploaded to a web site; and
The data should be in the public domain.

So anyone working on human genetics, had to sign up to this and it was baked into policies of large funding institutions. And now the human genome is completely known.

Culture change
Nielsen and other people in the 'Open Science Movement' suggest there is a need for a culture change in science so that scientists become much more motivated to share. Sharing should part of a scientists job. There should be rewards for this. Also, any publicly funded science should be open science. Everyone has a role in this, by spending at least a little bit of their time in open science projects, and be generous in crediting colleagues for their contributions in open science projects.

Definitions definitions definitions
The suestion what exactly is open science has kept many people awake. So time for a standard! Science Commons published a set of principles for open science:

Open access to literature from funded research;
Access to research tools from funded research
Data from funded research in the public domain
Invest in open cyberinfrastructure

JB: So I guess this focusses on the fact that something that has been funded by the tax payers money should be accessible to the taxpayers.

Science Commons

In their 'Introduction to Science Commons,' Wilbanks and Boyle paint the picture of a talented researcher who with all the talent, access to literature, grants, commercial tools, and all the best will in the world, would only be able to study the tip of icebergs of potential leads to study. That, combined with the argument that not everyone is that lucky to have all this access to resources, drives them to suggest a science commons, based on the creative commons principles, with

"[..] the ambition of achieving for the world of science and data, what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material."

The article further describes some of the projects the organisation started to work on to address the challenges that have been encountered in the process so far (JB: to be continued ... .)

Creative Commons - Science
Since 2004 (CC) has been focussing their efforts to extend the Creative Commons licenses to scientific and technical research. The Web page lists several links to resources that serve different audiences in the Scientific realm with publications, repositories, and open data.

OpenScience Project
This project is dedicated to the development developing open source scientific software. A group of scientists want to encourage a collaborative environment where data and models can be analysed and shared.

Open Notebook Science
To prevent scientists from sitting on their data and only sharing what is convenient to them and for all kinds of other good reasons, an extreme form of open science is that where the entire primary record of a research project is made available online as it is recorded. This involves putting the researcher's notebook online together with all raw data, hence Open Notebook Science.

Benefits
It ennobles other scientists to compare with their own work or to build on it. This can speed up the process. It enables more effective communication. Also one can refer to the exact instances of the experiments used to support arguments. And research is being reported on, on an ongoing basis without much delay or filter.

Arguments against
Data theft or being scooped. Difficult to publish in traditional peer reviewed journals. And there might be too much data for anyone to handle.

Personal reflection
Not sure how it works practically, but I must say that Open Notebook Science was something completely new to me. Quite col actually that there are researchers out there doing that, no?!

Open Access

2012-02-09T20:24:00.001Z

Am I a very linear person? Or just fixed in traditional ways of working? In anyway, the next topic down the list op Openness in Education topics, Open Access!

SPARC (2009) developed a neat little animation, explaining the principle of open access. It simply refers to free, unrestricted, online access to scholarly papers. It challenges the old business model where faculty hand over their writing to publishers for free, who then collect subscription fees from others to allow them access. At the time of creation of this animation, there were over 4200 peer-reviewed open access online journals.

For a more detailed description of what Open Access entails, have a look at Peter Suber's overview of open access (last updated in 2010.) In his definition, 'Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.' Not all open access literature goes as far as to lose the copyright restrictions. Suber therefore distinguishes between 'gratis open access' removing the price barrier only and 'libre open access' removing price barriers and at least some permission barriers as well.

Suber states that open access is compatible to any other form of service associated with conventional scientific publications. The difference is that the bills are not being paid by the readers, thus not acting as a barrier to access. Open access literature can be peer-reviewed, copyrighted, be profitable, career advancing, be of quality and prestige, etc.

Open access can be published in peer-reviewed online journals and in repositories.

Global Open Access Portal
UNESCO hosts this portal to provide the necessary information for policy-makers to learn about the global OA environment and to view their country’s status, and understand where and why Open Access has been most successful.

I notice that The Netherlands are doing pretty well ...

An impressive overview of funding mandates, thematic areas, key institutions, communities and contributors!

IJPE
Heather Morrison approaches the economics of scholarly communications from a poetic viewpoint, as we can read on her blog. In the article of 31 December 2011, she looks back on a successful year for open access journals. The counter for refereed OA journals stops at 7,000. There are 32,000 free journals in total. In addition there are 2000 depositories linking to more than 30M articles, growing with 21K articles a day! The worlds largest journal, PLoS ONE, doubled their number of articles in a year. And Bielefeld University developed a search engine called BASE especially for academic open access web resources.

(A Title-search for "Open Content" shows 111 results ...)

Open Educational Resources

2012-01-29T15:39:00.002Z

This part of the 2012 Introduction to Openness in Education course discusses Open Educational Resources. A video presentation and a variety of readings are used to introduce this topic. This blog summarises some of my learnings from and reflections about them.

Reformation
David Wiley, in a 2010 TEDx presentation discusses openness in education.
He defines open (in this context of education) as referring to resources that are freely shared, and come with permissions to reuse, redistribute, revise and remix.

Openness is about sharing and generosity, it is about giving.

Successful educators are those who share the most thoroughly with the most students. Luckily, expertise is non-rivalrous, not competitive; an educator can give something away, without loosing it him- or herself. Wiley calls this a good thing, else

"[..] teachers would all be like honey bees, who can sting one time and then die."

Where knowledge in books generally can be shared with one person at the time, in the digital world, hundreds/thousands of people can access the same materials at the same time.

Looking back to the time of the invention of the printing press, David sees a comparison with the advancement of new technology now. There is a collision between the huge demand for this new technology and outdated thinking reinforced by law.
In the 16th century, this led to the 'Reformation'. Now, education is on the brink of its own Reformation. Openness is what is missing. New media and technology increase the capacity to be open. Through giving feedback, sharing materials, and getting into discourse and collaboration. The more we give, the more education will be open.

Common Wisdom
Yochai Benkler, in his 2005 paper 'Common wisdom: Peer production of educational materials,' gives two reasons why peer production makes sense:

Quality of education everywhere; and
Access to educational materials in poorer countries.

Internet enables educators to quickly create collections of existing discrete learning objects into new meaningful educational experiences. He paints a picture how billions of people with a little spare time can produce so much more than a group of professionals working 40 hours a week on similar things. And the new technologies, and their applications come with their own new mechanisms for quality control.

Challenges and opportunities
A 2006 OECD report by Jan Hylén, discusses challenges and opportunities of OER.

Challenges

Awareness of copyright issues (lack thereof)
Quality assurance
Sustainability of initiatives

Opportunities
Why institutional participation?

Altruistic: Sharing is a good thing and in line with academic r=traditions
Institutions should leverage on taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources
Cost-cutting
Showcasing thus attracting new students
New business models

Motivation for individuals?

To gain access to the best possible resources
To have more flexible materials
Assisting developing countries and disadvantaged communities
Bring down costs for students.

A year later, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of that same OECD, in a flashy report titled 'Giving knowledge for free. The emergence of open educational resources,' discusses sustainable cost/benefit models, copyrights, incentives and barriers, and access and usefulness of open educational resources.

Note: Where Jan Hylén's report is licensed under a Creative Commons License, this report has a firm and strict © statement in it. Probably even illegal to link to it in the course (unless you got permission #DavidWiley?) I will not go through the trouble of asking permission, go look for it yourself in the OECD database... (where it states you can download the report for free ... .) ;)

This report is a more detailed report based on Jan Hylén's data. And discusses the money side more.

Roadmap 2012
The Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project that ran from 2006 to 2007 published their results in the form of a roadmap. While not obviously explained, the title Roadmap 2012 might suggest a five-year outlook. Given it is not 2012, did their map help us?
The work was conducted to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed. It covered the following areas:

Policies, institutional frameworks and business models;
Open Access and open content repositories;
Laboratories of open educational practices and resources.

For each of these area enablers and inhibitors are identified and described. Some of the (solutions to) most important inhibitors that the researchers felt that needed to be addressed are:

Appropriate systems for recognition and rewards for researchers and educators working on OERs;
The right mix of income streams; and
Support to communities of practice.

And the most important enablers:

The urgency of the lifelong learning agenda;
New generations of Web tools providing more effective OER; and
The Creative Commons License as an international standard.

Based on the results, the project provided comprehensive recommendations for a variety of target audiences.

Other resources
Similar enablers and inhibitors are described by other authors, for example the 2007 article by the Hewlett Foundation (working link: http://www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/Hewlett_OER_report.pdf)
On the other hand resources to tackle some of these inhibitors start to emerge.

Gurell & Wiley's 2008 OER Handbook for Educators, is an open resource providing information on how to find, compose, adapt, use, share and license OERs.
Plotkin's Free to Learn Guide focusses on higher education governance officials and leaders, to support policy development.
UNESCO comes with a comprehensive guide in 2011.
Finally, there's the FAQ Section of the Open Education Week Web-site.

Conclusion

A lot has been researched and written about Open Educational Resources. Earlier works have laid out the challenges and opportunities. More recently the community has started to tackle the challenges, in general by providing support and information for educators, academic, policy makers, and other target audiences. The handbooks and guides will make it easier for educators who just now start getting into OERs to get a jumpstart.

I do wonder how users of OERs are experiencing these support mechanisms ...

Open Courseware

2012-01-28T18:36:00.000Z

The resources for this topic include a recording of the press conference in which MIT announces their open courseware project. On April 4, 2001, Kenneth Campbell, Charles Vest, Steven Lerman, Harold Abelson and Dick Yue appear in front of the assembled journalists.

A council on Ed Tech was established; a sub group was charged with coming up with a creative cutting-edge way to reach beyond the boundaries of the MIT campus. And the administration had somewhat expected some sort of revenue generating initiative.

Open courseware (OCW) was to provide free access to primary content of virtually every course at MIT. Not to provide an MIT education on the Web. But core materials. Real education involves interaction between Faculty and students.

MIT as a leader. Hope that other institution will do the same.

And these days, in 2012, as the list of members of the open courseware consortium shows, hundreds of higher education institutions, organisations and associate consortia have followed the initiative. Please note, not all institutions offering Open Courseware are member of the consortium.

How did faculty respond to the suggested idea? One would expect concerns about intellectual property, and there were some. But the majority of discussion was around the ability to implement this with sufficient quality. And if services to support faculty in the process would be available.

"This resonated with what many of us believe is the core business of this university [..] it is very much about how do you disseminate and create human knowledge."

Reflections

When MIT first went public with this news, I remember being quite amazed and excited about it. And Then I went and looked at these resources (in the beginning they were rather limited, and I must confess I have not been back recently until now) and realised that indeed, you do not learn from looking at a syllabus and reading the description of an assignment. Someone needs to bring this to life somehow. Better start saving for that tuition fee ...

Open Content

2012-01-23T15:14:00.000Z

What is Open Content and where does it come from?

The Open Content Web Site defines 'open' as a continuous construct. Open refers to granting of copyright permissions above and beyond the ones offered by normal copyright laws. The fewer restrictions, the more open the content is. The degree of openness can be evaluated using the 4Rs framework which refers to the rights to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the content.

In a registration of David Wiley's keynote address at iSummit '08 (Saporo, Japan) David Wiley looks back at 10 years of Open Content. Can this free software and open source stuff work for content as well?

In 1998 there was a first attempt to a license with the Open Content Principles and License (OP/L) which was used by for example nupedia.com a predecessor of wikipedia.

Observation: Wikipedia refers to the license used in nupedia.com as Free Content.

In discussions with publishers and authors it became clear there were some needs. Publishers need some protection from competitors undercutting them. Authors want recognition and some want to protect the integrity of their work.

So in 1999 there was the Open Publication License (OPL). This license required attribution to the original author and had two options: 1. prohibits distribution of derivatives works; 2. prohibits distribution in paper for for commercial purpose.

There were some significant problems. In general vagueness. The two licenses were similar, and not everything was clear.

To the rescue: Creative Commons (by among others Lawrence 'Larry' Lessig). The designed a system where the options were very clear and visible. Basically not one license with options anymore, but a different license for each of the options.

David lists a few high-level examples of services that use some form of Creative Commons license, such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Jamendo, Soundclick, Magnatune and Internet Archives. In 2012 this list is probably much longer. Here is for example a list from 2009; sitepoint lists 30+ places where to find open content. And Open Culture seems to link to a lot A LOT of open content.

David Wiley id specifically interested in education. He gives some examples of initiatives:

Where is this all going?

David Wiley sees some problems ahead, for example license compatibility. What can be remixed with what? This is currently very limited. CC0 will be critically important for remixing in an easier way. Further there is the term noncommercial. What does it really mean? It is used a lot, but is it valid?

Of course he also sees opportunities. Examples of positive developments at the time (in 2008) were:

Refinements of licenses, such as CC+ and CC0
Flatworld knowledge - A commercial textbook publisher, offering free online versions and a variety of off-line versions for sale.
Open High School of Utah - Free, public, online, using only open access curriculum materials.

It is obvious to me that work on open content has created as much of a movement as the free and open source software initiatives. The amount of available resource will have grown significantly in the past 4 years.

An interesting observation maybe is that where Google used to be praised for adding a 'usage rights' option in the advanced search, this advanced search is now quite well hidden and in there the usage rights option hidden even deeper.

Does Google not want us to find open content any more?

Open Source

2012-01-22T14:56:00.000Z

It was interesting to learn some more about the history of free and open source software. In Revolution OS the main players in these movements tell the story. It was fun to see that in spite of the sharing nature these men (why all men?) have there little quarrels about who deserves credit for what :)

To summarise the topic:

Software sharing is as old as computers.
At some point in the 70s software development became expensive and companies needed to find ways to recover costs, so starting to lock down the source code.
In the 80s groups of nerds started to work together to build their own systems.
Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in an effort to build a complete operating system. He founded the Free Software Foundation to promote the concept of "free software".
Linus Torvalds 'beat' the GNU project to the development of a kernel, the central component of most operating systems.
In combination with the GNU components a first complete working free-software operating system was available.
While the software is available for free, business opportunities arose around providing service, and custom packaged systems.
Eric Raymond was one of the people who thought that the term free-software (and its philosophy) was not appealing for businesses and started to look to rebrand the movement to reflect the business potential of sharing source code (in response to Netscape's decision to release Communicator as free software.)
The term open source was coined.
In Richard Stalman's article Why Open Source Misses the Point the philosophical differences are laid out: "[the Open Software Initiative] judge solely by the license of the source code, whereas our criterion also considers whether a device will let you run your modified version of the program ... "

I am not all that fussed about these quarrels. I like playing around with free and open source software. What is important to remember is that is definitively was a revolution and is leading to great creative things.

But, is the proprietary software industry hitting back?

In the video recording '28c3 The coming war on general computation,' Cory Doctorow paints a picture of the next way in which the computer industry will hit back. While the copyright war is not even over, Doctorow predicts that the next war will be fought over what applications can be run on the computers, tablets, phones, etc that we buy. He predicts that companies will install functionality (with or without our knowledge) that will ban anything they do not like (read; that does not make them money?) He predicts a Big Brother approach to regulation of computer technology in the near future. And that the industry behind these coming lobbies will be unmeasurably more powerful than the movie and music industry in the copyright war.

I may be an idealist. I still believe that if one does enough to keep the masses small and dumb, the masses will at some point rise to the challenge and topple over the powers that be. There is probably already a movement working on the next generation Open Source or Free Internet!

Thinking about this I remember that my first encounter with free software was in the mid eighties when in the evening on the radio in a programme about computers, they would 'play' a simple programme for a game or so. You could record these on cassette tape and then run on your Commodore 64! Of course I had to cycle 6 miles and cross a river to get to a friend with a Commodore, but hey ... ;)

Open licensing

2012-01-12T16:05:00.001Z

Some eye-openers from the materials in the open licensing section.

On copyright:

* Copyright is meant to promote creativity - that is, by protecting works for a period, creative minds are forced to come up with their own new ideas.

* Current copyright law smells like a conspiracy theory ... (in particular the continuous extensions of the terms [especially given donations of 'the industry' to political campaigns...])

On Creative Commons:

Creative Commons does not ignore copyright, that is still with the creator.

Creative Commons does provides creators with an alternative license system where some rights can be reserved. And by stating beforehand what freedoms your give other, there is no need to ask for permission to use and remix resources, as long as the original license is respected.

On CC0 — “No Rights Reserved”**:

CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.

In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and database protection, and the exclusive rights automatically granted to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses.

My thoughts:
It is a difficult issue ... !

**Creative Commons / CC BY 3.0"

Openness and badges

2012-01-10T07:42:00.001Z

In my jobs I have been fortunate to be able, in fact encouraged, to keep up to date with the developments in my field. One of the ways I have been doing this is by attending the international convention of AECT. Here I run into my former professors and peers from Twente and Penn State, learn something new from time to time and try to report back when I managed to apply some theory in the real world.

In recent years the topic of openness has interested me; it makes so much sense to me. Even more when one is working in an organisation like Oxfam, where equal rights and equal access to resources is the central focus of all our work. I am developing some e-learning modules at the moment, and want them to be published under a Creative Commons license, and do run into problems with copyrights at the moment. So that will be one focus of my participation in this course.

At the last AECT convention (Jacksonville, FL, Nov 2011), I heard about Badges for the first time. And something immediately clicked for me again. So often I get questions about 'can we get accredited?' 'does this lead to a Masters?' 'what does this internal training actually mean?' And in my humble opinion the answers generally are no, no and whatever you take from it. And some people are very capable of expressing what they took from a training, how that changes the way they work, how it contributes to the organisations objectives and what it means for their value for the organisation. For this who are not so well able to voice this, badges can be an excellent additional tool to show what one is capable of.

I am going to try to design a system of badges for some of the trainings in my department in Oxfam. And participating in this course will help me gt a better idea on what it should include an how it works.

Looking forward to learning from/with others!

Cheers,
Jeroen