CETL creates and organizes resources faculty need to develop their learning environments, including teaching and learning conference support, grants related to teaching development, guides to teaching strategies and frameworks, a library of books and articles, and OU handbooks and documents. For faculty development opportunities online, see our Virtual Faculty Development.
Sadik Shahadu (The Open Advocate)Sadik Shahadu is an open advocate and a professional project manager with over 4 years of experience in managing community projects. He is a certified professional at NTEN and currently volunteer in coordinating Wikipedia related projects in Ghana. He is the co-founder and Director of Communication and partnerships for GOI Foundation.
Executive Summary ALT has produced this call to action to highlight to education policy makers and professionals how Open Education and OER can expand inclusive and equitable access to education and lifelong learning, widen participation, and create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners, preparing them to become fully engaged digital citizens. Open Education can also promote knowledge transfer while enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion and creating a culture of inter-institutional collaboration and sharing. One of ALT’s three strategic aims is to increase the impact of Learning Technology for the wider community and we are issuing this call to action for policy makers to mandate that publicly funded educational resources are released under open licence to ensure that they reside in the public domain and are freely and openly available to all. This will be of wide benefit, but in particular will enable education providers and learning technology professionals to: Keep up to date with the rapid pace of technological innovation Develop critical, informed approaches to the implementation of Learning Technology and the impact on learners Scale up knowledge sharing and its benefits across sectors.
I remember the first time I heard the term “free riders” being used in the context of the open education movement. It was at the Open Education Conference in 2015 in Vancouver when, dur…
Of course the Open Education conference is just an open education conference and it certainly isn’t the only place to have these conversations. Regional events such as the Northeast OER Summit, the Cascadia Open Education Summit, Wisconsin’s E-ffordability Summit, the Statewide Colorado OER conference and others are wonderful options. Further afield, the OER conference and the Open Education Global conference are both events that welcome critical conversations. As do other events like Digital Pedagogy Lab and the many virtual conference hallway conversations facilitated by Virtually Connecting.
Nice list of open education and OER related conferences and communities.
Our high-quality educational tools give students access to the learning materials they need to succeed, at little to no cost. Because we don't believe anything should come between students and their future.
How to provide better credit on the web using the standard rel=“canonical” by looking at an example from the Open Learner Patchbook
A couple of weeks back, I noticed and began following Cassie Nooyen when I became aware of her at the Domains 2019 conference which I followed fairly closely online.
She was a presenter and wrote a couple of nice follow up pieces about her experiences on her website. I bookmarked one of them to read later, and then two days later I came across this tweet by Terry Green, who had also apparently noticed her post:
I really hope this new post of the Open Learner Patchbook comes across the feed of lots of learners who haven’t experienced a Domain of One’s Own program before.
Patch Twenty Five – My Domain, My Place To Grow
by Cassie Nooyen @CassieNooyen https://t.co/0hjEtyJ2XU @Autumm
— Terry Greene (@greeneterry) June 21, 2019
But I was surprised to see the link in the tweet points to a different post in the Open Learner Patchbook, which is an interesting site in and of itself.
This means that there are now at least two full copies of Cassie’s post online:
While I didn’t see a Creative Commons notice on Cassie’s original or any mention of permissions or even a link to the source of the original on the copy on the Open Patchbook, I don’t doubt that Terry asked Cassie for permission to post a copy of her work on his site. I’ll also suspect that it may have been the case that Cassie might not have wanted any attention drawn to herself or her post on her site and may have eschewed a link to it. I will note that the Open Patchbook did have a link to her Twitter presence as a means of credit. (I’ll still maintain that people should be preferring links to their own domain over Twitter for credits like these–take back your power!)
Even with these crediting caveats aside, there’s a subtle technical piece hiding here relating to search engines and search engine optimization that many in the Domain of One’s Own space may not realize exists, or if they do they may not be sure how to fix. This technical subtlety is that search engines attempt to assign proper credit too. As a result there’s a very high chance that Open Patchbook could rank higher in search for Cassie’s own post than Cassie’s original. As researchers and educators we’d obviously vastly prefer the original to get the credit. So what’s going on here?
Search engines use a web standard known as rel=“canonical”, a microformat which is most often found in the HTML <header> of a web page. If we view the current source of the copy on the Open Learner Patchbook, we’ll see the following:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://openlearnerpatchbook.org/technology/patch-twenty-five-my-domain-my-place-to-grow/" />
According to the Microformats wiki:
By adding
rel=“canonical”to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should be considered the preferred or definitive version of the current page. This helps search engines avoid duplicate content, and is useful for deciding how to link to a page when citing it.
In the case of our example of Cassie’s post, search engines will treat the two pages as completely separate, but will suspect that one is a duplicate of the other. This could have dramatic consequences for one or the other sites in which search engines will choose one to prefer over the other, and, in some cases, search engines may penalize one site for having duplicate content and not stating that fact (in their metadata). Typically this would have more drastic and averse consequences for Cassie’s original in comparison with an institutional site.
How do we fix the injustice of this metadata?
There are a variety of ways, but I’ll focus on several in the WordPress space.
WordPress core has built-in functionality that should set the permalink for a particular page as the canonical one. This is why the Open Patchbook page displays the incorrect canonical link. Since most people are likely to already have an SEO related plugin installed on their site and almost all of them have this capability, this is likely the quickest and easiest method for being able to change canonical links for pages and posts. Two popular choices for this are Yoast and All in One SEO which have simple settings for inputting and saving alternate canonical URLs. Yoast documents the steps pretty well, so I’ll provide an example using All in One SEO:
/wp-admin/admin.php?page=all-in-one-seo-pack%2Faioseop_class.php.
If you’re using another SEO plugin, it likely handles canonical URLs similarly, so check their documentation.
For aggregation websites, like the Open Learner Patchbook, there’s also another solid option for not only setting the canonical URL, but for more quickly copying the original post as well. In these cases I love PressForward, a WordPress plugin from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media which was designed with the education space in mind. The plugin allows one to quickly gather, organize, and republish content from other places on the web. It does so in a smart and ethical way and provides ample opportunity for providing appropriate citations as well as, for our purposes, setting the original URL as the canonical one. Because PressForward is such a powerful and diverse tool (as well as a built-in feed reader for your WordPress website), I’ll refer users to their excellent documentations.
Another useful reason I’ll mention for using rel-canonical mark up is that I’ve seen cases in which using it will allow other web standards-based tools like Hypothes.is to match pages for highlights and annotations. I suspect that if the Open Patchwork page did have the canonical link specified that any annotations made on it with Hypothes.is should mirror properly on the original as well (and vice-versa).
I also suspect that there are some valuable uses of this sort of small metadata-based mark up within the Open Educational Resources (OER) space.
In short, when copying and reposting content from an original source online, it’s both courteous and useful to mark the copy as such by putting a tag onto the URL of the original to provide it with the full credit as the canonical source.
Preface This is a first draft of a free (as in speech, not as in beer) (although it is free as in beer as well) undergraduate number theory textbook. It was used for Math 319 at Colorado State University – Pueblo in the spring semester of 2014. Thanks are hereby offered to the students in that class — Megan Bissell, Tennille Candelaria, Ariana Carlyle, Michael Degraw, Daniel Fisher, Aaron Griffin, Lindsay Harder, Graham Harper, Helen Huang, Daniel Nichols, and Arika Waldrep — who offered many useful suggestions and found numerous typos. I am also grateful to the students in my Math 242 Introduction to Mathematical Programming class in that same spring semester of 2014 — Stephen Ciruli, Jamen Cox, Graham Harper, Joel Kienitz, Matthew Klamm, Christopher Martin, Corey Sullinger, James Todd, and Shelby Whalen — whose various programming projects produced code that I adapted to make some of the figures and examples in the text.
The author gratefully acknowledges the work An Introductory Course in Elementary Number Theory by Wissam Raji [see www.saylor.org/books/] from which this was initially adapted. Raji's text was released under the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 license, see creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0. This work is instead released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, see creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0. (The difference is that if you build future works off of this one, you must also release your derivative works with a license that allows further remixes over which you have no control.)
Hat tip:
be sure to check out the materials that @poritzj has shared at his website, incl. all you wanted to know about cryptography but were afraid to ask:https://t.co/SdxbbNlNsT
Yet Another Introductory Number Theory Textbook (Cryptology Emphasis Version) — CC-licensed! #Domains19 https://t.co/HsWU5gxvmM— Laura Gibbs (@OnlineCrsLady) June 10, 2019
ltaub (Twitter)Students in @tinebeest course use #DoOO to draft and try out ideas that will eventually become an #OER textbook they are collaboratively producing. #Domains19 #imagine #otherworldsarepossible #slowfuse
— ltaub (@ltaub) June 10, 2019
WP OER is a free plugin which allows you to create your own open educational resource repository on any WordPress website. Why pay for a proprietary system with limited options? WP OER is customizable, easy to use, and free. Try the WP OER demo here or download WP OER plugin for free today!
Bring your ideas and passions to help us all brainstorm, ruminate, and then with help actually design and build the version of the web we all want and need–one that reflects our values and desires for the future.
I’d like to invite you all to the 9th Annual IndieWeb Summit in Portland, Oregon, USA on June 29-30, 2019. It follows a traditional BarCamp style format, so the conference is only as good as the attendees and the ideas they bring with them, and since everyone is encouraged to actively participate, it also means that everyone is sure to get something interesting and valuable out of the experience.
We need more educators, thinkers, and tinkerers to begin designing and building the ethical #edtech, #OER, and interactive pedagogy systems we all want.
Come and propose a session on a topic you’re interested in exploring and building toward with a group of like-minded people.
While on-site attendance can be exciting and invigorating for those who can come in person, streaming video and online tools should be available to make useful and worthwhile virtual attendance of all the talks, sessions, and even collaborative build time a real possibility as well. I’ll also note that travel assistance is also available for the Summit if you’d like to apply for it, or you’re able to donate funds to help others.
I hope you can all attend, and I encourage you to invite along friends, students, and colleagues.
I heartily encourage those who don’t yet have a domain of their own to join in the fun. You’ll find lots of help and encouragement at camp and within the IndieWeb community so that even if you currently think you don’t have any skills, you can put together the resources to get something up and working before the Summit’s weekend is over. We’re also around nearly 24/7 in online chat to continue that support and encouragement both before and after the event so you can continue iterating on things you’d like to have working on your personal website.
Never been to an IndieWebCamp? Click through for some details about what to expect. Still not sure? feel free to touch base in any way that feels comfortable for you.
Register today: https://2019.indieweb.org/summit#register
👤 @kfitz @holden @btopro @actualham @Downes @bali_maha @timmmmyboy @dr_jdean @cogdog @xolotl @cathieleblanc @BryanAlexander @hibbittsdesign @greeneterry @judell @CathyNDavidson @krisshaffer @readywriting @dancohen @wiobyrne @brumface @MorrisPelzel @econproph @mburtis @floatingtim @ralphbeliveau @ltaub @laurapasquini @amichaelberman @ken_bauer @TaylorJadin @courosa @nlafferty @KayOddone @OnlineCrsLady @opencontent @davecormier @edtechfactotum @daveymoloney @remikalir @jgmac1106 @MiaZamoraPhD @digpedlab @catherinecronin @HybridPed @jimgroom @rboren @cplong @anarchivist @edublogs @jasonpriem @meredithfierro @Autumm @grantpotter @daniellynds @sundilu @OERConf @fncll @jbj @Jessifer @AneliseHShrout @karencang @kmapesy @harmonygritz @slzemke @KeeganSLW @researchremix @JohnStewartPhD @villaronrubia @kreshleman @raynamharris @jessreingold @mattmaldre
CommentPress Core is a WordPress plugin for creating and debating social texts in social contexts. It replaces all previous plugins (standalone and multisite) and includes the default theme.
A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook
Dramatically extending a Domain of One’s Own with IndieWeb technology: How to improve your online research notebooks, commonplace books, and digital pedagogy
(This description will be edited and used on the website. Please include 1-2 paragraphs and a list of key takeaways for the audience.)
Having a Domain of One’s Own and using it as a “thought space” to own your online identity and work is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine how useful it would be if you could use your Twitter account to reply to someone on Facebook (without needing a Facebook account) or vice versa? Open web technology from the IndieWeb movement that utilizes simple plugins, modules, or even built-in functionality now exists so that people can now use WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav and many other content management systems on any domain name to have rich site-to-site communications in a simple and intuitive way. Third party (and often unethical) corporate platforms are no longer needed to have rich interactions between scholars on the web.
It is now easily possible to have a teacher write a post on their own website and their students to easily reply/react to that post on their own websites (along with a useful reply context) and send that reply to the teacher’s website for possible display. Each participant can now own a copy of both sides of the conversation.
You can now have the joy of a Domain of Your Own and still easily interact just as if your site were a (better-than) first class social media platform.
(Please describe your session in greater detail for the organizers. You may be more casual in this description as it will not be posted on the website.)
In some sense, this session will be a crash course on using IndieWeb technologies and building-blocks with WordPress in the Education space. I’ll aim to remove a lot of technical jargon and keep coding examples to a bare minimum (if using any at all) so that those with the technical ceiling of downloading and installing a plugin can immediately benefit from the talk. I will also provide enough pointers and describe the broad outlines that developers will have a broad overview of the IndieWeb space to find and extend these plugins and functionality if they wish.
I’ll be covering the basics of new W3C recommendations like Webmention, Micropub, and WebSub along with forthcoming specs like Microsub in combination with IndieAuth (a version of OAuth2 for login). I’ll show how they can be applied to personal websites in research, teaching, collaboration, and other educational domains like creating Open Educational Resources. Many of these can be easily implemented in WordPress with just a handful of simple plugins that allow the web to become the social media platform we all wish it would be.
I’ll use examples from my own personal website and several others (which use Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, etc.) to show how these plugins can be used in educational settings and will walk through a case study of a course built using DoOO and IndieWeb philosophies and technologies (EDU 522: Digital Teaching and Learning at Southern Connecticut State University) on which I collaborated with Dr. Gregory McVerry.
Read Chapters: The Ethics of Design, How Designers Destroyed the World, and Moving Fast and Breaking Things
I was very reticent about this book at first, but it is way more essential than I initially thought! I knew I was going to know almost all of the examples, and I’ve generally been right on that account so far, but he’s going beyond the problems with potential solutions. I was worried it was going to be something that I would appreciate and heartily recommend to others without getting much out of it myself, but it reads quickly and easily and there’s a lot here that I want to come back and ponder about further.
Despite the fact that I don’t feel like a professional web designer by trade, what he’s talking about here are standards of human care and interaction that anyone who makes anything should be thinking about on a daily basis. Whether you’re building or creating things for others or even making your own daily life, at heart, you’re designing something.
If Chuck Chugumlung hasn’t come across this book yet with respect to his Design X Pasadena group, I’ll recommend it heartily to him.
I also find myself thinking a lot about how people are building and designing technologies in the edtech space. May of the researchers, professors, and instructional designers I know are immersed in some of the ethics and morals behind using these technologies. Generally I hear them talking about what they “wish” they had as tools, but often they seem to be stuck with things they don’t really want and are then attempting to figure out ways around these technologies after-the-fact so that they can use them in an ethical manner. They really need to stand up, refuse to use what they’re given, and demand better design from the start. Even if they’re incapable of building their own tools, they’re slowly, but surely going to loose the war if they don’t move upstream to where the actual decisions are being made. Fortunately some of the work I see in the OER space is being done at the grass roots where people have more choice and say in the design, but I worry that if they’re not careful, those tools will be siloed off with bad design choices by for-profit companies as well.
