Sometimes one sees the wrong icon next to a file in the Resources tool, this may also have the side effect of forcing the download of a file rather than opening it in the browser. This can be quite annoying.

I asked WebLearn developer Matthew Buckett about this and here is what he had to say about PDFs that were incorrectly attributed.

To fix the issue go into the Resources tool and for every file with the problem click on “Edit Details (Properties)” then scroll to the bottom of the page to find the File Type field and click “Change File Type”. Then from the first drop-down list select “application” and from the second select “pdf”. Then click save. The file should then download/open in all browser fine.

Background/Reasons: When a file is uploaded to WebLearn we get some additional bits of information as well as the actual file. One of those pieces of information is the MIME type, which is a value saying what the format of the contents of the file are. When file was uploaded into WebLearn, the user’s computer told WebLearn that the contents of the files were ‘text/unknown’, WebLearn saves this value and then when anyone download/opens the file the value is sent back to the browser to help it understand it. This mechanism allows files to open correctly when they don’t have a known extension.

To address the above problem, the user needs to fix the MIME type for all PDF files on his computer which should stop this problem from occurring in the future. One might be able to do this using the Finder or an application like http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/

Some browsers don’t trust the value in the MIME type and will also look at the file extension to determine how to handle it so the problem may not be evident with all browsers. Once the file is downloaded and saved to disk the MIME type information is lost and so the operating system uses the file extension to determine how to open the file.

Another way to workaround the problem is to put the files to upload in a zipfile then upload the zipfile and expand the zipfile in WebLearn. This way there isn’t any MIME type information about the PDF files when the ZIP is expanded so WebLearn should use the .pdf extension to set the MIME type and so get it correct.

As we announced the other day, Phil and I have written a report sponsored by the 20 Million Minds Foundation responding to California SB 520, a.k.a. the “MOOC bill,” and making some recommendations for the governor and legislature to consider as they attempt to tackle the bottleneck course problem in the current budget discussions. You can see more about the report on 20 Million Minds website here. Ry Rivard of Insider Higher Education has a good write-up of the paper here.

Phil and I will doing a CrowdHall event Tuesday through Friday of next week. CrowdHall basically lets anyone ask questions (asynchronously) and then have participants vote up the best questions for responses by the “speakers.” I have no idea how well it will work, but I’m interested in trying it. We will be serializing the paper here on e-Literate during those days, posting a new section and some commentary each day to try to stimulate discussion. The event starts at 9 AM PST and ends at 2 PM PST each day (although how much those times mean during an asynchronous event is not clear to me).

The post Right to Access Report Links and Upcoming Event appeared first on e-Literate.

Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the interview, and this is an area that needs more attention – local educational technology support for faculty innovation, with an emphasis on faculty sharing best practices. The summer institute is May 28th – 31st.

I was interviewed by Richard Gordon and Paul Hyde, and some of the key topics we explored:

• Not everyone is a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education – what the heck is a MOOC?
• How do MOOCs affect faculty teaching in a bricks-and-mortar university?
• What are the completion rates of MOOCs and what are the student types?
• Are there applications beyond higher education?
• Why is there such significant pushback against MOOCs lately?
• What disciplines beyond science and engineering are using MOOCs?

Here is link to the U Delaware radio interview - audio only. It’s about a half hour in length, but with some cool NPR-sounding music to kick it off.

I have also added some graphics and created a video of the interview.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The post MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware appeared first on e-Literate.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our white paper on California’s bottleneck course issue. Many thanks to the paper’s sponsor, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, for giving us the support and freedom to write exactly what we believe. If there is anything that you find wrong or objectionable in the paper, then blame us.

The central idea in the paper is that California should adopt the principle that students have a right to educational access. There is a fundamental difference between saying that we should do whatever we can to give students access and saying that we have an obligation to enable students to exercise their right to access. And that change of frame is critical to solving the problem of bottleneck courses.

The current incarnation of SB 520, which we have written about here repeatedly, has been accused by its detractors as being a potential vehicle for gutting and privatizing California’s public higher education. We believe that concern is legitimate. However, in the context of a larger bill supporting the students’ right to access, it could be not only positive but essential as path of last resort. As part of supporting every citizen’s right to due process when accused of a crime, the government is required to provide access to a public defender. But few people who have financial means are likely to choose a public defender over a private attorney because private attorneys, by and large, have access to resources (including time for individual attention) that public defenders do not. Likewise, we believe that access to third-party online courses disconnected from a student’s home institution is a poor solution to the student’s access problem. The only worse solution is not to have one at all, which is the current situation. If Californians believe that students should have a right to access, then they must provide a means of last resort for students to exercise that right.

But the best solution would be to eliminate bottleneck courses altogether, which is why much of our proposal centers on providing mechanisms and funding to empower faculty members, campuses, and systems to solve these problems within the California public education system, where students have the benefit of the campus support network and expertise of local faculty. Even the main funding for the third-party course provisions, which we characterize as the “safety valve” of the plan, would go toward developing infrastructure that would be equally useful to support students taking courses from other campuses within the California systems. If the faculty and administrators will lead an effort to solve the bottleneck course problem organically, with appropriate support from the state, then the actual use of the safety valve option by students could become a rarity.

We acknowledge that technology is not the only possible solution to the bottleneck course problem; nor do we assume that the underlying budget challenges should be accepted at face value. We have written about technology as one avenue to solve the problem because educational technology is what we know about and what we were asked to write about. None of what we suggest precludes discussions about allocation of funding in college budgets, levels of state funding support, allocation of faculty time to lower-division courses, or other relevant questions.

We believe strongly that students should have a right to educational access and that technology can be one useful tool in enabling them to exercise that right. We also believe that the educators in California’s public college and university system are still critical enablers of that right and have a central role to play in making that ideal a reality. And we think there is real value in bringing together educators across the state to focus on sensible application of technology to solve a real educational problem. The culture and collaboration, knowledge and infrastructure that could be created to solve the access problem could also be applied to problems such as improving completion rates, improving course quality, and lowering tuition costs.

You can read the white paper here.

The post California and the Right to Educational Access appeared first on e-Literate.

The following questions emerged at the lunchtime session on the Site Info tool on 14 May 2013:

Q: How do you delete a site?
A: Good question – this option is not part of the Site Info ‘dashboard’. To delete a site, you need to remove it from the hierarchy and delete it. Both operations can be done at the same time from the Hierarchy Manager (small menu on the lower left side > Arrange site). Go to the desired site; click on ‘Arrange site’ on the lower left menu; click on ‘Remove site’; select the box ‘Also delete the site’; click on ‘Confirm remove site’. If you do not see the Hieararchy Manager (small menu on lower left side), you will need to speak to your Local WebLearn Coordinator to give you the required permissions.

Q: Do site participants receive an email when a site is deleted?
A: No – so it is not necessary to first remove them as site participants before you delete the site.

Q: Do site participants receive an email when creating internal sub-groups?
A: No – so you can create, edit or remove internal sub-groups without any notifications being sent.

Q: External users (without an Oxford single singon account) – how do they get access to a WebLearn site and how do they get their login details?
A: WebLearn allows you as the site owner to add either Oxford University particpants, or anyone else, simply by using their email address. If the new participant is an external user (e.g. a research collaborator at another university, a visiting expert etc.), they will automatically receive a one-time system-generated email message giving them a link to activiate their account and create their password. They then log in to WebLearn by clicking on the ‘Other Users’ login link. You can try this out by adding yourself to a WebLearn site with your external email address (e.g. gmail, yahoo etc.), give yourself the ‘access’ role, and then log on as an external user to see how the site operates from the access point of view. (This gives a more authentic experience than using the ‘Switch to access user’ toggle option.)

Q: When might you want to make someone ‘Inactive’ in your site?
A: You might be testing something new in the site – instead of unpublising it, you could make the participants temporarily ‘Inactive’ which means that it is as if they have been removed from the site. Later you can make them ‘Active’ again. Another scenario is if you have added a bulk ‘Participant Group’ – you cannot remove individuals in the bulk group, but you can make someone Inactive if you know that they have left the group or course.

Note: I am not speaking for Blackboard in this post and I am not speaking for the University of Michigan in this post. The opinions in this are my own.

Just over a year ago, in addition to my full-time job as a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, I became a part-time employee of Blackboard, Inc. as with a title of Sakai Chief Strategist (My Blog Post / Press Release)

I figure it is probably a good time to give a bit of a status update as to how things went this past year and what I did.

A little more context on my decision / strategy

You can go back and read all my motivation, rationalization, and plans from my blog posts from late March and early April of last year. While all I said was completely true – there was one small detail in my motivation for going to Blackboard that I somewhat understated a year ago. You can see a running theme of Sakai CLE resources in those posts but not up-front and explicit. Now a year later I can be much more explicit.

Early in 2012, things were looking really bleak for the Sakai CLE. The progress toward the 2.9 release had slowed and eventually stopped. I was really worried that if Sakai 2.9 (most importantly Rutgers LessonBuilder) did not ship that Sakai 2.8 would not be able to hold its market share because of Sakai 2.8’s lack of structured and sequenced content. But I felt that 2.9 with its new portal and LessonBuilder would be a solid and competent LMS that would have a long life in the US and around the world.

I did not want to quit so close to the finish line. If you recall, Sakai 2.9 was in *beta* when the TCC cancelled all further release activity.

In January – March 2012, I felt that we were seeing the end of Sakai before our eyes. In this blog post from March 31 last year – I get a little testy and call out the Sakai community for its lack of investment in the commons. You can see my frustration, anger, and fear with respect to Sakai’s long-term survival in that post.

Michael Chasen was willing to give me money and resources to invest in Sakai so we could finish and ship Sakai 2.9. He would put little or no constraints on how I spent the money – it was mine to spend as I saw fit. It was not enough money to take over Sakai development and release management but I gave him a figure that I felt would get things moving again when added to the rest of the Sakai community resources.

You can look at the Sakai 2.9.0 release cycle document to see that 2.9.0 was finished November 12, 2012. The code freeze and first release tag (A01) had been created 13 months earlier on October 17, 2011.

I want to make it really clear that many people deserve credit for the 2.9.0 release. My contribution and Blackboard’s contribution to 2.9.0 was non-trivial but many others contributed much more than Blackboard or me. It was a cross-community effort and I was only a part of that effort – which is as it should be.

What Got Done? How Did You Spend Your Time? How Did You Spend the Money

Here is a list in no particular order.

• I bought food, drink, stickers, and shirts for community leadership. Sorry – but this is important. For those of you who have been in Sakai from the beginning, you may remember situations where I used the University of Michigan Credit card (backed by grant funds) to pick up the tab for 40-50 people at a time. If you are going to volunteer your spare time to doing hundreds of hours Quality Assurance or software development – then *someone* should at least buy you a meal or two to say “thanks”. I don’t hesitate to use my Blackboard American Express Card to pick up the tab when I am sitting at a table with a bunch of amazing community volunteers. I took the entire TCC and a few guests to Ruth Chris at the June 2012 meeting. I turned in an expense of $3700 for the TCC dinner. It was approved with no questions asked. It was a bargain given the amount of work that the people eating those steaks have contributed over the years.
• I contracted with developers in the Sakai community from June 2012 – February 2013 to work on resolving any and every outstanding Sakai 2.9 issue they could find. When I paid these contractors I did not ask that they make any public statements about the source of their funds. This was not about getting credit for Blackboard per se, it was simply to get the product out the door with whatever it took.
• I paid for travel for several people in the Sakai community who could not otherwise attend meetings where I felt their presence was very valuable and their organizations could not afford their attendance. Again, the funds were given without any requirement of public announcement that the funds came from Blackboard. These funds were a gift/grant because I wanted the particular person to be at the meeting – it was not to make it about Blackboard.
• I travelled to the Sakai meetings in Atlanta, Paris, and Puebla Mexico as well as had Blackboard pay my way to the Sakai Foundation board meetings while I was still on the board. I also went to a Moodle Moot in Los Angeles. I gave talks at each of these meetings – mostly focused on bringing some excitement back to the CLE and making sure that everyone knew how awesome Sakai 2.9 was.
• Blackboard paid my part-time salary and made it possible for me to spend nearly all my own spare time working on Sakai. Beyond bug fixes and release support for Sakai 2.9, the my primary large developments were to completely replace the Sakai Web Content tool with a JSR-168 portlet that eliminated the double iframe problem and allowed us to deal with sites that are starting to set the X-Frame header. The second development was a major investment in cleaning up the LTI code in Sakai and release a new version of LTI with Sakai 2.9.2 that fixed over 45 problems that were identified in the LTI code from the 2.9.0 release. Both the new Web Content tool and LTI code should be in the upcoming 2.9.2 release. This was all supported by Blackboard. University of Michigan (Beth, Zhen, and John) can also take a bunch of the credit for the new LTI code as well. Matt Jones and Sam Ottenhoff of LongSight also helped with the Web Content tool.
• I even spent Blackboard funds to send myself to a purely academic conference. I figure I am an academic researcher – I should go to an academic (i.e. not industry) conference once in a while. It was my first non-industry conference in years.
• I installed a Sakai 2.9 QA server on my Blackboard-provided server hardware. I wanted this so I could do more complete tests of Sakai’s increasing support for LTI-related web services.

So What Did You Do For Blackboard Last Year?

I did do a few things for Blackboard that weren’t just working on Sakai.

• I advocated internally for quick implementation of LTI 1.1 in ANGEL – which was completed in mid-summer and announced at BbWorld 2012 in July. I joyfully filled out my IMS Ring of Compliance with the ANGEL logo and got the tattoo in New Orleans with Linda Feng doing the filming.
• I did a review of the xpLor integration API and made suggestions that led to a new version of the API that makes it more reasonable to integrate xpLor into an LMS at “arms length” – it made xpLor more like just anther external tool in terms of its access to information within the LMS. I hope this new API will be the basis for a general-purpose Learning Object Repository Integration (LORI) API in an upcoming version of IMS LTI 2.x and that such an API will allow many tools (i.e. not just xpLor) to enjoy deep integration with LMS systems.
• I built the API code to support the revised LORI API so that Blackboard’s xpLor (as well as other LOR products) can smoothly integrate into Sakai’s Lessons capability as of Sakai 2.9.2. I also built PHP sample code/unit tests for that API.
• I have been interacting with the Blackboard Engage (formerly Edline) group that sells a very successful K12 CMS system. I am working with them as they explore LTI integrations. (I am not announcing any delivery of any product here)
• I have been attending IMS quarterly meetings and Learning Impact to continue to move IMS LTI 2.0 and other IMS activities forward.
• I have been working with Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Wimba/Elluminate) as they explore the LTI integration. They are in pretty good shape on their own but I help a little bit here and there when they ask.
• I worked with my new colleagues from Moodlerooms. But really I mostly just learned from them. We went through the design of the Moodle 2.3 LTI code and its design approaches – and I stole many of those ideas for LTI in Sakai. They showed me some of their secrets of how they get Moodle to scale so well. Their approaches really informed what I think we should do in Sakai if we want to become a SaaS application. Seeing the Moodlerooms SaaS implementation makes me just a little jealous.

There were several things I did not do in the past year. First, I am not allowed to work on closed-source products directly as part of the employment contract between University of Michigan, Blackboard, and me. So I have not written any code for Learn, xpLor, or any of Blackboard’s non-open source products. This has not been a problem – I have been plenty busy with Sakai and IMS things and Blackboard has plenty of really talented folks working on those products. The second thing I have not done is any kind of sales support. Three times in the past year a sales person in a situation where Sakai was involved in a possible Learn sale has contacted me asking for help. In each case I have politely declined. My management (in the Blackboard engineering organization) has put absolutely no pressure on me at all to do any sales support at all. I doubt they even knew I was contacted. I have answered a few technical questions about different versions of Sakai or how to convert data but nothing on the strategies or tactics of a particular sale.

So I feel very comfortable and feel no conflict of interest. If Blackboard products fare well in the marketplace I am happy because my budget for money to spend on Sakai goes up. But I have had no problem at all remaining 100% loyal to Sakai and the Sakai community over the past year as a Blackboard employee – in particular because my management expects me to be committed to Sakai and the Sakai community.

So What Went Wrong?

Nothing is perfect, right? There must be some disappointment.

If I look back over the year, the only thing that leaves me a little disappointed is that I really wanted to get to the point that I could use Blackboard’s performance testing lab and quality assurance processes and apply them to Sakai as a way to increase overall resources available to the community. This would be an amazing contribution if I can pull it off. I made some progress on this last summer when the performance test lab in Blackboard (which is awesome) did some performance testing on Sakai and identified some areas that could be improved.

I really would love to have gotten that work finished and presented to the Sakai community – but I just got too distracted by other things to stay on top of that task and bring it home. And once Sakai 2.9.0 shipped it seemed to me to be less pressing. Perhaps in time I will come back to this task and finish it. But even now, it is kind of on my back burner.

Not much else went wrong.

So What Is Next?

In general, much of the roadmap of the Sakai CLE is discussed and set at the annual meeting – this year in San Diego. So some of these priorities might get adjusted after that meeting. But for now, these are the two tasks I will set out to accomplish this summer as my Blackboard contribution to Sakai:

• I want Sakai to be the first LMS to ship LTI 2.0 support. While LTI 1.1 is great and nearly universal, it is starting to fray at the edges as each LMS pours more and more extensions into it. These extensions take widely different approaches, use different formats and web service interaction patterns. There is no interoperability and no conformance tests for these extensions. LTI 2.0 gives a way to solve all these problems – but we have to get started before there is any payoff. So I plan to write the Sakai LTI 2.0 support, a full set of PHP sample code to compliment the Rails sample code developed by John Tibbets and contributed to IMS, and work to get LTI 2.0 into Moodle through my MoodleRooms colleagues. I will also start building sample LTI 2.0 tools and write LTI 2.0 documentation to help evangelize LTI 2.0 to other LMS systems. This is a long task – but the best time to get started is now.
• Once I have LTI 2.0 underway I want to circle back and look at IMS Common Cartridge import and export in Sakai. Chuck Hedrick has done a great job with Lessons in terms of CC import and export – but I want to expand it to interact with everything in Sakai – not just content in Lessons. I want to look at interoperability of the cartridges in a way that supports open educational resource use cases.
• I will be teaching a Python MOOC on Blackboard’s CourseSites platform. I want to use this as a way to learn how to teach using Bb Learn and explore some of the cool features of Learn as well as spread my Python material to a few thousand more students through yet another channel. I also expect to serve as an early heavy user of LTI in CourseSites to make sure that it is easy for others who come in after me. I want to also play with the nice Common Cartridge and Open Educational Resource support in Learn as well – again to serve as an pattern for others to follow building MOOC / OER courses. Here is the link to enroll in my course (scroll down to Python for Informatics).

I would like to increase Blackboard’s direct support of the Apereo Foundation. We spent three+ years merging Sakai and JASig – for me it is time to invest in Apereo so it can move into the kinds of wonderful new areas we had imagined as we designed the merger.

Summary/Reflection

It has been a heck of a year. Releasing Sakai 2.9.0 and (soon) Sakai 2.9.2 will be really important milestones for me. My own measurement of the value of my Blackboard activities is simply that the Sakai community is thriving and healthy and the product continues to move forward and improve.

Back a year ago I told people that this would all be “no big deal” and everything would be fine. I hope that people now see a year later that this is indeed the case. Blackboard has gently supported the Sakai community in appropriate ways and without fanfare. As was stated March of last year, Blackboard intends to have a healthy engagement in open source activities like Moodle and Sakai and do so in a way that advances the causes of those communities in order to have a healthy open source ecosystem in higher education.

When I look at both my involvement in Sakai and the Moodlerooms team’s involvement in Moodle – I am pretty pleased and proud of what has been done so far.

As always, comments welcome.

I am totally geeked and somewhat histrionic that CC took a look at my plight. Elliot Harmon of CC commented on my post about CC-∞ (Infinity) from yesterday.

… Thinking about CC Infinity, I worry that it would create an infinite number (sorry) of incompatible bodies of work. The exciting promise of OER is the ability to seamlessly mix content together from different sources. Navigating a complicated set of restrictions would make life much more difficult for educators and content creators….

Since my response is really long I decided to make it whole post.

---

Elliott,

Thanks for your comment. I feel good that the topic is receiving some discussion at CCHQ. When I say “content slums” – I mean any cloning of material for the sole purpose of making money off ads, getting into search results or taking away views. YouTube is not a content slum – but a YouTube channel with nothing but cloned content is a slum (in my vernacular). But my definition hardly matters.

The problem in a sense is the kind of thing that happens when something like CC-BY is very successful – I used it on everything. But at some point my fragmentary bits come together in something like a whole book or whole course and after years of development and promotion my work starts to get some attention. But that very moment that I get attention for my work is the exact moment when bottom-feeders can gain the most advantage by cloning those materials.

There comes a time where one needs something that is more precise than the CC-BY series. One might say “use NC” and that will keep people from cloning content on YouTube with ads. But if they are caught – they turn off ads for a few days and then when no one is looking they turn them back on. If all they are doing is cloning materials, they are complying with ND. And they are not trying to limit others from spamming – so they are complying with SA. So all the CC additions are pretty much useless in the face of those whose intention is to clone (and not remix or add value to) materials.

The answer is ARR with pre-granted permissions. In order to avoid the “incompatibility” you speak of above, I would word all the permissions in the following form:

By limiting the statements to when a non-ARR license can be used but insisting that those licenses be from the existing CC set hopefully means that the only complex legal interpretation will be the “when to apply” parts of the statements and not the “what happens” part of the statements. Of course I am not a lawyer… :)

You can sit in a room at CCHQ and convince yourselves that such a thing would somehow confuse the CC brand. It indeed might. And so CC might decide not to do it. But just because CC does not build such a thing, it does not mean that thing thing is not needed and it does not keep someone else (i.e. like me) from building such a thing.

I have decided that CC-Infinity is a bad moniker for the idea. Yesterday I was in a hurry and trying to figure what the “opposite” of CC0 was. My new “opposite of CC0″ is CC1 – CC-One.

With the addition of CC-One, there is a delightful slider bar of options on a number line. CC0 would be at 0.0, CC-BY would be at 0.25, CC-BY-SA would be at 0.5, and CC-SA-NC would be 0.75, CC-BY-SA-ND-NC would be 0.85, and CC1 would be at 1.0. It is beautiful – CC1 completes the set perfectly. CC0 starts from PD and works up while CC1 starts from ARR and works down while CC-BY populates useful stopping points in the middle.

I love the symmetry – as an engineer it feels like it is now complete.

I also understand if CC thinks that if you make CC1 it will be come too popular and folks will abandon CC-BY, preferring CC1 even for little things like a Flickr photo. This might reduce the overall amount of CC-BY.

I would disagree, I think that CC1 would mean more people would find one of the CC licenses suitable for far more materials. Some might start with CC1 to dip their toes into CC and then after becoming more educated and comfortable know when they want to use the CC-BY series. I think that CC1 might lead to a short term drop in the use of CC-BY and friends – but in the long run – by making the CC language more expressive and widening the range, we can involve far more content creators in CC overall. Every crack we can put in ARR is a step in the right direction. And frankly something like CC1 might give mainstream publishers and content producers a way to loosen their grip ever so slightly in a way that more slowly achieves our common goals – but does so for a far wider range of materials.

Comments welcome.

P.S. You really need to look at the Bill Fitzgerald post on Creative Commons and Human Nature where he talks about the recent improvement in the Createspace policy that addresses the rights of the copyright holder when the copyright license is “non-exclusive”. It is a beautiful thing – the policy was changed from “first in wins” to “copyright holder wins” early last year. If CC had something to do with this – outstanding. If not, you should say nice things about it and try to get other distribution channels to adopt similar policies. I had a very unhappy run-in with Createspace back in 2010 that caused me a lot of pointless work – back when the policy was “first in wins” and the material was CC-BY-SA.

P.P.S. If I do build this “something less than ARR” framework, I won’t call it CC1 because then I would be sued (rightfully) for trademark infringement. I would love to call it “ARRGH” but I don’t yet know what the “G” and “H” stand for to make the acronym work. :)

Yesterday was an interesting and emotional day for me.

• I made a video of how upset I am at my own mistake of putting CC-BY on materials and having that decision play into the hands of spammers who would use my content for search or link bait.
• I removed all the CC-BY references from my Coursera Internet History, Technology, and Security recorded lectures and replaced it with All Rights Reserved.
• I got some help from Cory Doctorow (tweet) who noticed my situation and gave me some reassurance that YouTube would fall on the side of the copyright holder and not let the spam stand even with the small detail of the CC-BY license. I of course did not believe him (tweet)
• YouTube did remove the offending videos – even the ones that were CC-BY. Cory was right. It only took two days. (tweet)
• I made a new version of my histronic video addressing the issues independent of YouTube taking the videos down.
• Bill Fitzgerald wrote an excellent post titled Creative Commons and Human Nature where he covers some of these issues with less histronics than me. In particular points out that Createspace has an excellent policy that nicely addresses the rights of the copyright holder when the copyright license is “non-exclusive”. It is a beautiful thing – the policy was changed from “first in wins” to “copyright holder wins” early last year. Worth a read.

So reading the above sequence of events you might think, “Great – You won against a spammer.” – but actually that is not at all how I feel.

I effectively used a bit of bluster and YouTube’s general tendency to do whatever the copyright holder asks to get my way. But in effect, I succeeded in revoking CC-BY after the fact and that makes me feel bad. I don’t want to break CC-BY – it was my mistake to use it and legalize spammers.

So I am still removing CC-BY from all my materials that I don’t want used as spam or link bait. I don’t want to face YouTube the next time and have them look at the actual copyright detail and decide that I have no recourse.

We still need a license that protects high-value OER materials from inappropriate reuse while enabling responsible reuse without any requirement of permission.

What we need – CC-∞ (Infinity)

I tenatively title my idea CC-∞ as homage to Creative Commons CC0. CC-∞ starts with All Rights Reserved as the default license (much like CC0 starts with effectively Public Domain) and then adds statements that define legitimate reuse scenarios for which permission is explicitly given.

In a sense if we look at CC-BY+SA+ND+NC it is structured as a liberal license that adds increasing restrictions based on the desires of the copyright holder. CC-∞ is the opposite – it is a restrictive license that adds clauses that make it more liberal in scenarios per the wishes of the copyright holder.

Much like in all of CC – we are best served if the smart lawyers at Creative Commons draft these up. All this stuff is so complex especially when international laws are involved. This is not something that I should draft up by myself – but unless CC builds something like this – I will be forced to define CC-∞ myself – and it will suck. But it will be better than any of the CC-BY variations and better than All Rights Reserved – but still suck unless Creative Commons steps up and does this work.

Reflection

I was really upset yesterday. But I should be clear that I was not upset at YouTube and I was not upset at the spammer. I was upset at myself for not anticipating this “CC-BY” gotcha. It is always painful when you assume that you are safe and doing the right thing and then something jolts you and makes it clear to you that you made a mistake. And you might suffer negative consequences for your mistake. Yesterday my intellectual property and copyright cheese got moved and I was scared and upset.

Now 48 hours later all is well. I will still keep CC-BY on much of my materials – for example, my Python for Informatics course on online.dr-chuck.com is 100% CC-BY and releases all its materials with CC-BY (here). I am not going to remove the CC-BY from these materials because I really want them distributed as widely as possible and and want to pre-permit unfettered reuse – even if a copy of the materials end up in a content slum. I have thought that through and am prepared for it.

Going forward, I won’t just put CC-BY on everything I create related to teaching and learning. I will put it on most of what I produce – just not all. I will ask myself the question, “Are you prepared to make spam-like reuse of these materials legitimate?” If the answer is “yes” – then I will use CC-BY and if the answer is “no” the answer will be my own self-constructed version of CC-∞.

Just in passing, I would just like to note that I am very explicitly not revealing *who* did the spamming. They probably did not have any truly evil plan – they do not deserve any particular attention or criticism. They were in possession of a few MP4 files and put them up on YouTube. I got them taken down – nothing to see here – move along.

Thanks for listening and as always comments welcome.


for dir in {1..100}; do
for dir2 in {a..f}; do
folder=dir-${dir}/dir-${dir2}; mkdir -p ${folder}
echo "A file with some text" > $folder/`pwgen -A10`.txt
done
done


./dir-1/dir-a/euciphel.txt
./dir-1/dir-b/aineijof.txt
./dir-1/dir-c/naungeix.txt
./dir-1/dir-d/oopoolah.txt
./dir-1/dir-e/epahgome.txt
./dir-1/dir-f/ahshicia.txt
./dir-2/dir-a/busaenga.txt
./dir-2/dir-b/waepheep.txt
./dir-2/dir-c/jaeyahbi.txt
./dir-2/dir-d/biejoong.txt


A Mac ships with two useful utilities which are hidden away by default. The first it Ticket View which allows you to see the kerberos tickets you currently have and the second is Screen Sharing, which is a VNC client. I find it useful to create an alias to these two programs in the Applications/Utilities folder so that spotlight will index them and make them easy to launch. By default the applications are installed in:

/System/Library/CoreServices/

In finder you can go here in Finder by pressing ⇧⌘G and pasting in the path. The drag the programs to:

/Applications/

Not you can easily find these programs and open them from spotlight.

Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley, is one of the best software engineering books I’ve ever read. The ideas in this book are going to transform the industry.

The general idea is that deployments and upgrades are only as painful as they are because we do them infrequently. The release process should be so routine that performing a release is the most boring thing in the world. Continuous delivery takes continuous integration to the natural next level.

Read this book. You’ll see that we needn’t endure the difficulties that we take for granted when we maintain a software system.

Congratulations to sophomore Roger Chen and freshman Ashley Ngu for their winning entries in the CourseWork Visual Design Contest. In addition to showing excellent graphic design and an attractive color scheme, the winning entries were comprehensive, simple, and original.

For their efforts, Roger will be awarded a MacBook Air, while Ashley has won a iPad Mini.

Elements of the winning designs will be incorporated into a CourseWork redesign in the 2013-2014 Academic year, but here is a preview of their winning logos.

We thank all the students who took the time to enter. While this contest was judged for visual design, we did appreciate the ideas presented in some entries for improving the workflow of CourseWork and we will be crediting these students if their ideas make it into CourseWork at a future date.

The Sakai Teaching and Learning community is seeking submissions for the annual Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) competition. The award recognizes innovation and excellence in technology-supported teaching, academic collaboration, and student engagement. (See last year’s winners.)< http://openedpractices.org/twsia/2012/winners >
Award categories include:

• Higher Education: Face-to-face

• Higher Education: Fully Online or Hybrid Course

• Primary and Secondary Education (K-12)

• Project Sites & Other Uses of Sakai

• Portfolios

We look forward to entries from those using the Sakai CLE and those pioneering the Sakai OAE (Open Academic Environment).

This year, the selection process will consist of two phases:

Phase 1: Preliminary abstract submission (recommended but not required)
Opening Date: Feb 11, 2013 Closing Deadline: March 1, 2013
Each applicant should submit a brief description of the innovative teaching method, practice or strategy to be considered for the final award. Instructions and an example of a well-written abstract are included in the submission form< https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1egNQvvJFxECWsr122G3Uegk9SAsJ3jkawDQR5X0K61Y/viewform >.
Applicants will receive feedback on abstracts by March 8, 2013.
Submitting an abstract is not required. However, the three questions on the abstract submission form will be required for all applicants as a part of the full application process. Those who submit a preliminary abstract may edit their responses prior to submitting the final application, in order to incorporate feedback from the judges.
The responses to these three items also will be used as part of the session description at the annual conference.

Phase 2: Final submission (required of all applicants)
Opening Date: March 1, 2013 Closing Deadline: April 5, 2013
Each applicant will submit an in-depth description of the innovative teaching method, practice or strategy submitted and how it addresses the award criteria.

Resources for applicants
• Award categories< http://openedpractices.org/twsia/award-categories >
• How to get started< http://openedpractices.org/faq/i%E2%80%99m-interested-applying-teaching-sakai-innovation-award-twsia-where-do-i-start >
• Award eligibility, criteria and rubric< http://openedpractices.org/twsia/2011-teaching-sakai-innovation-award-evaluation-rubric >
• Frequently asked questions< http://openedpractices.org/faqs%3Ftag=twsia >

Winners will be announced no later than April 19, 2013 and recognized at the Apereo (previously Jasig-Sakai) Conference in San Diego, California, June 3 -6, 2013.

Registration and travel expenses may be available for award winners.

Contact: Salwa Khan< mailto:sk16@txstate.edu?subject=TWSIA%20 >, sk16@txstate.edu < mailto:sk16@txstate.edu > Texas State University, TWSIA Committee Chair