[IP] Open Educational Resources as an alternative to Textbook Piracy

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: David Lassner [david@hawaii.edu]
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 1:09 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Open Educational Resources as an alternative to Textbook Piracy

IP readers may be interested in the "movement" to share educationally
resources freely, which largely falls under the umbrella of Open
Educational Resources (OER).  This approach enables both learners and
faculty to identify high-quality educational content and tools that
can be used in formal courses as well as informal and lifelong learning.

MIT's Open Courseware initiative <http://ocw.mit.edu> has been a
poster-child for OER.  Several foundations have made substantial
investments, e.g. <http://www.oercommons.org/> and there are many more
initiatives that work at the institutional level and beyond.

To make Bob Frankston's point in another way, universities have
generally delegated selection of course materials to individual
faculty, who may or may not even work together within departments much
less across disciplines.  The lack of collective positioning by
selectors (who do not bear the costs) has put control of the
marketplace in the hands of the textbook publishers.  Their ultimate
responsibility is of course to maximize value to shareholders.  This
is not their fault, it's the marketplace we have created and support.

Breaking the law through piracy, whether with BitTorrent or a copier,
is not the answer.  OER *may* represent another approach to the legal
creation, distributiong and use educational resources.

A fun place to start exploring is:
    http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-learning-ocw-oer-free.html

------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Lassner                                           david@hawaii.edu
Vice President for Information Technology
    & Chief Information Officer                    Voice: +1
808-956-3501
University of Hawaii                                Fax: +1 808-956-5025



On Jul 3, 2008, at 5:59 AM, David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2@bobf.frankston.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:28 AM
> To: David Farber; 'ip'
> Subject: RE: [IP] Re:       BitTorrent now being used for piracy of
> textbooks
>
> Periodically we need to step back and ask basic questions like why
> are we using a particular funding system – in this case using text
> books as units for recovering the costs of producing the books with
> some profit incentive?  The current system is far from perfect and
> has other side effects such as letting states that purchase large
> volumes dictate policies – especially when a state like Texas may
> view science with fear.
>
> In the old days professors would put together their own compendiums
> using a copying machine to copy the pages. Torrenting is just an
> incremental variation on borrowing copies of a text book from a
> library or buying a used volume. The result of these practices is to
> up the price for each purchased copy to compensate what could be
> considered lost sales of the arbitrary physical objects that are at
> the center of an arbitrary funding model.





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