NJECC Presentation: Reading & Writing Supports

This Tuesday, March 16th I will be presenting at the New Jersey Educational Computing Cooperative Annual Conference which is held at Montclair State University on the topic of: What's New in the Area of Reading & Writing Supports. My session is from 2:30-3:20 pm and if you are planning on attending it would be great to see you. A lot has happened this year in the field of assistive technology and in the field of technology in general which has resulted in some new and updated technologies that I'm sure you will want to find out about.

I have been busy this year publishing some new materials which can be used to support assistive technology in the schools. I recently released a new video called: Assistive Technology: Powerful Solutions for Success which is a wonderful tool for teacher in-service programs. Likewise, in this age of information overload I created a four page laminated reference guide called: Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know, which is chock full of resources and information about the use of assistive technology in the classroom. I will have both resources available at my workshop for you to take a look at. The session will be fast paced as we delve into some of the new tools and trends to support students in the area of reading and writing in the classroom. I hope to see you there- but just in case you can't make it here is my presentation deck that I will be using.



PS: You can now purchase my video and laminated reference guides right from my blog by clicking on the individual pages on the right side of the navigation panel.

Creative Commons Use in For-Profit Company eLearning?

As part of the Big Question this month Open Content in Workplace Learning?, I’m exploring whether Open Content can be used by for-profit companies.  And, since Open Content comes in under the Creative Commons license structure.  Actually, I’m curious if Open Content ever is not Creative Commons?  It’s by definition Open, but theoretically you could choose a different open license. I’ve just never seen it.

In any case, to understand the use of Open Content, it’s important to understand Creative Commons licensing.

Creative Commons Licensing Terms

Creative Commons licensing terms.  All CC licenses start with:

• Attribution (CC-BY) – Allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform a copyrighted work – and derivative
  works based upon it – but only if they give credit. All CC licenses contain this condition.

Licenses may have one or more of the following permissions or restrictions:

• Non-Commercial (NC) - Allows copy, distribute, display and perform a work – and derivative works
  based upon it – but for non-commercial purposes only.
• Share Alike (SA) - Allows others to distribute derivative works but only only under the same conditions as the original license.
• No Derivative Works (ND) – Allows copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of the work, but not make derivative works based on it.

These get combined into one of six licenses:

• Attribution (CC-BY)
• Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
• Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
• Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

Licenses on Open Content

I took a bit of a sampling of various sources of content found via the OER Commons and from the OCW Consortium:

• SERC – CC-BY-NC-SA
• Learn NC – CC-BY-NC-SA
• MIT OpenCourseWare – CC-BY-NC-SA
• Utah State OpenCourseWare – CC-BY-NC-SA, but some specific courses such as Intro to Instructional Design has a CC-BY-SA
• Johns Hopkins OCW - CC-BY-NC-SA
• Notre Dame - CC-BY-NC-SA
• The Open University – CC-BY-NC-SA

There’s a definite pattern here.  Most of the OCW content appears to come under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.  There were a few exceptions such as Stanford Engineering Everywhere with a CC-BY license.

But, I think this really turns into a question of the implications of CC-BY-NC-SA.

Implications of Noncommercial Use

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses disallow “commercial use” – i.e., they preclude the use:

… in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

From what I’ve read, it’s intentionally fuzzy what this exactly means and I am by no means an expert (or a lawyer) around this stuff.

Creative Commons themselves conducted a study to understand commonly held interpretation of this definition – which is itself important from a practical standpoint.

The study itself tells us that people generally consider the following unacceptable:

• Promotional use (advertising)
• Use makes money

Perception is that greater scrutiny is required as you move from:

• Private or individual,
• Charitable or social good,
• Non-profit,
• For-profit

In other words, generally use by an individual (i.e., self-study is considered okay).  If it’s for a charity, social good or non-profit, you are generally safe if you are not making direct revenue / donations from it.

I interpret that putting up links as a means for employees to access the content themselves would generally be considered safe.  I would be curious if anyone disagrees with this.  Of course, you can always find a corporate attorney who doesn’t want to do that even, but you probably can’t access common websites from that company either.

Here’s the tricky questions.  Maybe there are clear cut answers, I just don’t know what they are. 

What if I want to use the course content or part of the course content to teach employees or partners behind the firewall.  Is that commercial use?

A question from the study:

“Work would be used by a for-profit company, but no money would be made”

• Definitely commercial - ~33%
• Can’t say - ~40%
• Definitely noncommercial - ~27%

Shows that people are generally split on the question of whether the scenario I describe is considered commercial or noncommercial.  So it’s a bit of a gray area.  And likely it’s even fuzzier based on whether you are linking, copying, modifying, etc.

Any thoughts on the practical answer here?  If I want to create eLearning for use by my employees, can I use CC-BY-NC content as part of it?  Under what conditions?

Implications of Share Alike

Share Alike has some interesting challenges in interpretation for this situation as well.  From the Creative Commons FAQ:

If you are combining a work licensed under a ShareAlike license condition, you need to make sure that you are happy and able to license the resulting work under the same license conditions as the original work.

This suggests that if you use ShareAlike licensed materials in a course for your employees, then the resulting work must be licensed the same way. 

There’s a lot of gray around this as well.  First, likely the course is being provided only behind your firewall.  There’s nothing specifically that I can see that says you have to distribute the resulting work or make it widely available.  However, there is a clause that causes a bit of concern:

You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.

Of course, the license would allow anyone with access to the work to distribute it themselves.  Thus, an employee could theoretically make a copy and distribute it.  Doubtful that an employee would do this, but since it would be consistent with the license, I’m not sure you could pursue.

In practice, I’m pretty sure you would want to approach the use of this content a bit differently.  If you are taking ShareAlike content and either using a subset or modifying it, you might just want to create a derivative work that is ShareAlike on its own.  It can be fully redistributed, and you wouldn’t care.  Then you can link to that work within your broader course.

It’s somewhat a loose coupling of content, but it is consistent with the spirit of the ShareAlike license.  Create new, public works based on the original work.  Don’t put stuff in that new work that is specific to your organization that you don’t want shared.  That creates a new ShareAlike work.  And you can link to a public instance of that.

If you think about it, having a large collection of these smaller chunks that could be used by employees probably could provide value to others.

Question for Images and Other Content

Of course this same question comes up about a whole lot of other content.  For example, Flickr provides access to images according to Creative Commons license.  See Flickr Creative Commons.  The images under the Attribution license obviously give you a fair bit of freedom to use in your eLearning.  How about those under Noncommercial?  Can you put one of those images inside your internal corporate training as long as you provide attribution?

It’s really the same question as the noncommercial use as described above.

ShareAlike would seem to be a bit problematic for images.  You are very likely using it as a copy inside the course.  Doesn’t that run you into the problem described above?

Help

Again, I’m by no means an expert on this stuff, nor an attorney.  But what would be good is to have some people who know more about this weigh in with help on how to proceed.

I’m also curious to find out what corporate attorneys are deciding around this?

Using Context Organizer within Comapping

I have been using Context Organizer for the past year or so and was very excited to see that it is now integrated with Comapping, a web based collaborative mind mapping tool. Context Organizer can quickly pull out keywords and summarize information from URL's, Word documents, and PDF's. I have created a short video tutorial showing you how Context Organizer works within Comapping. If you like what you see go to Comapping and set a free trial account to get started.

Importing a List of Images into PaperShow

For the past year I have used PaperShow extensively in my teaching and when I am doing workshops and presentations. I have primarily used PaperShow as a digital flipchart which has really worked out really well. Recently, I have begun to use PaperShow when teaching my graduate course in Action Research to make my PowerPoint presentations more interactive and engaging which has put a whole new spin on how I am using this innovative and exciting product. Having said this, there may be times in the classroom or in your training session that all you want to do is to be able to show and annotate images and don't really have the need for a full blown PowerPoint presentation. So the question is- is there a way for me to bring in just a list of images that I can then show and annotate? Of course the answer is a resounding yes! In fact you can import jpg, gif, and png files into the PaperShow application and then print them on the 8 1/2 x 11 PaperShow paper so that you can annotate on top of them. If you plan on importing a series of images I would recommend that you place all of the images that you want to use in a folder which will make it easier to import as you will see in the video below. So go ahead and feel free to use PaperShow just with a list of images. This technique works equally well on the Mac and on a PC.

LMS Solution for Simple Partner Compliance Training

Background / Requirements

I’m just starting consulting with a company that has a single course (might eventually be broken into a few different course) that needs to be delivered to an audience of 600-1000 partners as part of a larger certification process.  Thus, they need to be able to report back out who’s completed the courses.  Courses will be authored using a Rapid Authoring Tool.  This may grow to be a little bit more than this, but likely not much.

So, that’s a pretty simple set of LMS requirements.  It worries me just a bit that I might be missing something important that will turn into a Learning Management Systems (LMS) Selection Gotcha?

Fast Selection

And while this wasn’t the basis for the post One Week to Select an LMS – No Way, it’s a situation where I’m not seeing the need to spend a lot of time going into a detailed selection process. But it’s almost like my background with and knowledge of all the different LMS products (see LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers, Low Cost Learning Management Systems, Rapid Learning Management Systems and Open Source Learning Management Systems) feels like it’s hurting me in this task. 

Current Thinking

So, without a lot of thought, here’s what I’m currently thinking and I hope folks will weigh in…

I was a little surprised when I realized how much some of the mainstream SaaS LMS products (Articulate Online, Learn.com, etc.) would cost.  Something like $500/mo.  And we wouldn’t really be using much of the functionality.

We are definitely considering doing something like a hosted Moodle solution.  Pricing is very attractive on some of these.  However, the interface and user interaction doesn’t quite align with what we want.  Still , it’s definitely in the running and other than interface, I’m not sure what I’d get with other LMS solutions that I don’t get with Moodle. 

I’m also looking at whether we could just put the content on one of the social learning hubs such as LearnHub, Coggno, odijoo which seem to offer a way to put this up for a very attractive price (Free).  We have the advantage that the content here is not sensitive, so if someone else took it, more power to them.  I don’t have direct experience with these systems and worry a bit about the risk associated with doing it this way.  Thoughts?  Anyone have much experience using these social learning hubs for that kind of purpose?

What else should I consider?

CS Odessa Announces ConceptDraw MindWave

PRESS RELEASE

CS Odessa announces ConceptDraw MindWave a no charge mind mapping add-in for Google Wave

San Jose, California, on March 1st, 2010 – CS Odessa released a version of its mind mapping tool for Google Wave. This is a no charge add-in to Google Wave that can be used as part of Google Wave to map out a strategy rapidly or brainstorm on a critical topic. The ConceptDraw MindWave for Google Wave tool allows teams to collaborate on a mind map in an interactive flowing manner building a map structure that represents the planned work.

The map add-in supports Google Wave playback that allows one to step back through a map. Once a mind map is has the contents from the interactive session the mind map file can then be downloaded to one’s desktop to be further developed using ConceptDraw MINDMAP for Macintosh or Windows.

Olin Reams, General Manager for the Americas at CS Odessa, states, “We hear from our customers that collaboration tools are critical for team communication today. It is what gives them the competitive edge needed to maintain flexibility. Google Wave and ConceptDraw MindWave are free tools that deliver seamless communication inside or outside your organization”.

Yuriy Varbanets, Product Manager for ConceptDraw MINDMAP, adds, “We feel that Google Wave is a great collaboration backbone for us to support with our collaboration tool. Beta customers have been talking up about how well suited it is to their planning process.”

Learn more about ConceptDraw MINDMAP add-in for Google Wave on the ConceptDraw
website http://www.conceptdraw.com/en/mindwave

ABOUT CS ODESSA

Founded in 1993, Computer Systems Odessa supplies cross-platform productivity tools and graphics technologies to professional and corporate users around the world. With headquarters in Odessa, Ukraine and an office in California, CS Odessa sells products internationally through resellers in over 25 countries. The ConceptDraw Productivity Line of products has won numerous awards and is used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Does the Big Question Make Sense Anymore?

I’ve been facilitating the Big Question on ASTD’s Learning Circuit’s blog since sometime in 2006.  Last month’s big question was Instruction in a Information Snacking Culture?  The question was all about how we consume and work with information:

People seem to be spending less time going through information in depth and less willing to spend time on information. We seem to be snacking on information, not consuming it in big chunks.

In Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim and that seems to be how people consume blog posts much more these days. I've also noticed a trend towards more twitter mentions of blog posts, but less deep commenting behavior much less thoughtful blog responses.

One of the comments was really telling:

Reading this blog has been an example of snacking for me.

I am very interested in the post and thoughts it provokes and read down the comments (skimmed) but when it came to links to other blogs I did not use them.

And since many of the responses provided (in comments and via blog posts) suggested that snacking is just fine, it seems hypocritical to say - “Well that kind of defeats a key purpose of the Big Question.”  But it does (and I am).  The point is for us to have an exchange of ideas around a topic.  But if no one reads the responses or exchanges ideas, then what’s the point?

I personally still feel like I get value.  If there are some meaningful responses to this month’s question Open Content in Workplace Learning?, I will likely learn a lot.  Please still do respond to it.  And if you don’t know about Open Content – take this as an opportunity to learn.

Still I have to wonder if we need to revisit the approach and value proposition.  Maybe we need to look at other ways of doing this?

Thoughts, suggestions?