Serendipity35

Here's my point upfront: Not everything online is open. 

This is the story of an image and a blog post that are mine and that have found their way online in other places. 

I post a lot of things online - mostly articles and images. Almost all of that is marked with a Creative Commons License. That means that with few restrictions you can use and reuse the resources. This blog is labeled in that way.

But the Open Everything movement of the past three decades has created a generation and an incorrect assumption that everything online is open.   

I found a photo of mine that I had used online in another place. It was the two Buddhas image shown here and I found it on a well-respected Buddhist journal website.

It also shows up in other places. One simple Google image search turned up 10 instances of it being used and it can also be found on other sites. I'm actually pleased to see it used and properly attributed for others to see.  

The really important distinction is that in the case of the Tricycle journal using the photo (as you can see above), they have credited me and linked to their source which is my Flickr site. That "attribution" is part of the CC license I used. That is the way open is supposed to work. Other people have reused the image (which I did clearly mark for reuse) too but without attribution. And others after them have then reused it having no idea where the image originated and whether or not it is open for their reuse. (Another Flick example is at the top of this post.)

I have also seen other mages of mine used in places online without attribution. In some cases, they were images I did NOT license as open (such as an image on Instagram or Facebook). I'm not a professional photographer who makes a living from my images, but there are people who are and obviously this is a critical issue for them. Watermarking images, disabling right-click downloading and using smaller, lower-quality files are some ways they might try to prevent copying. But it's so easy to grab a screenshot of anything online that it's impossible to fully prevent it. Plus, you have to spend a lot of time tracking down where your images are being used and pursue misusers.

When I use free and open images from others (Google allows for that kind of search and there are many sites such as pixabay.com), I still doublecheck to see whether I need to attribute a creator or site. On that popular image sharing site, they have a Pixabay License and it also states when you download an image that it is is "Free for commercial use. No attribution required," there is an opportunity for you to give attribution. I always tag the image name with "pixabay" and I usually will still give credit. For one thing, I want others that see it and know that it's not my work and that they too can legitimately use it. The site tells you that "Crediting isn’t required, but linking back is greatly appreciated and allows image authors to gain exposure." You can also "tip" the creator with a donation. Pixabay, Wikimedia, Flickr, YouTube, and others will give you the correct code to use for attribution and perhaps even for embedding. An example is at the bottom of this post.

I have Google Alerts set for lots of words and phrases. For example, I get updates about the appearance of my name, Serendipty35, and serendipity35.net appearing n the web and I check out the sites. It's always nice to see someone linking to the blog or mentioning me in a positive fashion. It is a lot less appealing to find posts plagiarized and in a few cases, the entire posts feed being fed into some other site as its content.

As an educator for 40+ years, I have always included lessons in the proper use and citation of sources for all kinds of intellectual property. It's a lot more difficult since the Internet came into being because the copying is so much faster and easier. Educating users in and out of school and of all ages about the proper use of reusing content is a lesson that should never end.

Here are some concepts that I see used as hashtags, which is a sign that they have a following: lifelong learning, lifewide learning. open education, open learning, open universities. Around 2012, when MOOCs went large, the open of Massive Open Online Courses was a really important part of what defined those courses. Today, the open part has been lost in many instances where you see the MOOC term applied to an offering.

I created a category here in 2006 called "Open Everything" as an umbrella term for what I saw as a trend which would include MOOCs, OER (Open Educational Resources), open textbooks, open-source software and other things used in "open education" and beyond what we traditionally have thought of as "education," such as training, professional development and unsupervised learning.

It's not that this openness started in 2012. In 2006, I was posting in that category about a conference on interoperability, iTunes U, podcasts, Creative Commons and other open efforts. It wasn't until 2008 that I used the term "Open Everything" in a post as a movement I was seeing, rather than just my aggregated category of posts. 

That 2006 conference brought together schools using different course management systems (CMS such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai) to see if there might be ways to have these open and closed CMS work together. Moodle and Sakai were open-source software and schools (including NJIT where I was working) were experimenting with them while still using the paid products. At that time, a survey of officials responsible for software selection at a range of higher education institutions responded in a survey that two-thirds of them had considered or were actively considering using open source products. About 25% of institutions were implementing higher education-specific open-source software of some kind.

On a much larger scale, there were open universities with quite formal learning, such as the Open University in Great Britain. There were efforts at less formal learning online, such as Khan Academy. There was also the beginning of less formal learning from traditionally formal places, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

The MOOC emerged from the availability of free resources, such as blogging sites, that were not open in that you probably could not get to the code that ran it or reproduce it elsewhere but were freely available. 

The Open Everything philosophy embraces equity and inclusion and the idea that every person has a right to learn throughout their lives. It champions the democratization of knowledge. 

In the 14 years since I started writing about this, we have made progress in the use of OER. Open textbooks, which I literally championed at conferences and in colleges, are much easier to get accepted by faculty than it was back then.

Unfortunately, some things that began as open - MOOCs are perhaps the best example - are now closed. They may not be fully closed. You can still enroll in courses online without cost. You may or may not be able to reuse those materials in other places or modify them for your own purposes.

In 2017, I wrote that David Wiley makes the point about "open pedagogy" that "because 'open is good' in the popular narrative, there’s apparently a temptation to characterize good educational practice as open educational practice. But that’s not what open means. As I’ve argued many times, the difference between free and open is that open is “free plus.”

Free plus what? Free plus the 5R permissions." Those five permissions are Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute. Many free online resources do not embrace those five permissions. 

I view the once-open doors are mostly shut. I hope they won't be locked.

It's Monday morning in America and students are headed back to classrooms. Well, most of them are headed out to a school classroom. The COVID-19 virus (AKA coronavirus) has finally put some schools into motion to consider and try to set up online learning in the event that the school is closed.

Of course, if nothing is already in place, it's too late.

An NPR headline about K-12 education says "As Schools Close Because Of Coronavirus, Nearly 300 Million Kids Aren't In Class."

A NY Times headline on higher education states "First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow." It uses the University of Washington ias an example as they move to online classes for its 50,000 students. This week finds both K-12 and colleges starting spring break, which might be a break from the problem or a time to prepare for the possibility of not reopening after the break.

In my home state of New Jersey, the state posted a directive and "guidance" to schools. Local school officials are concerned about this public health emergency. The NJDOE will count days of home learning toward the requirement that districts provide 180 days of instruction. The risk of exposure to COVID-19 in New Jersey remains low at the moment but the possibility of mandated public health school closures is real. 

The phrase "it's not a case of if but when" is being applied to COVID-19 but it also applies to less serious situations like natural disasters that close schools and even instances when teachers or students need to be home for extended periods.

Newbie schools will quickly learn that there is a lot more to online learning than "putting materials online." Some schools may be using software or a paid platform to post homework and other materials. That's not online learning. That's content management.

In preparing to move instruction online, it is too easily forgotten that training needs to be done for faculty and for students. I think back to the late 1990s when I first began teaching using the Internet and designing online courses. Both groups of users were not ready for it. Some students didn't even have the basic technology from a home computer, fast enough Internet and even smaller things like a microphone for a computer. 

The software we used included a Course Management System (at first our CMS was WebCT at the college) and additional software for watching and recording video and audio and all of it became the major training activities for the instructional technology department I managed. We tried very hard not to be known as "the WebCT people."

I had started in K-12 education and when I left there at that time we had no online learning in place. Unfortunately, for many schools, they are not that much further along today.

Certainly, money is a factor. A school district that provides students with a laptop or tablet to take home has a big advantage over one where only some students have a computer and broadband at home. In the past two decades, not everyone has gotten online or is carrying a smartphone in their pocket.

Again, having the hardware, software, and content online is only part of the solution.

The college that doesn't offer online classes is rare today, but even more rare is the college that is prepared to go fully online with all its courses, students and faculty in an emergency.

It is sad and disappointing that it takes a possible pandemic for schools to think about how they would deal with a shutdown. The capability to provide instruction when there is a weather closing or other short-term emergency should be considered as important already. 

Schools have made progress going online in the 21st century, but not enough.

Researchers expected it a year and a half ago, but Facebook is finally giving researchers access to a lot of data. The data is about how users have shared information, including misinformation, about political events around the world.

The data released last month relates to URLs (38 million) that users shared publicly on Facebook between January 2017 and July 2019. Did they consider a linked site to be fake news or hate speech? Which links did they click or like or share?

Social scientists will also be able to connect that with some demographic information like age, gender, and location and political affinities. There are also concerns that there are distortions, or noise, that have been injected into the data. Why? Thankfully, because of differential privacy by data managers who have tried to ensure privacy.

This seems to echo the last U.S. Presidential election in 2016 when Facebook was hit with evidence that it had given political operatives unauthorized use of its data. In April 2018, they announced that they would turn over full access to information about its users with no strings attached - but to researchers.

It's the right thing to do but a tough thing for a company to do - turning over proprietary information. Previously, that data was only available for research that was either conducted in-house or required preapproval from Facebook.