[Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands
Hello, Maybe this is interesting for Wikimedians too, certainly for Wikibookians. The Dutch ministry of education is going to set up Wikiwijs, a project to develop provide open and free school books or teaching materials to Dutch schools. In the elections the parties promised to abolish parents' payments for school books, and now the government has to cope with the costs. On a seminar in Amersfoort at Friday it became obvious that many questions are still unanswered. Wikiwijs is intended to be a platform for collaboratively developping teachings materials, but also link to already existing materials (also commercial ones). Although a letter of the minister to the parliament said that only teachers will be able to edit on Wikiwijs, now this remains to be discussed. Kennisnet (a government foundation known to Wikimedians because it supported Wikipedia with technological help) and the Open University are commissioned to create Wikiwijs. The man from the Open University admitted that Wikiwijs will not work like a wiki, and Marjon Bakker from Wikimedia Nederland asked him why the name is Wikiwijs then. (But on many occasions the minister and others compared Wikiwijs to Wikipedia - are they exploiting our good name?) The organisation of Dutch high schools wants to set up a different project. This has to do a lot with the distribution of power between the agents in the educational system in the Netherlands, and also within the schools. Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right to commercially exploit their work... The project manager of the organisation of Dutch high schools gave me a very striking reason against a license that allows commercial use: Most of the teachers want to teach with the help of ordinary school books, with additional material taken from the internet. They want to have something on paper. If the school book publishers are allowed to make print versions from open content, then the teachers want those print versions. They will put pressure on their head masters to buy them, and then the shift from print to digital will not occur, and the plan of the organisation to save 385 millions € will not become reality. So, the manager says, the better if the publishers cannot sell print versions. Ziko van Dijk read more in German on http://groups.google.de/group/infobrief-wiki-welt/msg/21c9f6c00634d13c? -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com wrote: Hello, snip The project manager of the organisation of Dutch high schools gave me a very striking reason against a license that allows commercial use: Most of the teachers want to teach with the help of ordinary school books, with additional material taken from the internet. They want to have something on paper. If the school book publishers are allowed to make print versions from open content, then the teachers want those print versions. They will put pressure on their head masters to buy them, and then the shift from print to digital will not occur, and the plan of the organisation to save 385 millions € will not become reality. So, the manager says, the better if the publishers cannot sell print versions. But no publisher will have an exclusive right to print such textbooks, so these textbooks would cost much less than existing alternatives, in fact just slightly above printing costs. This is an especially salient point if these headmasters really do value print versions so much; the alternative of using an obscure copyright mechanism to force them into all-digital does not make much sense to me. Thanks, Pharos Ziko van Dijk read more in German on http://groups.google.de/group/infobrief-wiki-welt/msg/21c9f6c00634d13c? -- Ziko van Dijk NL-Silvolde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands
Ziko wrote: Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right to commercially exploit their work... What a great news! All those wat too expensive school teachers that are a burden to the Dutch taxpayer voluntarily move to become volunteer teachers. Please pass the champaign on this. Let's celebrate! Where is Mike Godwin our legal counselor. I really need a terrier preparing a big law suit on this. Just in case a single teacher would have the guts to accept a pay check while using CC-NC-SA material in class. Why? That is my interpretation of 'commercial': making directly money while using the material. Article 4c of CC-NC-SA is very clear about this: You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. Even Dutch teachers can be instructed to read aloud the last three words private monetary compensation. So far, so good for the first part of the defense, thank you Mike. That was only the part concerning the selfish and myopic Dutch teachers. Now for the second part, to open their eyes. Primary and secondary education might perform a whole range of goals, and a tiny little one of them is to prepare kids for a future role as income earning participants in society (deliberately not specifying in which way). Having been educated with CC-NC-SA materials those poor kids will not be allowed to make any money with the knowledge thus gathered. This contradicts at least one of the primary goals of education. What the Dutch teachers want sounds all too much like wanting to get direct monetary compensation at the taxpayers expense up front for creating the teaching materials *and* failing to deliver the materials (distribute it to who paid for it, the taxpayers, that is the public at large, so distribute it freely) *and* looking for ways to collect royalties without repaying the expenses paid up front. A great counter example is the image project. The WMF has paid for the creation of content (imagery) with the explicition condition the material is freely licensed. If the Dutch minister is going to pay 385 million euro annually for the creation of content without requiring the material to be freely licensed, he is f***ing nuts. Dedalus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands
effe iets anders wrote: 2009/5/19 Ziko van Dijk zvand...@googlemail.com Correction, it was actually mentioned that the Wikiwijs project was intending to use the CC-BY license. And I'm in conversation with at least one other organisation that intended to use NC, but might change their might. Things are not as NC as they seem at first sight :) read more in German on http://groups.google.de/group/infobrief-wiki-welt/msg/21c9f6c00634d13c? You might direct them at our fine article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Learning_Environment Personally I can tell, that in my studies in library and information sciences in the Keuda Kerava business oriented studies learning institute, we have been using the [[Moodle]] learning platform, with some very significant utility, despite some very minor technical glitches in the software. It includes blogs, wikis threaded forums and much more. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content
A brief update: On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Samuel Klein The current amortized cost of making 10 nickel discs (each with 10,000 pages in a 100x100 grid) is around $500 each. They can also make polymer copies for much less that are likely stable for at least a century. The amortized cost is closer to $600 for nickel disks and $150 for polymer. Back to the near term : can someone tell me the rough cost per GB and expected lifetime of the backups our colo uses? (I would guess $1 and 20 years.) Are there full offsite backups? I would feel better if people would help update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Contingency_planning ... SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands
Dedalus wrote: Ziko wrote: Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right to commercially exploit their work... What a great news! All those wat too expensive school teachers that are a burden to the Dutch taxpayer voluntarily move to become volunteer teachers. Please pass the champaign on this. Let's celebrate! One shouldn't be so harsh on the teachers, who probably haven't given much thought about the implications on NC licences. It's a natural reaction for the unfamiliar to believe that NC merely keep things away from commercial exploitation. We all know that the opposite is true, but at the same time it's counterintuitive. Those teachers just need to be educated a little. Yes, commercial publishers would be able to print and sell the freely licensed material, but they would need to compete with the non-profit sector. It would be mostly uneconomical for them to do that. Although their printing costs might be less through economies of scale, they will still have the costs of marketing and distribution added to that, along with a small profit on top of that. A teacher can produce and print what she needs for a class of 30 at a fraction of the cost, less if she doesn't bother with the chapters of the book that are not relevant to her class. Producing single chapters is even less economical for the big publishers, because the distribution costs do not go down with the size of the publication; they are likely increased because of the added administration. What will make open licences work will not be the proscriptive clauses in such licences, but their undermining of established economic infrastructures. The Encyclopædia Britannica has learned that the hard way. The record and movie manufacturers are still in the middle of their lesson. The newspapers are in full panic. Once the teachers have figured it out it will be the turn of the textbook publishers. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
