Hi David, this is gonna sound funny but it sounds like something i would say, i just can’t remember when i said it 
didn’t find it where i thought it was. But thanks for bringing it up
Hmm interesting point. I would have said revising a work might be a way to re-work it for one’s own context (as you say to give students parts that are relevant), but by doing so, we also de-contextualize it, may misinterpret.
Then again - isn’t that what we do every time we reference someone anyway? Always a risk of misinterpreting anyway. What is important, I guess, is not to deliberately misrepresent another?
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Saw a Blogpost with stories of OER reuse by Alan Levine today: http://cogdogblog.com/2014/08/10/mythical-oer-reuse/
More aspects of openness that I have recently become aware of, and would consider important too:
- Open Contracts (as opposed to non-disclosure agreements, secret dealings, etc)
- Open Hardware/Open Infrastructure, for instance bitcoin or ethereum
As with any form of communication is an act of decoding someone’s intent and ascribding meaning to it, as such it can be misinterpreted anyway 
I think the key is to not make such a mistake intentionally (misrepresent someone else to support your point)
There are a couple of responses to this question on a different topic here on Discourse. I thought I’d link to them here so everyone else is sure to see them!
Hi there Paul Olivier those two kinds of openness sound interesting! Had not heard of them before…
@JohnJohnston interesting post! The thing that caught my attention the most was “publish my thoughts and idea without permission (limited by social norms, employment and the law).” I know that this can be a sticky point, especially in work situations where employees aren’t necessarily protected by law (in the US “at-will employment”) where you can be dismissed for any reason, including what you post on your blog. It’s scary to think that your out-of-work activities (legal as they may be) can cause someone to lose their job.
Based on extensive quantitative outcomes from triple-blind randomized control trials and some anecdotal experience, as well as heuristic textual analysis of previous discussions on the meaning of open, early findings suggest that open seems to happen at the praxis intersection of some very specific constituencies, so my provisional meaning of open involves some combination of cats, buttons and giving a damn.
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This is an interesting question, especially for me the last part. When one changes an artifact that is licensed with a Creative Commons license, for example, best practice is to link to the original and its license. So for the second artifact the original is still accessible. But if the second one is also CC licensed, then a third one just needs to lead to the second. And so on. So the original does, indeed, get buried. For me, I don’t care if my own work gets built on and buried in this way; I think it would be great if it would be the chain to several other things, each moving in different directions.
What I’d like, though, is to be able to know if my work is used, even once, even twice. But I might only hear this if people tell me about it, and they don’t of course need to in order to use my work; they just need to cite it and I may never know. One nice thing about the citation system in academic writing and journals is that one often can find out where/how one has been cited. But with CC-licensed stuff, not so much. I just think it would be cool to know, but I’m not sure how that would work.
I agree fully on our concerns about privatising teaching and learning… I am not familiar enough with the history of academic publishing to know, though, how we gave away journals to private companies. Were journals often originally tied to universities or groups of academics, and then later handed over to private companies? I simply don’t know and am curious!
With textbooks, those are often already privately produced, so MOOCs run by private companies replacing textbooks doesn’t seem that much of a switch. Unless, of course, there are open or otherwise publicly funded and produced texts that then get replaced by MOOC providers that are private. But in the cases I know most about, the textbooks are already privately produced (and often ridiculously expensive!).
I also worry about public education being coopted by private business, but perhaps I am too optimistic in thinking that the MOOC providers aren’t finding good enough ways to make money in order for that sort of worry to come to fruition. Udacity has already pulled out of the higher education market, from what I can tell (for example). Coursera seems to still be in it, but I’m not sure their business model is sustainable. Still, I’m not fully up on all this, so I may be unduly optimistic!
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@MahaBali @David_Jones I remember this point about language translation too; I found something sort of similar in this blog post, about accessibility requiring an accessible language: http://blog.mahabali.me/blog/whyopen/whats-open-anyway/
Was that it?
I think that officially, translation counts as making a “derivative” of the original work, and so if one doesn’t allow derivatives of one’s work, say through a CC license that is not “no derivatives” (ND), then translation is not allowed without permission: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#When_is_my_use_considered_an_adaptation.3F
So while I agree that one can think of a translation as not modifying the original but a new work itself, under the terms of Creative Commons licenses, anyway. So if one licensed an academic work as CC-BY-ND, for example, then that means one is not allowing translations without express permission. Whether that’s a good way to organize CC licenses or not is another matter! Of course, one could try to explain directly that one wants to allow translation but no other modifications, but then one is creating one’s own custom license I guess.
And I’ve gotten that message from Discourse too, that I’m talking too much! Sigh. I just get so interested in these discussions! But yes, others should jump in where/when they wish to!
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Oh this is nice, thank you
Yep, I tend to hope that my employers (temporarily the Scottish Government) will be reasonable about blog posts as long as I don’t post something that does actual damage, for example spoiling a procurement. I don’t write about anything very sensitive, but recently had to avoid blogging my work for a while for this reason.
Very interesting indeed! I like especially the idea of “Talking across domains”, but am still struggling with some other aspects of what you are writing too. For instance, how would you compare the freedoms you have on your blog to that you have here? Do you think you have strictly less freedoms here?
(this looks like a bug, I am quoting @akoutropoulos, not @clhendricksbc)
I would agree when the translation is creative, for instance if it is a translation of classical literature from one language to another. There are many cases however where I find it harder to really consider translation a different work. What if I just take something and Google Translate it to French? What if it is translated through Duolingo? Through this?
Still struggling to get caught up but I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s perspectives and having the opportunity to view the results of the survey from last year. I always see some new way of thinking about "open"
Starting from a general perspective (my understanding/thoughts) about “openness” is that it is primarily about accessibility to learning or at least the possibility of learning. It’s about sharing and helping each other. And learning doesn’t have to be structured - openness is about access to data to help you make decisions, access to design, to conversations, to events, to knowledge. What you do with it is your challenge.
It’s about seeing the world in a positive light and believing in the value of collaborating rather than competing; sharing what you know and what you do implies a belief that people will see the sharing as a benefit and not as a way to target you or tear you down.
In education (my field), “openness” is often interpreted as about open textbooks, or open courses, or open technologies for learning. I have some serious concerns about relying on textbooks at all, and I don’t believe that we can call them “open” if they are provided to courses and instructors who don’t reshare what they learn. I echo the feelings expressed by several other participants in this course, that there are degrees of “openness” but I always believe that the primary responsibility of accessing and benefiting from “openness” is to contribute back in some way. Sometimes that means sharing into a network or to a wiki or repository; at other times it just means taking the time to share what you’ve learned with others who can benefit - and doing it without being paid.
And another aspect of “openness” is the transparency of classroom walls (figuratively speaking if you teach online;-) I think teachers have to learn that it’s OK not to know everything (who can these days) and “openness” means being open to the knowledge and expertise of your students. Learning should never be a one-way street.
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So far I’ve found all the posts I’ve read by you to be thoughtful and useful. I’m not sure I’d pay attention to machine guidelines. Post a poll and see how many people want you to hold back - I don’t. Keep on commenting!
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It’s amazing how many people feel uncomfortable with this. I think, partly, it’s because knowledge was so inaccessible in years past (think father’s and grand-father’s generations) where the teachers and professors were revered as one of the points of knowledge in a society, whereas today information is widely available (big asterisk here about the privilege of having access) and the information is no longer what is considered “knowledge” but being able to analyze it and evaluate it (and its veracity and applicability) carry more weight. This is course isn’t recognized as much thus far because we are still transitioning (IMHO) from a system where information was the currently to evaluation being the currently.
Even though I am not an economist (nor do I play one on the internet) it seems to me that once something is comodified (information in this case), something with else will come in and take its place.