For week 2, we’ve asked you to read some things about the differences between"open" and “free,” and also to think about Creative Commons licenses. Whatever you want to discuss on those topics you can do in this thread!
It is pretty funny that my “pre-course” post on The Cost of Free, fits into this week almost perfectly. I am wondering what others think about this.
On a related note, I think many people confuse free and open all the time (especially in MOOCs). I’ve seen a lot of videos on coursera (“free” and/or “Open” courses depending on how you negotiate the meaning of “free” or “Open”) that are not open. It’s too bad, because some of them would be awesome for courses I teach (or courses that colleagues teach). Even though I can download the videos, as a learner, there is usually not license to use those videos in your own course (so I guess you’d throw them on YouTube, make them password protected and go from there - not that I endorse that sort of thing 
)
Other examples of free, but not open --> every week the AppStore on iOS has free games and apps (promotions), those are free (for a limited time) but they are definitely not open. The same is true on other platforms such as EA’s origin.
On the other hand you have open source software that is both free of cost, and you can take the source code and mess around with it.
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This is a message for @MahaBali (and others who want to join in of course!)
I saw the question on twitter on what is the difference between Open Education and Open Pedagogy. Good question, and I have to say that I hadn’t hashed out my thoughts before, and even now they aren’t fully hashed out, but I can say that here is the fundamental difference that I see:
Open Education is an over-arching category which can include OER, Open Pedagogy, Open Policies and other things. It’s the sibling to “education” (or “traditional” education), so we can’t say that one thing make it up.
Open Pedagogy on the other hand is (this is just my initial thought process and by no means final) a set of practices that are inclusive. You could have open pedagogical practices in a small closed class (as weird as that sounds), and closed pedagogical practices (sit down, shut up, listen to my awesome professor produced materials). Open Pedagogy is something that is negotiated, and open, To some extent I guess it picks up streams from self-directed learning, andragogy (not that I like that term), rhizomatic learning and so on.
Does this make sense, or did I just make things more murky? 
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@MahaBali and @akoutropoulos: I responded on Twitter by sharing a link to a blog post by David Wiley (@OpenContent) from last year. For Wiley, open pedagogy specifically uses the five Rs of OER: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. I like this definition because open pedagogy involves having students adopt open practices. A really great way to teach students about research and sources is creating assignments where they have to use materials that use creative commons licenses.
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@akoutropoulos Great post and I think you captured the most significant concerns about ‘open’ and ‘free.’ Just like as in higher education, you have the good, the bad, and the questionable. The same exists with open courses and open resources. As consumers, we need to be knowledgeable and informed. While ‘open’ may be ‘free’ - and some ‘free’ may also be ‘open’ - open and free are not synonymous.
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@JeannetteMELee thank you for sharing on Twitter 
I had googled it before (just to see what Wiley said about Open Pedagogy - I know that this was part of his #IOE12 MOOC that I was part of - but I forgot some of the finer details). The question I have is how does one define Reusable or even “redistribute” in light of pedagogy? In the way that I was thinking of pedagogy (a mix of philosophy and practice) you can’t really redistribute it because it’s not a tangible product.
In terms of the difference between Open and Free, I think @akoutroupoulos has hit the nail on the head. Free of charge does not mean openly available. Additionally, though creative commons now has the CC0, licensed openly still places a layer of formality and legality between the open material and the potential user.
As I’ve been grappling with this question, I’ve sort of landed on a different but related one. What about the difference between “Open” and “Openness”. Open is a binary concept, data/software/etc. is open or not, but I think the more graded notion of openness, captures the reality of the situation rather better. Some data is open but only to those that register with the provider, other “open” data is only available through application of Freedom of Information requests, but in many cases, due to sensitivity of the data, it would be hazardous to put it out in a completely open way. So I think we benefit far more by demanding openness rather than simply demanding that things be open as it allows more for the gradations of access and restriction that may be necessary for certain materials. I’m still working through this one in my head but that’s where I’m at for now.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about my choice of Creative Commons license since I listened to the Week 1 Hangout. I think I’ve finally come to a decision that I’ve been grappling with – especially since I became a digital storyteller and realize how combinatorial creativity really is.
So I’ve blogged about my choice of Creative Commons license and my rationale
Gotta check out the CC0 license Brittney mentioned. Who knows? I may change my mind again.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but it makes sense to say that things are either open or they are not (I think of a door, or a window–it’s open (even a little) or it’s closed. But many people talk about open as if it could be a continuum, where some things are more open than others. So, for example, open access scholarly articles are open in the sense that one can read them for free and copy/redistribute them, but one can’t revise them. Whereas an image from which one can create derivatives is “more open,” some would say, than one that you can only reproduce without changing it at all. I don’t know…maybe we could say the same thing about a door: it’s open a little, or open more, or open all the way?
I wonder if we should call data that is open only to those who file an FOI request, “open.” That seems to me pretty closed except for those who fall into a very specific category. It’s kind of like students who register and pay for a course: they get access to teaching materials that others may not have access to, if the instructor hasn’t made them public. For those teaching materials that are only available to people registered for a course, I tend to think of them as not open. Those are my usual thoughts, though, and I’m happy to consider further if you or others disagree!
This makes sense to me, but now it’s making me wonder what the similarities might be between these sorts of pedagogical practices and things like open content (journal articles, blog posts, images, videos, audio, etc.) such that we would use the same term for both. Is it perhaps the idea of collaboration, that open content allows for collaboration in the sense of building on top of what others have done, taking their creations and reusing them, reworking them, etc.? So perhaps one aspect of openness that is shared between content and pedagogy is making possible and encouraging collaboration?
Or what else might be similar?
I commented on your blog, but thought I’d include it here too so others could see!
I guess I had never noticed that your work for ds106 had always been all rights reserved. I would have if I had decided to try to revise/reuse something you’ve created, but I guess this hasn’t come up yet (and if it did, I’d of course ask permission!).
As someone who is a big fan of CC licenses, I have to say I’m pleased to hear about this change. It makes it so much easier for others to build on your work and create new things, while still allowing for you to reserve the possibility of making money from what you do. Me personally, I neither try to nor need to make money off of my creative works, so it’s easy for me to choose CC-BY. But I completely respect those who try to or do make money from their works. This seems like a great compromise to me.
I’m currently working on a blog post on open vs free, but won’t finish it right away (I’m on holiday this week, and finding it hard to keep up!). So I thought I’d like to another blog post I did awhile ago on CC licenses.
I’ve thought quite a bit about various CC licenses and which ones to use on which sorts of works. I usually use CC-BY on my blog, the images/videos/audio I create, and my teaching materials. This I can do because I don’t need to make any money from such work, beyond my academic salary. I don’t think everyone must make this choice, but it works for me.
In 2013 I wondered about whether I even needed the attribution part. Could I just use CC0 (public domain) on what I create? I still haven’t gone there, but here is a blog post in which I reflected on that issue and asked for others to help me think through why I should care if I’m attributed…
http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2013/03/21/why-care-if-attributed/
It’s an interesting thing we’ve struck here. I think at the core of the matter is: what do we mean by ‘education’? Can education happen when the learner interacts only with the (open) material and there is some sort of cognitive presence (CoI Model) l? Or must education also have some sort of teaching presence (that more knowledgeable other) in order to qualify as education?
I think interaction (whether it’s collaboration or not) is key, but I still haven’t come away yet from the concept of “I will know it when I see it” when it comes to Open Education. The reason I picked interaction, instead of collaboration, is that (for me anyway) collaboration has the connotation of some common goals (to some extent #whyopen is a collaboration because we are are here to explore open in various incarnations) - but it seems that the majority of us are focusing on educational realted matters, but I can conceive of situations where people in the same course have radically divergent goals (imagine #whyopen with some of us in education, others in software, others in publishing, and so on)
I agree with @Brittney about thinking of open as more of a continuum because different things can be open or opened in different ways. FOI requests make information open or perhaps less closed that was previously completely closed. While scholarly articles can’t be revised in the way that an image or video can be, if we think about the idea and the development of the idea within the article along with the expression of the idea then the scholarly article can be thought of as more open even if it is behind a paywall. Really what gets debated are the ideas (even though sometimes the expression of the idea hinders one’s ability to understand the idea). But the real value in academic scholarship is the idea and not its expression (which would be the realm of fiction, I think). Once one has read an idea, one is free to respond to it, remix it in the sense of taking the parts that one agrees with and rejecting the parts with which one doesn’t agree, incorporate it into another article, etc. Really the process of academic scholarship incorporates the 5Rs, just not in the same way as would an image or video. Writing, and academic scholarship as a sub-genre of writing, is two parts: idea and expression of idea. Once one has read or come across an idea, it is one’s own to do as one will as long as one cite one’s sources. I think of teaching similarly. Even if one has to pay to go that uni/school and register for that class, once one has been exposed to a teacher’s ideas, then one can engage in the 5Rs because it is the ideas that have a hard time being bound and closed. The actual material may be closed but the ideas conveyed within the material can have a life of their own. This is why I support Creative Commons licenses for academic scholarship because the licenses are really only attempting to more appropriately capture the life of ideas. I would love to know what others think about my differentiation.
I agree that education has a common goal that the student learn. All participants are supposed to be on the same page and want the same or similar outcomes, so it is a collaboration between teacher/professor and student. It’s also a collaboration because the teacher/professor can learn from the student how to teach better. As Freire has pointed out, both have the opportunity to learn and become educated. While I do believe that learning and education can happen without social interaction, this is not a viable structure for a country. Humans are social creatures, which therefore means that a viable education system would have to have a social component. There are individuals who can learn and become educated only using open materials, but this would be a poor model for a country. A country and school system can and should incorporate open materials within their education system. I also think that there must be at least one person more knowledgeable than the other or we have a case of the blind leading the blind. Because the teacher/professor may have more disciplinary knowledge or be better skilled doesn’t mean that a teacher/professor can’t learn from a student.
Even if we have radically divergent goals, our fundamental interest is the same: what is open and what it its value and utility in our field. Even if we are all in education, we may disagree on the role of open in education. Even if we are in different fields, we may agree on the role of open as a transformational practice. The open source community has shown what can be done with open, collaboration can be messy and a challenge but its rewards are worth the work.
Okay, finally finished a long and somewhat rambling post on “open” vs “free.” I decided to try to figure out some of the history and differences between “free software” and “open source software,” and ended up wondering about the ambiguity of both words “open” and “free.” Not sure I resolved anything in my own mind; ended with lots of questions.
http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2014/08/21/open-and-free-redux-or-yes-the-words-do-matter/
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Wow Christina…thank you for this fab. review of open vs free. Bookmarked Will need to come back to it later for it to all sink in.
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Posted on yr blog:
For the ds106 point of view this is great news.
For myself riffing and remixing other folks ds106 contributions has been one of the joys of the course. Quite often I get ‘stuck’ until I see the idea of others.
I’ve also been surprised in the amount of delight I get when someone takes an idea I’ve had and remixes it.
not in the comment:
I’ve used cc-by-nc for a few years now. Had a couple of almost commercial requests to use images, ie can we use your image in a book/website for no money cause we are small. I got a book once:-) Every so often I muse about dropping the NC, but I don’t rely on creativity or producing material to sell for any part of my income.
I’ve made some minor reflections on David Wiley’s hangout here:
I also ripped the audio and posted it here:
(after checking with @clhendricksbc it would be ok )
What is nice about things shared for remix is we can adapt them for access. I often rip youtube to audio so that I can listen while driving or riding on the bus.
@clhendricksbc posted a reply on your blog Open and free, redux; Or, yes the words do matter | You’re the Teacher
Thanks for this, it is a great overview. I’ve been going round this stuff, or it has been going round me for a while. It would be nice to get some clarity and simplicity.
A few years ago I was trying to help my class of 10 year olds understand a bit about copyright and how to attribute images they used in their blog post. Looking at, say, a wikimedia commons page for an image and trying to figure out how to attribute was tricky for a 10 year old.
The usability of the page is a bit better now, but attribution is still difficult to do, depending on source and where you are using it.
Since watching the David Wiley I have refocused a bit on the idea of practicality (which I probably lost on leaving the classroom). Share resources need to be usable and attribution simple.
Back in my classroom days I longed for a weekids licence, this would link to the source and state: I am a wee kid, I think I am allowed to use this.