I’ve never had these kinds of problems installing Ubuntu before, and I wasn’t really sure where to start troubleshooting.  A number of forum websites with postings similar to my own situation recommended changing some of the install parameters, such as noapic, nolapic, noacpi, etc.

None of this worked.

I finally found this post on a Dell community forum, which ingeniously suggested to:

1. Install Ubuntu 8.04 (Heron) x86_64 Server
2. Check for updates in the package manager.  Install all UPDATES (NOT distribution upgrade)
3. Restart
4. In a terminal, sudo update-manager –devel-release
5. Check for updates one more time.  THEN click on the button at the top of the package manager window to install the distribution upgrade to arrive at 10.04 (Lynx).

I never would have thought of that.  I followed the post instructions exactly.  Success!  Everything appears to be working just fine.  Here’s to you, jakeman66.

nohup is what you want – it’s a wrapper that blocks the SIGHUP signal sent to all applications connected to a terminal when that terminal is closed by the shell.

Just ssh into the box and start the command using this syntax:

[user@remoteboxen user]$ nohup /path/to/command arguments &

The man page explains it better.

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

I learned how it install it from this page. Here’s a summary:

To install Microsoft Windows fonts: sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
To install Red Hat Liberation fonts: sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

To install any other kind of font (including the one I downloaded from sostars.com):

1. mkdir ~/.fonts (make a font directory in your home directory if one doesn’t exist already)
2. mv ver-army.ttf ~/.fonts (move your ttf file into the .fonts folder)
3. Restart the computer

So, today I had a problem.  A friend needed me to convert a 10 MB data file from tab-separated format to comma-separated format.

“This should take about 2 seconds.”

I wasn’t on my trusty little laptop (running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope since March) and was stuck using a lab computer on campus, which was, of course, running Windows XP with no useful utilities whatsoever.  To try to save some time, I tried to do this conversion right on my friend’s computer.  We opened the document in MS Word, and tried to do a Find and Replace for tabs, converting them to commas.

Slow.  Killed the program several minutes into the operation.

Next, over to my trusty laptop.  Loaded up jEdit, a handy programming editor that has done well for me in the past.  Tried to do the find and replace.

Also slow.  Killed this about 10 minutes into the operation.  “It really shouldn’t be taking this long.”  What went wrong?  JEdit was out of memory.  I found that out from the command-line terminal where I launched jEdit.  Hmmm… Maybe some kind of error box would have been nice so I didn’t just sit there for 10 minutes wondering.

No more of this garbage.  We’re going to the command line.

Always go to the command line.

I already knew about sed, but my memory was a little rusty on the command-line arguments.  After about 10 minutes, I finally found what I was looking for.

Converted the file in about 2 seconds.

Why is it that something that should take 2 seconds always takes 30 minutes?

1. Perform a site:yoursite.edu search in Google, displaying 100 results per page.
2. Save each page (Google will only give you 10 at most) into a folder named yoursite.edu
3. Download the shell script to the directory that contains the yoursite.edu directory.
4. At the command prompt, type:

./google-results-parse yoursite.edu

5. OR, if you named the yoursite.edu directory something different, run this:

./google-results-parse yoursite.edu savedresultsdirectory

6. It will create a “savedresultsdirectory-parsed” directory, which will contain a “domainlist” file and a “pagelinks” directory. The “domainlist” gives the subdomain breakdown of the search results.  The “pagelinks” folder contains files for each subdomain that include all of the search result URLs for that subdomain.

Download the file here.

#!/bin/sh

site_name=''
results_path=''
parsed_path=''

### validate arguments
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
  printf "usage: google-results-parse exampledomain.edu [/googleresults/directory/path]"
  exit 1
fi

if [ $# -eq 1 ] && [ -d $1 ]; then
  site_name=$1
  results_path=$1
fi

if [ $# -eq 2 ] && [ -d $2 ]; then
  site_name=$1
  results_path=$2
else
  printf "Must supply one parameter that is the domain name and the name of the directory for the google search results"
  exit 1
fi

### create "-parsed" directory
parsed_path=${results_path}-parsed
if [ ! -d $parsed_path ]; then
  mkdir $parsed_path
fi

### create "pagelinks" directory
pagelinks_path=${parsed_path}/pagelinks
if [ ! -d $pagelinks_path ]; then
  mkdir $pagelinks_path
fi

### count up the total number of CC page instances per domain
grep -ohr "http://[^/]*$site_name/" ${results_path}/* | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr > ${parsed_path}/domainlist

### get all of the individual links within these pages that remain in the initial domain
grep -Eho "http://[^/]+" ${parsed_path}/domainlist > /tmp/clean_domains_$$
grep -ohr "http://[^/]*$site_name/[^"']*" ${results_path}/* | sort | uniq > /tmp/pagelinks_$$

### put links for each domain in its own file
for line in $(cat /tmp/clean_domains_$$)
do
  grep "$line" /tmp/pagelinks_$$ | sort > ${pagelinks_path}/pagelinks-${line#"http://"}
done

### send wget to go get these page links!
#for file in $(ls ${parsed_path}/pagelinks)
#do
#  wget --input-file=${parsed_path}/pagelinks/${file} --wait=1 --random-wait --force-directories --directory-prefix=${parsed_path}/downloads --no-clobber
#done

### scan for media links
### jpg, gif, png, mp3, zip, doc, docx, xls, xlsx
### grep -Erho 'http://.*byu.edu/[^"]+.(pdf|doc|jpg|gif|png|docx|xls|xlsx|zip|wmv|mp3|wma|wav|m4p|mpeg)' * | uniq

### remove all temporary files for this script
rm /tmp/*_$$

“Many BYU faculty already openly share their syllabi and other course materials on personal websites, through iTunesU, and through other mechanisms … Find as many of the open educational resources being shared by BYU faculty as you can…”

It seems to me that discoverability is really going to be the ultimate make-or-break hinge issue for OER.  One could produce world class, high quality OER that trumps everything that any institutional OER effort produces, and yet remain in complete obscurity with no hope of ever actually sharing these wonderful OER with anyone at all.  And after all, if you take the time and trouble to make some kind of resource with openness in mind, it seems silly to have it be completely worthless (or at least, gravely underused) in the end because you weren’t able to put it somewhere that people would find it.

This post isn’t going to discuss the hows and whys of publishing open educational content for maximum discoverability. We’ll save that for another time.  However, Quest 5 gives us the specific assignment to comb over BYU’s web presence looking for faculty-produced OER content, and it begs the question, “How would one go about finding all of the OER on a university’s web space?”

The task is not trivial.

What is “Open” ?

The first question that came to mind was how to define “open” as far as university faculty are concerned.  Many college and university professors post all sorts of wonderful educational content on their personal web pages, with the knowledge that outsiders will occasionally stumble onto the site and (hopefully) find some of their content useful.  I imagine that many people on the web would just be flattered if someone came to them and asked to use their content as material in a course.  (“Flattered” may not entirely be the right word if the visitor just ripped it off without permission and used it for commercial purposes, but let’s leave that for now and just assume pure and benign motives here.)

The point is that, because of the publicly accessible nature of the web, putting a collection of materials on your website is done with the understanding that someone may eventually come along and make use of the things that you posted.  With that in mind, you go ahead and post everything you’ve got to your website, hoping that someone will like it and find it useful.  As far as you are concerned, putting it on your website makes it, in a way, “open.”

And this is the first problem we run into while tracking down OER.  For some people the simple precondition of an objects existence in an Internet-accessible location makes it essentially “open.”  And unfortunately, in addition to being “open,” it is also completely indistinguishable from all the other Internet-accessible NON-open content that is out there.

The Need for Creative Commons (or Something Similar)

So really, if you how will anyone find your materials in the first place?  The web is a big place.  Do you really think that your website is the only one with good instructions for underwater basket weaving?  Is yours the only one with autographed pictures of Canadian Royal Mounted Policemen?  Is yours the only one that describes different types of fly-fishing rods and reels?  Or cheese?  How will your website be differentiated from the thousands of other sites out there that are exactly like it?

One good place to start is Creative Commons.  That is, if you really intend for your content to be open, you should mark it with a specific license that meets your needs and level of openness.  In addition to letting everyone know exactly how your content may be used, posting a CC license on your page has some additional benefits:  Google Advanced Search.

Google Advanced Search seeks to provide a (partial) answer to the discoverability problem as it now allows you to search for pages that indicate specific usage rights.  From the Google website:

Google describing the usage rights advanced search feature

So, Google will provide a list of web pages that contain your search query and carry the Creative Commons HTML code indicating the type of usage rights you are looking for.  Brilliant!  If I post my open content with some CC license code, then my OER is much more likely to be discovered by someone using Google who is looking specifically for CC-licensed content.

Searching BYU through Google

Having discussed all of this, let’s look again at our assignment for find all of the “open” educational resources on the BYU site.

First, a quick query from Google indicates that the byu.edu domain contains over 1 million webpages:

site:byu.edu
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,120,000 from byu.edu.  (0.03 seconds)

Now, searching byu.edu for all CC-licensed material:

site:byu.edu
Results 1 - 100 of about 1,510 from byu.edu.  (0.15 seconds)

Hmmm… so, of about 1.1 million web pages, Google tells me that only about 1,500 pages have some form of CC license HTML code on them.  And actually, if I follow through to the last result page, it says there are now “about 1,110″ pages.  I tell it to “repeat search with omitted results included” and there are now “about 1,120″ pages.  Following to the last page again, I find that, in fact, there are only 890 actual pages.

890 out of 1,120,000?  Who knows if the 1.1M estimate is correct? If it is correct, then 890 / 1,120,000 = 0.079% of BYU pages have a Creative Commons license on them.  Let’s say that there are actually only half of that number of total pages, about 600,000 pages at byu.edu.  890 / 600,000 = 0.148%.

According to Google, about 1/10th of one percent of all byu.edu pages have Creative Commons HTML license code on them.

I don’t believe that there aren’t more people at BYU who want to openly share their content.  However, I do believe that these people don’t know what a Creative Commons license is, or why they should use one.

Shell Scripting Fun

I created a Linux bash shell script to help me parse through the search results from Google.  This script takes a set of html pages (Google search results that I saved from Firefox to a folder on my hard drive) and searches through them for links to a specific domain.

So, for example, I search Google for all CC content pages at byu.edu.  I saved those results (100 at a time) to a folder on my hard drive.  I ran this script, and it identified each Google search result by looking for all links containing “http://something.whatever.byu.edu/”.  The script then counts all search result links for a specific byu.edu subdomain.

Here’s the breakdown of the 890 CC search results from Google by subdomain:

726 http://rhetoric.byu.edu/
73 http://open.byu.edu/
33 http://classes.eclab.byu.edu/
18 http://www.et.byu.edu/
16 http://morse.cs.byu.edu/
9 http://ilab.cs.byu.edu/
6 http://humanities.byu.edu/
2 http://csl.cs.byu.edu/
2 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/
1 http://www.math.byu.edu/
1 http://www.eclab.byu.edu/
1 http://synapse.cs.byu.edu/
1 http://reliability.ee.byu.edu/
1 http://ccl.ee.byu.edu/

rhetoric.byu.edu accounts for about 82% of all Google search results for CC licensed content

These 890 search results belong to 14 distinct subdomains.  In another Google search (for all content on byu.edu, not just CC pages) the first 1,000 results represent 497 distinct subdomains.  There are probably more.  So,

14 / 497 subdomains = 3% max. of byu.edu subdomains have CC HTML license code somewhere on their site.

More difficult than anticipated

This information is fairly dismal for our prospects of magically finding all OER content for an institution through Google.  Google Advanced Search tells me that about 1/10th of 1 percent of web pages in the byu.edu domain have Creative Commons license code on them. Furthermore, one individual’s site (rhetoric.byu.edu) accounts for nearly 85% of these pages.  If we consider this one person’s site to be an outlier and temporarily discard it from our analysis, we end up with (according to Google numbers) 164 out of 1,120,000 pages with CC license code, or 15 hundred-thousandths of a percent.

Whatever the numbers are, the point is this:  There have got to be more people than this who want to share their content, but they probably just don’t know anything about Creative Commons or other open licensing options.

What’s next?

So, how can we find all the OER content at byu.edu?

Well, there’s always the old-fashioned way.  As a class, we attempted to find all of this content by searching for “BYU” or “Brigham Young University” on sites that are known to have open content, such as iTunesU, YouTube, Flickr, etc.  It is also possible that you could do a site:byu.edu search on Google looking for keywords that you feel are more likely to lead you to open content (e.g. “resources”, “links”, “tutorials”, etc.).

Or, maybe we could just do some CC evangelism in our respective communities and encourage people we know to start using CC licenses? Then we can find those resources with Google just fine.

And yet, I’m still intrigued by the idea of finding it all automagically.  But what would that require?  Probably some supervised machine learning to create a statistical model of what words or clusters of words are statistically significant when found in the vicinity of content that people typically consider to be “open.”  That’s not going to happen this semester.

Then there’s my script.  I had larger plans for it originally, but it too fell victim to end-of-semester time constraints.  It’s not worthless, however.  I was able to use it to parse through Google search results and show me the breakdown of CC licensed content across byu.edu subdomains.  If nothing else, this helps me identify people and organizations that definitely do want to share some of their content openly.  If I can find these people, maybe they can point me to other people who also want to share their content openly, but don’t yet know about open licenses.  Maybe we can start encouraging these people in groups of similar interests to adopt open licenses.  And this brings me to my next point, which is,

Networking

Some time ago, I remember David Wiley quoting someone at some conference somewhere (I’ll get you a reference later) as asking, “What if I don’t want to share my content with the world?  What if I just want to share it with the guy down the hall?”

This makes sense to me.  People that are close to you, either personally or professionally, are likely to have something in common with you.  At work, your coworkers are going ot be working on the same (or similar) projects that you are working on.  At home, you will have freinds and family members who share common goals and interests with you.  In my opinion, these are situations in which content sharing is much more likely.  You need some kind of common connection.

Enter social networking.  Can we leverage the power of social networks to augment the discoverability of OER?  Can we also use the power of social networks to classify and rate OER?  There has got to be some way to distribute this discoverability problem over the distributed mental capacity of millions of people.and their daily social interactions.

Or will we just keep relying on Google to help us stumble onto the content we’re looking for?

I think I’ve talked more about copyright this semester than at any other time in my entire life.  This is not surprising, however, as I would guess that I am like most people in many respects, and I am assuming that most people aren’t well versed in the subtle nuances and intricacies of US copyright law, including the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH).

What a mouthful.

And truly, this whole copyright issue is just that.  There is a LOT to say no matter how you feel about it.  As I see it, copyright is such a complex issue because we, as humans, are sometimes torn between two very strong desires: 1) the desire to do awesome stuff, and 2) the desire to be recognized, reimbursed, or otherwise recompensed for the awesome stuff that we do.  Often, these two desires play quite nicely together.  Thus we encounter each day hordes of people who take a crack at creativity, sculpting works of art, taking photographs, writing novels, and generally just having a good time.  It’s fun to do awesome stuff.

A few lucky individuals in these unnamed masses will eventually rise to mega-stardom and sell a few copies of their pictures or books or whatever.  And for those who don’t actually acquire any monetary gain from their creative works, just having their work referenced somewhere, attributed to them with their name on it, gives a lot of satisfaction as well.  The recognition of awesomeness is pretty fun, too.

The problem comes in when one person’s desire to do awesome stuff is pitted against someone else’s desire to be recognized for being awesome.  For example, you see something that someone else did that was noteworthy.  You think, “I could really use something like that, or do something really similar to it.”  And in this case, the only thing stopping you in your quest for awesomeness is something we call copyright.

Now I think I’ll stop using the word “awesome.”  But that’s really what it comes down to.  I think, “Wow.  so-and-so really did a great job on this piece of work!”  And then I think, “I wish I could use that piece in my own work and make my own work even better!”  To which the author of the piece  may reply, “That’s fine, for a price,” or, “No, absolutely not.”

Of course I believe that copyright has it’s place.  Really.  I understand the need to recoup costs after having invested time and effort in a creative work.  But after reading today”s article by Michael G. Moore of Penn State, I am convinced that copyright law with regard to education is a complete mess.

Copyright law as regards education in general presents some difficult challenges.  Among these mentioned by Moore, the following two really stuck out to me:

• The work-for-hire doctrine and the ongoing battle between faculty vs. institutional ownership
• The three types of copyright infringement: direct, contributory, and vicarious

The work-for-hire doctrine states that,

In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright (17-U.S.C. Sec. 201(b)).

This can be a good thing.  Let’s say that I own a software development company.  If I, as an employer, ask an employee to write up some code I expect that my company will own that software.  This makes perfect sense.  He writes code for me, I pay his bills.  And, I would also concede that any code that my employee writes at home, on his own time, not using company equipment or any other company resources (physical, intellectual, or otherwise), belongs to him, and not to us.  I would even let him use his personal code to help him at work, if he wanted to, and if it would really increase his productivity.  Fine.  (I know some of you out there think this sounds pretty naive.  Fair enough.  I don’t own a software company.)

However, teachers also do work at home, on their own time, using their own resources, and we would like to think that the course outlines, the tests, the homework assignments, the lecture notes—-completely consisting of the teacher’s own intellectual energy and creativity—-would then belong to the teacher.

This isn’t always the case.  As Moore points out, legal precedent has been set in several cases where courts sided with the institution in copyright disputes over an employee’s “on-the-side” endeavors.  They did so, citing the work-for-hire doctrine, stating that the teacher’s hard-earned course materials did, in fact, belong to the school district for which he worked.

So what happens if this work-for-hire doctrine ends up being strictly enforceable in every educational situation?  What if I, as a teacher, understand that, upon being hired by an institution, everything I do to improve the educational experience for my students will be subsequently owned by the educational institution?

Lame.  Where is my incentive to create, experiment, and innovate?  Where is my incentive to become a better teacher and produce better teaching aids for my students?  Sure, I get plenty of satisfaction from seeing my students learn, but it would be pretty galling to have what I think of as “my property” ripped out of my hands the moment I decide I want to work at some other institution and that I want to take my materials with me.

This is something that needs some attention.  I know that both sides have their arguments, but some definition and clarification on this “work-for-hire” doctrine are certainly in order.

There was another issue that awakened me to a new sense, not to a sense of indignation like that from the work-for-hire issue, but to a sense of the gravity of the situation of copyright law in education.

“Fair Use” does not mean “Use whatever you want, whenever you want to, in any way whatsoever.”

Moore gave a hypothetical example (which likely has happened more than once in real life) where a professor would place on his course website a link to an external website that provided illegal downloads of Spark Notes publications.  In this one instance, a legitimate case could be made alleging three types of copyright infringement: direct infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement, committed by the student, the professor, and the institution, respectively..

The students who download any books from this site, as well as the publisher of the web site, are guilty of direct infringement, as they are the ones carrying out the actual work of infringement upon the author’s rights of reproduction and distribution.

The professor whose website links to the illegal site could be found guilty of contributory infringement, as his actions as a teacher persuaded and encouraged his students to go to the website to get the book.

The institution that employs the professor could be found guilty of vicarious infringement, as current applicable law holds the institution responsible for the conduct of its employees.

In other words, if I, as a distance ed teacher, am not absolutely vigilant in making sure that neither I nor my students in any way violate copyright outside of real legitimate educational “fair use”, I could find my students, myself, and my employing institution treading some deep legal water.

Having Carl Johnson (BYU Copyright Department) come to talk with our class tonight about what constitutes real educational “fair use” was very informative, and just underscored how important it is for us as teachers (distance or f2f) to be sure that we really are within the bounds of legal propriety as we use the copyrighted works of others in our courses.

So, this experience made me start thinking.  I’ve done my fair share of web development.  So, it’s not like I was completely unfamiliar with accessibility issues.  I know that images need to have alternate text, I know that it’s good practice to put a “Skip to the Content” link at the top of the page to skip over navigational links, etc., etc.  However, I didn’t really begin to understand what it was all about until finally having an experience on the web were I was prevented from doing something I wanted to do because my senses were unable to decode the information being presented to me.

This was an entirely new experience for me, and it helped me begin to truly appreciate just how frustrating it is for people who have certain disabilities to try to use the internet.

Since I am in a course this semester about online / blended /distance learning, I naturally had several questions after this experience:

1. How many people with disabilities take online courses?
2. How many people with disabilities are not taking online courses because experience has shown that the course material is likely to be, at times, completely inaccessible to them?
3. In terms of content format and delivery, what are the most likely accessibility offenses to be made against people with disabilities taking an online course?
4. During online course design, what specific things should we be aware of to make our online courses accessible to everyone?

While searching around on the internet, I found a great little article that gave a nice summary of the legal issues (in the United States) and the technological issues surrounding accessibility in online courses.  (Providing Access to Students With Disabilities in Online Distance Education: Legal and Technical Concerns for Higher Education, by Curtis D. Edmonds of Georgia Institute for Technology)  While it didn’t answer questions 1 and 2 above, it gave me some things to think about for questions 3 and 4.

Legal Issues

I don’t want to spend too much time on the legal issues.  There are some cases where, for example, institutions receive federal funding and must not, therefore, discriminate against anyone with disabilities.  But for the most part, based on what I can gather from this article, it seems that the majority of accessibility law in the United States does not explicitly mention accessibility of online information.

However, it is not entirely unlikely for this to change in the future, and we as designers would do well to remember that it is always easier to design with accessibility in mind, rather than retrofitting old sites to bring them up to standards.

In any case, we should do this because it is right.  That being said, let’s talk briefly about the technological issues behind accessibility in online courses.

Technological Issues

Edmonds refers to two types of technological issues: “first generation” and “second generation” accessibility issues.

First-generation accessibility refers to our standard HTML pages being compliant with accessibility standards.  This includes having alternate text for images, making judicious use of frames or other features that will cause problems for a screen reader, and so on.  Typically, HTML accessibility issues are easy to overcome.

Second-generation accessibility refers to other, newer formats for media delivery–PowerPoint files, PDFs, Flash animations, etc.  These types of technologies are harder to interface with screen readers and other assistive technologies, although attempts are being made to reconcile these differences.  (See, for example, WebAIM.)

Edmonds also mentions that content management systems like Blackboard and WebCT present accessibility issues in and of themselves.

And lest I have implied here that only visually impaired persons are affected by these issues, keep in mind that people with aural impairment, photosensitive epilepsy, ADD/ADHD, and any number of other disabilities may have different experiences with your online content than what you expected.

On that final thought, go out and find some resources that will give you a better idea of what to keep in mind to make your online content accessible.  Here are a couple to get you started:

AccessELearning.net (from the Edmonds article)

Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines and Techniques (W3C)

So, looking ahead to Quest 6, we in our guilds will need to collaborate to create a course entirely out of open educational resources.  Because we have so little time left, we decided as a class that we would devote everything we do in the remaining quests to work toward our goals for Quest 6.

The course that we as a class originally (more on that later) decided to build is 10th grade social studies–World Civilizations.  We will attempt to build this course entirely from OERs that meet the Utah State K-12 Core Curriclum Standards for World Civilizations.

So I decided that for Quest 2 I would just jump into the pool and do my best to find as many OERs as possible that could help us meet the objectives and standards set out in the Utah K-12 Core.  This actually turned out to be the first time I’ve ever made a real attempt to collect a large number of OERs from multiple repositories for a single purpose.  Everything that follows here is a description of my first purposeful experience looking for OERs.

If at any point you feel like cutting to the chase, click on this link or just scroll to the end.

MIT OCW

My first question starting out, naturally, was “Where would be the best place to start?”  There really are a LOT of places on the web that offer OERs.  Some are large repositories, some are small, individually owned websites.   MIT OpenCourseWare is well-known, and its name has come up in our classroom discussions a number of times this semester.  I decided to go there first.

When I arrived at the OCW site, however, I found myself slightly intimidated by the website interface (again) and didn’t really feel like looking searching there.  So I left.

OCWFinder

Then I remembered someone in my class mentioning something about “OCWFinder“.  What a great name!  Here I am, wanting to find OCW.  Perfect!  I went there and began to click on a bunch of tags in the list interface, trying to find something useful.

After about one minute I left.  I just didn’t feel like OCWFinder gave me enough.  Yeah, it helped me search through all the tags for the MIT OCW (and some other) courses, but it didn’t give me enough immediately information.  To really find anything out from this would require me to go to the MIT OCW site and do a lot more digging there.

Too much clicking.

I know that sounds silly, but any usability tester will tell you that a large number of clicks between your user and their data will be the death of your website.   Sorry.

Google – Advanced Search

Having already spent what seemed like an eternity (probably about 5 minutes) I began to grow impatient and defaulted to searching the web in the best way I know how–using Google.  If I were to compare searching the web to playing marbles, then Google would be my lucky Steely–shoot it into a pile of marbles and see it plow right through all of them.

Google’s “Advanced Search” features allow you to find pages according to usage rights.  So, I can find pages that vary in usage rights from  “free to use or share” to “free to use, share, or modify, even commercially.”

In this situation, Google Advanced search turned out to be immensely useful.  I began with search terms taken directly from the state core standards–terms like “hunter gatherer”,  “world civilizations”, “egypt”, “mesopotamia river valley”, and others.   There were plenty of results.  And (presumably) all of these search results were somehow marked as having the particular usage rights I was looking for.  In addition to a number of personal homepages and organizational wikis, I also noticed that sites like Wikipedia, Scribd, and YouTube were frequently coming up in the search results.

Wikipedia

*Duh*

I didn’t even think of trying Wikipedia!  Wikipedia was a no-brainer (except that my brain somehow never actually made this connection) because it provides all sorts of useful information that could help someone like me (who doesn’t remember a whole lot from his 10th-grade World Civ class) to begin generating a rough content outline.

Now, I know that everytime someone cites Wikipedia they’re forced to make apologies and give the appropriate disclaimers, etc., etc.  And if the only source one uses when teaching a topic is Wikipedia, then some disclaimers might be in order.  However, in terms of domain exploration for an admitted content non-expert, Wikipedia is pretty hard to beat.

Also, by searching Wikipedia for the initial terms from the Utah core standards I was able to find other related terms.  These new related terms that I gleaned from Wikipedia seeded other searches within Wikipedia and Google!

Scribd

I mentioned that Scribd.com also came up frequently in my Google searches.  I had never really done much with Scribd, but because of its frequent appearances in my search results it seemed like a good time to check it out.  Scribd, it turns out, happens to be a large repository of PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, OpenOffice documents, and image files.  As such, it seems a likely place to find all course documents of all different kinds.

For example, on Scribd I was able to find a number of individuals’ personal notes from world history and civilizations courses.  From these notes I was able to learn core terminology, key concepts, key people, and key dates.  All this information could be used to seed other searches for more OERs.  I was also able to find documentation for a number of class and individual activities, giving suggestions for activities and homework assignments that we might consider using in our course.  I also came across several course outlines for world civilizations courses, presumably written by the instructors of these courses.

Google was a good entry point to Scribd.  It identified a couple of good resources.  However, it soon became apparent that there was more to gain by using Scribd’s internal search and organizational abilities than by just searching Scribd with Google.

For example, Scribd allows you to browse all of the documents uploaded by a particular user.  Now, let’s step through some logic:

• Someone creates a resource.
• I stumble upon it.
• I find it quite useful.
• I find it useful because it gives a lot of good information or teaches something particularly well.
• It has a lot of good information or it teaches well because the person who made it knows the subject matter.
• The person who knows the subject matter might have gained this knowledge throuh their profession or as a hobby.
• If the person is involved in this topic as either a professional or a hobbyist and has taken the time to make one useful resource, then it is not unlikely that they will have produced something else that will be useful to me as well.

So by searching a through this person’s whole collection of documents, you are likely to find a number of resources that will be useful to you!  The secret is just to find the people who feel as passionately about your subject matter as you do, and find out the kinds of things they’ve done.  This reminds me of some ideas that David Wiley brought back from the Hacking Education conference recently, particularly:

opencontent: Alex Grodd: I don’t want a global (OER) revolution, I want to share with the person down the hall from me. #hackedu

Interesting thought.

YouTube

YouTube also came up frequently in my Google search results.  Here you will find thousands of videos relating to just about anything.  It also has its own internal search capabilities, and these really came in handy for the fact that they allow you to search through playlists.

A playlist is an enumeration of video resources that someone thought were related to each other for one reason or another.  This means that I can search for “india history” in YouTube, and instead of sifting through all of the results myself, I can leverage the sifting work that other people have already done.  Because these videos are in lists it is reasonable to assume that the list creator believed these videos had some particular value that others did not.  The result is that I can briefly look through the descriptions of videos in a few playlists and find multiple videos relating to my search topic that may very well be of greater quality than other items that may have come up in my YouTube search results list.

Personal Websites

Searching with Google without looking for specific usage rights also returned a lot of promising results, but with a few caveats.  There are many professors and teachers on the web who have put their course syllabi, examples, downloadable assignments, class notes, reading comprehension questions, and all sorts of other class materials.  These resources typically seem to be of reasonable quality and content.  However, the majority of these sites are not licensed by a Creative Commons (or any other license) that lends itself to openness.  Thus, if I find a fantastic resource on someone’s website, I need to get their permission before I can really use it in any of my projects.  Writing an email for each desired resource on an individual basis could become very tedious and time-consuming.

What I Have Learned About Looking for OERs

A few thoughts I picked up from this whole experience, summarized in some clever, catchy little tag lines.  (There’s a reason I’m not in marketing):

1. No Views, No Use. (yūz–gotta make it rhyme, you see) The discoverability issue is a real one.  That goes for finding sites, and for finding content within a site once you’ve entered it. If your open educational resources are not easily discoverable, they won’t be used. Period.
2. Power to the Proletariat. (No, I’m not a communist.)  You might want to consider looking on the average joe’s webpage, as well as in the mega-repositories of the elite.  Someone’s individual collection of OERs may very well be more immediately useful to you than an entire repository, as it may prove to be a more concentrated assortment of exactly what you’re looking for.
3. OER Like a Car.  Pool. (OK, this one didn’t work out too well, either).  When you’re looking for OERs, think car-pooling–talk to people you know to see if they’ll let you catch a ride.  Sharing OERs within a network of people you know personally and who share common interests is more likely to turn out better results faster.
4. Search Smarder, Not Harder. (And yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose.) If you can find a list of resources that someone else has already put together, that will be much more time-efficient than searching through millions of resources by yourself.