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Creative Commons is Looking for Open Education Resources

Open Education Search – The Hewlett Foundation is working with ccLearn to develop a web search portal of open education resources.  And they are looking for material.  I wonder how 4,000 hours of law school class lectures and summaries would work?  I think we’re going to find out.

From the Open Education Search FAQ

What data are you gathering to enable web-scale open education search?

Most important: Site URLs

We are collecting top level URLs for sites hosting OERs. A well-known example would be http://ocw.mit.edu. A web-scale open education search should minimally index all pages under such a site URL.

Resource URLs

We are also collecting individual resource URLs, for example http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-01TFall-2004/CourseHome/.We are interested in individual resource URLs even where we have a siteURL for the resource’s host, as the resource URL may be annotated morespecifically.

Keyword annotations (also known as tags, labels, and subjects, among others)

Both types of URLs may be tagged (or whatever verb you prefer) with keywords. This is optional but desired.

How can I ensure that my OERs are included?

We have one mechanism at present: mass import. In the future we willalso support the import of new OERs via feeds and manual addition ofindividual URLs.

Mass Import

If you have lists of OERs or OER sites in any textualformat (that includes XML and XML dialects, such as OAI), we can importfrom these formats. Send the file(s) or URL(s) to Creative Commons CTONathan Yergler: nathan@creativecommons.org. An example would be a URL pointing to an OAI file. It is very likely in this example that we can use dc:subject values as tags.

Contacts

For purely technical questions, see Nathan Yergler above. For allother questions, contact ccLearn Executive Director Ahrash Bissell: ahrash@creativecommons.org.

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Textbending Laws

Recombinant Text – 6.5 Law Making – Textbender is an interesting little project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while.  The idea is to create a collaborative editing/drafting environment that allows each author/editor access to all of the text used at all points in the process and to assemple, disassemble and reassemble the text in interesting ways.  Now it seems that it has occured to someone that this might be a useful way to draft laws and regulations.  It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

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Freeing American Case Law, Part II

AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database would grow over time.

Columbia News ::: Columbia Law School Launches Free Database of U.S. Court Decisions

Following closely on the heels of this developmnet, Altlaw.org comes along with a collection of case law from US Federal Courts going back more than ten years.  The key to this is that it is all in one place.  Most of the cases included in this search engine are avaialble on sites scattered about the web, as shown in Emory Law’s Federal Courts FInder.  The lack of a single free, public, non-commercial interface for searching case law has been a sort of Holy Grail for lots of folks, myself included, since we started putting case law on the web in the early nineties.

There is also a companion site, LawCommons.org, that promises to serve as a vehicle for releasding the technology and collections behind Altlaw.org.  These 2 sites have the potential for becoming a major resource in the area of providing free access to American case law.

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Walmart Serves Up DRM-free MP3s

Wal-Mart Launches MP3 Music Download Tracks

BRISBANE, Calif., Aug. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) announces the launch of “DRM-free” MP3 music downloads, now available online at http://www.walmart.com. At only 94 cents per track and $9.22 per album, the new MP3 digital format delivers value, convenience and the ability for customers to play music on nearly any device, including iPod(R), iPhone(R) and Zune(TM) portable media players. Wal-Mart is one of the first major retailers to offer MP3 digital tracks with music content from major record labels such as Universal and EMI Music.

This is a pretty good deal.  It is part of a marketing test being done by Universal to assess the impact of selling DRM tracks online.  I’d bet that the test is a success.  There is also a large library of albums available for less than $8.00.  Load ’em up.

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Yet Another Attempt at Freeing American Law

Carl Malamud has this funny idea that public domain information ought to be… well, public. He has a history of creating public access databases on the net when the provider of the data has failed to do so or has licensed its data only to a private company that provides it only for pay. His technique is to build a high-profile demonstration project with the intent of getting the actual holder of the public domain information (usually a government agency) to take over the job.

Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw

Generally, Malamud is launching a project to scan ultrafiche of the Federal Reporter, cleanup the rather large (3+ gigabytes per image) images, then do OCR on the images.   All this will be done using an assortment of open source and free tools.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on this,  not only to see how it progresses but to see what West’s reaction will be since they produced the ultrafiche he is using and are the publishers of the Federal Reporter.

There is a good NY Times article on this here.

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Do Students Actually Use Library Services?

If Libraries had shareholders – Article offers up some interesting graphics that seem to indicate that the actual use of library materials and services at major research libraries has been on the decline since before the Internet came along.  This decline continues, with libraries apparently used more as study and social space than for actual research. 

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iPhones KO WiFi At Duke

The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school’s pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

IPhones flooding wireless LAN at Duke University – Network World

Well, ain’t that something.  No one is sure why the iPhones are triggering ARP floods on the wireless LAN at Duke, but it sure is something that will need to fixed.  I wonder if this is happening elsewhere.

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WSJ Celebrates 10 Years of Blogging

It’s been 10 years since the blog was born. Love them or hate them, they’ve roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox. Twelve commentators — including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, the SEC’s Christopher Cox and actress-turned-blogger Mia Farrow — on what blogs mean to them.

Happy Blogiversary – WSJ.com

Good article marking the 10th anniversary of the ‘weblog’ as we know it, more or less, today. I’ve been blogging since October 16, 2000, a mere 3 years after it got going, primarily as away to keep track of stuff I find that interests me. I think that is still the strength of blogging: the ease with an individual can add content to the web. Everything else, order, search, etc is handled by the software. All I need to do is type into a form. Sure, most blogs are not of interest to anyone beyond the author, including mine. But that is what is so cool.. Even though I don’t have some sort of regular global audience, I can still type this entry without much effort on my part and someday I’ll come back to it and smile:)

BTW, I thnk the real highlight of my blogging career is a comment Jorn Barger himself after a brief article I wrote about the origin of the word weblog. Pretty cool!

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PHP 4 – End of Life – 12/31/2007

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

Looks like I need to get that upgrading done:)

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