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Editorial Projects in Education reports
To promote wider use of open educational resources by states and schools, the U.S. Department of Education proposed [October 29] a new regulation that would require any new intellectual property developed with grant funds from the department to be openly licensed.
That would make such materials available for free use, revision, and sharing by anyone. It would also represent a big, federally supported step away from the textbook publishing industry, long a backbone of K-12 education in the U.S.
[...] The announcement is just one part of the department's new #GoOpen campaign. At an Open Education Symposium being hosted [October 29] in Washington by the department and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, school districts, and companies pledged to support the new drive for [Open Educational Resources] (OER).
A group of 10 districts in California, Delaware, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as Department of Defense schools, are pledging to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the next year. So-called "Ambassador Districts" that already use OER--including Virginia's Chesterfield County schools and Pennsylvania's Upper Perkiomen schools--also committed help other districts make similar moves.
[...] The American Association of Publishers, and the software industry association that represents education technology companies, responded to the announcement with reservations.
[...] The department's efforts are just the latest step in a growing trend toward open educational content. Efforts in the U.S. Senate to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have included language that would encourage schools to use OER, and adaptive-learning company Knewton recently launched a new platform to bring its technology to the open-content marketplace. States such as New York have robust existing initiatives to develop and share open content, and last spring, California-based nonprofit the Learning Accelerator announced contracts with 10 companies to develop open materials for 12 states.
The Alexandria (Virginia) News has more names and more specifics.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 17 2015, @03:52AM
The concept of "intellectual property" is all about not being able to know things until you've paid for them. The concept of "education" is all about knowing as much as possible. So in order for the "intellectual property" types to get what they want, which is a gatekeeper fee any time somebody accesses whatever information they "own", they have to promote ignorance.
For example, book publishers *hate* libraries, particularly public libraries. Why? Because instead of selling a separate copy of the book for everybody who wants to read it, the library buys a few copies and everybody who wants to read it can do so, which means the publisher gets 3 sales instead of 30. And they make things even worse by having concepts like inter-library loan, where you can get books from libraries all over the place.
It is, of course, a constant battle to add ever more oppression to avoid the simple truth that the price of information tends towards 0. And if you don't believe me on how worthless information is, consider how long it takes for a rumor to spread.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday November 17 2015, @08:48AM
I sympathize with the sentiment, but not with the stated facts, and I dislike the term "intellectual property" because it is not focused enough for an in-depths discussion due to mixing entirely different concepts like copyright and patents. Patents are freely readable, so not blocking knowledge. Just blocking progress because people are not allowed to apply the discovered ideas on a wider scale.
Copyrighted works are by nature of course not freely available, but the most notorious copyright-defenders are from the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and their products are only of very limited value for learning. School- and other educational books only make a tiny fraction of copyrighted works.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum