 Hello. My name is Bill Fitzgerald, and today we're going to spend some time talking about the process of creating open content. And specifically, how do we transition from having an idea, or kind of what we think is our starting point, into creating material that we can use as we basically support teaching and learning. So to do this, I actually want to kind of walk through some sample content, starting with actually an idea that I had actually been kicking around for a bit that was actually kind of pushing to high gear by some conversations that I had. And it started a few weeks back when I was hanging out at home, and my daughter came to me and asked a simple question, can we make some butter? And my initial reaction as I was sitting in my kitchen was, no, of course not. You know, everybody knows that to make butter, you need to churn, and where are we going to get a churn? And at that point, my daughter looked at me, gave a deep sigh, and actually filled me in on reality. And as she explained it, basically all we need is some cream, some salt optionally, and a couple containers to hold them. Used a couple of gym jars that we had lying around. And then, shake it. And lo and behold, after doing this, we get butter. And of course, once you have butter, what goes well with it? And that led us directly to bread. And from here, I started thinking, and we started talking. So bread is one of the initial things that's kind of tied into the beginnings of civilization. Because the widespread use of grains is connected with early domestication. When we see farming starting actually throughout the world in any early civilization, the use of grains is connected with that. And as a result, domestication is tied to the beginning of civilization. And actually, if you look at the anthropological record, all of what are considered the major civilizations are centered around six domesticated plants. And these are wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes. While there were other plants that were used, and animals that were used, all of what grew into the kind of what we consider the major civilizations, Egypt, the Indus Valley, some Central and South American civilizations, and obviously the civilizations in the Fertile Crescent used one of those six grains. And as a result, if we look at domesticated grain and domesticated livestock, we can start to see the beginnings of our cultural heritage and of civilizations throughout the world. And in that domesticated grain and domesticated livestock, we can start to see the variance of bread and butter that spread throughout the world. So in looking at the transformation from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to farmers, and in looking at how basically these grains and the products of animal domestication came to be used, we start to see some transition points. And these transition points which occur, again there are different geographical and environmental factors at play here, but they occur across all cultures worldwide as this transformation happens from hunter-gatherer to farmer to in some places city dwellers. They're great for illustrating cause and effect. And because we have this convenient and recognizable start point, that of bread and butter, it provides an entryway into some of these ideas that to some extent still helps shape how we live today and why we live that way today. It's a way of making something which could be seen as irrelevant to our modern life, to our daily life, immediate and directly relevant. So now that we have this concept of using bread and butter as something that is immediate and familiar in the day-to-day lives of a lot of people, how do we go from that idea to something useful? And the reality is there's no way getting around research and planning and focused effort in converting an idea into something useful. And for the rest of this presentation that's exactly what we're going to focus on. We're going to talk about the planning that goes in and how we can actually shift and through some small minor adjustments convert the way we currently work into something that is more open and more universally accessible. So as we start the process of moving from concepts to something useful in our teaching and learning, it's necessary to have a path and we're laying out a path here and it's a series of steps that will help do that. But the important thing to remember as we move along this path is that you don't need to follow each step precisely. If you want to, great. But really, you should improvise and you should make your own. The steps that we describe here are things that have worked for people in the past, but everybody works differently. And it's less about following a precise set of steps that somebody lays out for you and really more important to just use something that makes sense to you. In the first step, we're going to define our goals. And these goals should reflect what we want to accomplish. And as we are getting these goals down, you need to get them down on paper, you need to get them down on screen so you can refer to them. Frequently, things will make a lot of sense in our head and as we write them down, we see the things that we are forgetting giving short shrift to or leaving out. By getting them down on paper, we can refer to them over time. And there's no need for anything complex, it just needs to be articulated and down. When I'm doing mine, I use a text editor to do it. And for this, I broke it down into two separate sections. The first is the high level, patterns that hold true across just about every major civilization that transitioned from hunter-gatherer to farmer to civilization worldwide. And then in the second section, applying patterns to a specific region you can see here, we take it and we come up with some kind of regional specific questions. And in this way, we have a general framework that can be used as the basis for an early civilizations course that had a worldwide focus instead of just a tight focus on Mesopotamia. And our options here, we have a few and they're all good. Everything ranging from a Word doc to a text editor up to a paper or a Google doc or a blog. What you use here will determine how easy it is to share with other people. Obviously, if you're using paper, you can only share it with somebody you are in the same physical location with, whereas if you are putting it on a blog or online, you can share it with a much broader audience, including actually unintentional sharing if somebody happens to cross it. In the second step, you need to start identifying and collecting resources that will support your goals. And we need both online and offline resources. And with this subject in particular, there are a lot of actually really good resources that don't exist online. Some of these are museum-related resources that aren't shared yet. And some of these are texts, including translations of ancient writings that don't exist online. So being able to collect both online and offline resources is essential. And as with our goals, we have a lot of options here. Everything ranging from Evernote, Digo, delicious, text docs, paper. And again, it's not to use a specific tool. It is to use a tool or some means of collecting these things up over time. So as you're working over two to three months getting these things together, you can refer back to them and not lose things. And a very important thing here, the tools for collecting resources need to match up with how you work. If your resource collecting tools don't match your workflow, you're just not going to use them and it's going to be ineffective for you. I use Pinboard for exactly this reason because as I'm reading things, I like to post the links on Twitter. And everything that I post to Twitter, every link that I post on Twitter gets stored in Pinboard. So it's an easy way for me to store resources no matter what device I'm working on. Pinboard also lets me store things publicly. So when I want to share things out, it's easy. Anybody who has the link can get to it. It also generates an RSS feed. I'll frequently use feed readers to collect things up in different places. And Pinboard supports that. And the link to resources I collected up for this is on this slide here. So if you go to that, you can see all of the resources that I've collected for this specific project. As you are storing resources, you need to make careful note of how they're licensed. This is not directly relevant at this stage, but later when it comes time to publish and choose a license, knowing the license under which the resources you store are published will save you time and hassle down the road. Introductory activities provide a way to transition into the material that we're going to want to cover. And really, they just provide a frame right how we want to get things started. And for this, there are a series of pretty simple hands-on activities that can be used and kind of start here and go into increasing complexity. The best choice for you will obviously be determined by how much time you have, the resources you have available, and how much flexibility you have within your curriculum. The options here range from the very simple making butter, which takes about 15 minutes, start to finish, to some more complex things. Actually, you could give students the wrong gradients for a traditional meal and have them prepare it. There are also things you could do to get them working directly with primary source material. In choosing the opening activities, you want students to get a chance to work directly with materials that are going to be relevant to what you're covering because this starts to facilitate a connection between what they're doing in their class and their day-to-day lives. The next step, identifying and defining some open questions, will ideally tie in to the introductory activities and give students the opportunity to do some student-led inquiry and research. These open questions will also provide a bridge for deeper, more focused study down the road. Like the introductory activities, the ones you use will be determined by, at least in part, by the resources you have available and the goals that you want to achieve. Open questions are also a good opportunity to highlight cross-curricular opportunities with this unit, looking at world civilizations that's usually covered in either history or literature curriculum, but there are a lot of tie-ins with math and science as well, and you can use your open questions to highlight those. And ideally, your open questions, it's less about the answer to the question and more about actually the questions, the additional questions that arise as students start digging into it. Another facet of the planning is evaluating if there are any good or relevant or convenient field trips or out-of-classroom opportunities, any chances to connect what is being covered in the class with the outside world and more of the day-to-day. And this is obviously going to vary widely based on geographic region, the student's age, the amount of time you have and your goals. For example, field trip to a farm for urban students will be a very different experience than a field trip to a farm for people who are living in a more rural area. But as you are doing your planning and doing your evaluating, you should collect up options because even if they're not relevant for you immediately right now, options are good. It's good to know what you have available to you as you're doing this planning. Once you've collected up the resources, sorted your activities, nailed down your open questions and evaluated basically any good out-of-classroom opportunities, you're ready to start nailing down the sequence on this. And when you are defining your sequence, the needs of your learner should be first and foremost in your mind and how you're going to be structuring the day-to-day. But you'll also be taking into account the amount of available time you have. A unit that's going to be breaking down over a week is going to be structured differently than one that's going to be breaking down over a month. But really, your day-to-day structure will be determined and informed by the needs of your learners, your goals for the specific unit, your goals for the course, the overall flexibility you have within your curriculum as a whole. And what you want to accomplish within your course. And once all of these things are in place and you've actually laid out a sequence, it's now a good time to revisit the initial goals that you laid down in step one and recalibrate them. Our starting goals might not always align with what we finish with. And that's fine. That's well and good. We just need to make sure that we update our goals to reflect the reality that we're going to be doing as we are structuring the teaching and learning activities. Up to this point, we've talked a fair amount about the planning process and the creating process. But we haven't talked a lot about licensing. And in some ways that's intentional because really a big part of open content and creating open content is the actual traditional planning process and traditional writing processes that we have already been using. And licensing comes into play when we are ready to release our work. And when we are ready to release our work and send it out into the world, using a Creative Commons license is generally going to be the most efficient way to proceed. They provide the simplest options and their options are also widely used and widely recognized. You can get a good overview of their options at creativecommons.org slash licenses. It's a good reasonable choice. When we're creating open content, we're still going to be interacting with non-creative content license resources. And the most important thing to remember is that all of the standard rules apply. Just because we're creating open content, it doesn't mean that everything we've learned about citation, about fair use, about duration, no longer applies. We're using them in a different context, but yeah, these same rules are still in effect. Fair use is, for those unfamiliar with it, it's a set of guidelines and legal protections that define when a copyright burden's resource can be used within another context. And the links that we have here are good resources for it. A full treatment of fair use is outside the scope of this presentation. The most important thing that I like to remind people about fair use is that it defines our rights and it defines what we're legally allowed to do. But the doctrine of fair use and the notion of fair use is really a defense when somebody's being sued. With that in mind, I will generally advocate using openly licensed resources whenever possible because fair use determines what we're legally allowed to do whereas an open license gives us rights and it's always better to rely on your rights because that's a higher level of protection. For more information on this, these are two starting points. Creative Commons has some useful information about it and we've also done some writing on the funny monkey blog. We've shortened up the links here to make them a little bit more readable and legible. The next thing we're going to cover here we're going to talk about is publishing your work because it's one thing to, again, create this work and give it an open license but unless you publish it, unless you release it out, it's still only going to be useful and accessible to you. When it comes to publishing, there are a lot of good choices. You have some good open source choices, you have some good free proprietary choices. When you're choosing a place to publish, what you want to make sure you do is you want to choose something that ties in with your existing workflow. You don't want to be forced into shifting how you work to align with the technology so whatever you choose, just make sure it's a good comfortable fit for you. Some general guidelines about publishing that can help you over time. First, publishing a space you control. When you put your information on somebody else's servers, on somebody else's hardware, you have lost a degree of control over it that could be problematic over time. Second, whenever possible, provide access to your source material. As we talked about when we were sequencing, if somebody has access to the building blocks, they can then rebuild that in a way that makes sense to them when they need to. Third, when you publish something out, no matter where you put it, go to oercommons.org and add a link back. Oercommons is a great way to make sure that your work gets to as broad an audience as possible. As we've been talking there, we've been talking a lot about planning. The emphasis has been more on actually the work involved in actually creating this and less about openness. That's intentional because openness is really more about how you work, how you publish, how you reuse, and how you acknowledge that work than the actual work you're doing. Whether you are working openly or not, you're still doing the same thing. But something becomes open when you actually make the choice to apply an open license to it and share. Because working openly, it's not a shift in what we do. It's a shift in how we do it. It's a shift in attitude. And when we transition to working more openly, we will begin to get the increased benefits of working in a broader community of like-minded people. Hope you enjoyed the presentation. If there are any follow-up questions or feedback, feel free to be in touch. Thanks a lot for listening. Have a good day.