 Hello, my name is Carl Blythe and I'm the Director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. At Coral, we think it's important that educators learn the digital literacy practices for developing and using OER. And that's the topic of this talk, OER, Digital Materials for Today's Knowledge Ecology. The term OER was coined in 2002 during a UNESCO forum about the rise of informal learning on the Internet. As more and more people began to teach each other new things on the Internet, the members of UNESCO decided that there was a need for a new generation of pedagogical materials that would promote learning in this new kind of ecology. Therefore, the concept of OER emphasizes knowledge construction as a highly dynamic and interactive group process. To illustrate these points, I'd like to talk about OER digital practices in terms of a single educator, Joanna Lux. Joanna is a French instructor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and this is her story of how she came to understand a set of digital practices that are inherent in open education. Our story begins with Joanna, senior lecturer of French at Cornell, who at the time was looking for a suitable textbook for her French classes. Joanna had heard about Français Interactive, French Interactive, which is an OER, a free and open textbook for beginning French, and she decided to check it out online. She liked the fact that it was free, but she also liked that the textbook included multiple role models for language learning. In other words, French Interactive wasn't just focused on the native speaker, rather there were many French speakers of different levels of proficiency in different backgrounds, such as a proficient non-native teacher of the language. Unfortunately, today's commercial textbooks are still focused almost exclusively on the native speaker, and rarely do they demonstrate the notion of language learning as developmental. So, Joanna decided to adopt Français Interactive primarily because of its content, not because she was a proponent of open education. But as Joanna began to teach with Français Interactive, she soon discovered, like most teachers do, that the textbook, all textbooks, have limitations. She perceived that the book had some gaps and that it wasn't, well it just wasn't as perfect for her courses as she had hoped it might be. In particular, Joanna thought that there were a few missing pieces, and those of course were literary readings. So she contacted us at Coral, and she asked rather sheepishly, do you think I could add a few literary readings to the textbook? And we replied, of course you can add to the textbook, that would be great, we would be so happy if you did. After all, an OER is an open textbook to which any instructor or any student can contribute. So Coral encouraged Joanna to choose her own literary texts, and to create her own literacy activities around those texts. But in working with Joanna, we had a great idea. Her activities were so clever that they deserve to be developed as a standalone OER, something that could be used as a supplement for any beginning French textbook, not just Français Interactive. So basically we wanted to set her ideas free, her ideas about literacy and literary texts. Joanna was open to the idea of creating an OER, but she wasn't entirely clear about what that meant. So Coral began educating Joanna about the advantages of an OER versus commercial textbooks. Joanna already knew that OER cost much less than a commercial textbook. For example, the print-on-demand version of Français Interactive only cost $25, as opposed to several hundred dollars for a typical commercial foreign language textbook. We talked to her about how easy it is to edit OER, and we discussed with her different kinds of editable formats, such as Google Docs. And of course, when something is in digital form, it's easy to update. So we discussed the problem that many foreign language teachers have without dated content. You know, the moment you're in the middle of teaching a lesson and you suddenly realize that the president of the country in the textbook has been replaced by several other presidents years ago. We also talked about the idea that we could get something published much more quickly in digital form than if we were to go the route of a traditional print textbook. But basically, we talked to Joanna about copyright and the idea that digital practices are made possible by adopting an open license. Coral talked to Joanna about how to choose an open license for her OER, something called a Creative Commons license. There are many different kinds of CC licenses, and at first she didn't quite understand it all. We explained to her that copyright is about sharing different kinds of rights with the end user. Joanna was familiar with the notion of copyright. That's of course the C in the circle, the symbol that publishing companies use to say that their works are copyrighted. But more importantly, that symbol is followed by three words. All rights reserved. That means that copyright is actually a plural concept. It's a bundle of rights. We talked to Joanna about how the traditional form of copyright actually closes down the sharing of ideas. It locks up creativity, but by not allowing authors or publishing companies to share their intellectual rights with others. We discussed how Creative Commons licenses constitute a new and legal way to share various rights within users. In Joanna's case, her end users were of course her students and her French colleagues around the country who would benefit from her materials. After understanding this alternative approach to copyright, Joanna chose the most open license of all, CC by that's the license that tells end users that they may use her materials as they wish, as long as they give attribution to Joanna as the creator. In other words, end users can make derivative works, but they must acknowledge that the original work was created by Joanna. So Creative Commons is all about the legal sharing of intellectual property. It is not about plagiarism. It is not about piracy. As her ideas progressed, she came up with the concept of the literary in the every day. Joanna wanted to help her students play with meaning making in French right from day one in their French studies, and she wanted to show them that language play was central to literary texts. But playing with meaning also characterizes ordinary everyday language. So by emphasizing the notion of playing with meaning, Joanna was able to build a bridge between the literary and the everyday. After Joanna had decided on her license and had refined her main ideas, we told her about the five Rs, a term coined by David Wiley, a well known leader in open education. Wiley explains that open licenses actually promote five different digital practices that he calls the five Rs. The first R, or digital practice, is called retain. It means to make, own, and control copies of the digital content. In the digital age, pedagogical materials can disappear. David Wiley talks about disappearing ink. That's his term for textbook rental programs. Because educators have begun looking for alternatives to expensive textbooks, publishing companies have begun reducing costs by adopting textbook rental programs. This sounds like a good idea, but when a student rents a digital textbook, he or she actually buys access to the textbook only for the duration of the course. And of course, when the semester ends, the student loses access. The textbook actually disappears. By adopting an open license, Joanna allows her users to retain the content. This means that students and teachers can download and keep their copies of her OER. No disappearing ink. The next practice made possible by Joanna's open license is called reuse. That means to use the content in different ways and contexts. For example, in a class or on a website, or even in a video. Joanna wanted her materials to be as open as possible, and she wanted users to be able to reuse her materials in many different ways. If you want to learn more about how to find open content, just go to the link for CC Search, as indicated here, and you'll find a page with many different search engines, all of them optimized to help you locate openly licensed educational content in your foreign language. The next digital practice is revise. Revise means to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content. Joanna told us that she really wanted other faculty members at other universities to look at her French materials as templates. In other words, she didn't want them to adopt her materials as is. She said, don't adopt, adapt, just as she had done with Français Interactive. So, for example, a teacher might like Joanna's choice of the text, but prefer to change the activity. Joanna also wanted teachers to take her ideas for French text and translate them into other foreign languages. A good example of just this thing, this notion of revising comes from TED.com. TED stands for Technology, Education, and Design, a terrific website. TED produces videotape talks of experts in different fields that are then translated into many different languages by the end users. TED uses these translations to make closed captions for each video, thereby giving more people access to these experts' knowledge. This is a great example of the power of the crowd that's made possible by the digital practice of revision. The next digital practice is remix. Remix means to combine original or revised content with other content to create something totally new. Joanna wanted to promote the remixing of her materials. In fact, she had begun remixing all kinds of open materials in her own OER. For example, she used many third-party images from many different open sources. And she even embedded an open tool called ECAMA, a tool for collaborative annotation of text, into her literacy activities. ECAMA is produced by Coral and carries an open license that permits exactly this kind of remixing. The fifth and final digital practice is called Redistribute, and this is all about making copies. To redistribute means to share copies of the original or revisions or remixes with others. Teachers are often unaware that when they make a copy of a page from another textbook and then they pass those copies out in their class, that they have actually violated copyright law. Redistribute is the digital practice of clicking on the share icon of a YouTube video or posting an article on Facebook. It means that you're making copies and sending them to others without legal worry. Because of the open license that Joanna chose for her OER, teachers can even import her content into a learning management system such as Blackboard or Canvas. That is, they can redistribute her materials any way they want on their LMSs. So let's zoom out for the big picture. Because of the open license that Joanna chose for her OER, she is actually promoting five different digital practices that she shares with her end users. In essence, she's saying to others, here's my OER, use it as you see fit, retain it, reuse it, revise it, remix it, and please redistribute it. But remember, the open license that I've chosen requires only one thing from you and that is to indicate that the original content was created by me. That's of course the open license called CC By. These five digital practices are important components of today's online knowledge ecology, part of a 21st century organic whole. So what does this matter? Well, at CORA, we believe that OER are here to stay. The OER Research Hub, an endeavor that started at the Open University in the UK, has been collecting research studies of OER usage from around the world. The research shows that OER are gaining ground. More and more teachers and students are using more and more OER. That means that educators must learn the digital practices that are part of OER, such as how to find OER, how to create OER, and how to understand open licenses. OER are essentially the products of digital practices. And as such, they're really the products of a community of practice. In other words, an OER exists because of a group of people who are committed to sharing their practices with one another. Creating an OER is the 21st century equivalent of giving an apple to the teacher, except the apple is digital and therefore there are potentially millions of teachers. I'd like to end with the notion of sharing. Creative Commons is not just a group of legal scholars devoted to developing a new set of copyright laws. Rather, the Creative Commons is a metaphor for a new digital participatory culture, something that we can all contribute to, something that we can all share in. Open Education is fundamentally about sharing ideas and practices with others. In Joanna's case, with her students and with her colleagues. Open Education is a grassroots movement of educators who are collaborating on a massive worldwide scale thanks to the digital practices defined in this talk. Foreign language educators can become open educators by practicing the five Rs, just like Joanna.