Friday, February 1, 2008

Open Source vs Content & Copyright

The Open Source Text Book is making progress...I have started talking with some of my colleagues from my work environment (Australian Secondary School that also offers online learning) and some of the teachers are interested in the concept.

Probably the biggest hurdles that can be envisaged at the moment are related to:
  1. Content - how do you encourage students who are learning about the content of a course to submit expert knowledge to a textbook or at least an authoritative source of information.
  2. Copyright - how can the open source text be maintained in a way that it will not break copyright. There are a number of texts that have been written for the course I teach, and some are excellent text books - the temptation will be for the students to copy content from them and not acknowledge the source.
I have some responses to this so far, but plan to read further into the www.opensourcetxt

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