Here is Dartmouth’s mission statement (full text at the bottom of this post).

The closest passage that I could find was this:
“Dartmouth fosters lasting bonds among faculty, staff, and students, which encourage a culture of integrity, self-reliance, and collegiality and instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world.”

This comes close, but it’s disappointing in that the “the broader world” is tacked on at the very end, and doesn’t play a central role in the sentence which is actually about bonds among university affiliates. If you pick it apart (it seems to me that being picky and semantic is warranted for something as important and central as a mission statement) it says that the bonds which Dartmouth fosters “instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world” among the individual members of the college. In other words, the school does not specifically make a point of spreading knowledge throughout the world, but the individual members feel “responsible” for the world in a broad sense, which might include a responsibility to spread knowledge throughout the world. Even though this statement involves a global scope, it says nothing specific about education or dissemination of knowledge on a global scope.

There’s also this statement:
“Dartmouth faculty and student research contributes substantially to the expansion of human understanding.”

This is only useful if we can understand course materials as research, which is a stretch to say the least.

I thought this was weird, so I did some research. My friend at Yale suggested that I consult the Dartmouth faculty handbook. But as far as I can tell, it’s of no help. The mission statement listed within is just a longer version of the one mentioned above, and makes no additional mention of educating the broader world.

Though our missions statement is lacking in this department, President Kim’s rhetoric seems to easily support OpenCourseWare. His saying, “make the world’s problems your problems” easily applies if you think of the lack of access to educational resources worldwide as one of the world’s problems.

I undestand that our mission statement was last revised in 2006. I think that it would be beneficial to add another revision to include a phrase that explicitly gave a global scope to our school’s goal of education.

As a comparison, I looked up the mission statements for all of the universities in the Ivy League. Some make an explicit point about global knowledge dissemination, and some come close. I would argue that they all offer more support for something like OpenCourseWare, though for a couple (mostly just Harvard), that’s easily contestable.

Below, I have links to and copies of the various mission statements. I’ve emboldened passages that I think could be cited in a pitch for OpenCourseWare.

Columbia:

“Columbia University is one of the world’s most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields. The University recognizes the importance of its location in New York City and seeks to link its research and teaching to the vast resources of a great metropolis. It seeks to attract a diverse and international faculty and student body, to support research and teaching on global issues, and to create academic relationships with many countries and regions. It expects all areas of the university to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world.”

Brown:

The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation. We do this through a partnership of students and teachers in a unified community known as a university-college.

Yale:

Like all great research universities, Yale has a tripartite mission: to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. Yale aims to carry out each part of its mission at the highest level of excellence, on par with the best institutions in the world. Yale seeks to attract a diverse group of exceptionally talented men and women from across the nation and around the world and to educate them for leadership in scholarship, the professions, and society.

Also, from Yale’s faculty handbook:

b. The University does not conduct or permit its faculty to conduct secret or classified research. This policy arises from concern about the impact of such restrictions on two of the University’s essential purposes: to impart knowledge and to enlarge humanity’s store of knowledge. Both are clearly inhibited when open publication, free discussion, or access to research are limited.

Cornell:

Cornell is a private, Ivy League university and the land-grant university for New York State. Cornell’s mission is to discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge; produce creative work; and promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community. Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world

Our faculty, students, alumni, and staff strive toward these objectives in a context of freedom with responsibility. We foster initiative, integrity, and excellence, in an environment of collegiality, civility, and responsible stewardship. As the land-grant university for the state of New York, we apply the results of our endeavors in service to our alumni, the community, the state, the nation, and the world.

Princeton:

Princeton simultaneously strives to be one of the leading research universities and the most outstanding undergraduate college in the world. As a research university, it seeks to achieve the highest levels of distinction in the discovery and transmission of knowledge and understanding, and in the education of graduate students. At the same time, Princeton is distinctive among research universities in its commitment to undergraduate teaching.

The University provides its students with academic, extracurricular and other resources—in a residential community committed to diversity in its student body, faculty and staff—that help them achieve at the highest scholarly levels and prepare them for positions of leadership and lives of service in many fields of human endeavor.

Through the scholarship and teaching of its faculty, and the many contributions to society of its alumni, Princeton seeks to fulfill its informal motto: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations.”

Harvard

Harvard College adheres to the purposes for which the Charter of 1650 was granted: “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country….” In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.

To these ends, the College encourages students to respect ideas and their free expression, and to rejoice in discovery and in critical thought; to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation; and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions. Harvard seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students’ full participation, so that individuals may explore their capabilities and interests and may develop their full intellectual and human potential. Education at Harvard should liberate students to explore, to create, to challenge, and to lead. The support the College provides to students is a foundation upon which self-reliance and habits of lifelong learning are built: Harvard expects that the scholarship and collegiality it fosters in its students will lead them in their later lives to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society.

Dartmouth

OUR MISSION

Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.

OUR CORE VALUES

Dartmouth expects academic excellence and encourages independence of thought within a culture of collaboration.

Dartmouth faculty are passionate about teaching our students and are at the forefront of their scholarly or creative work.

Dartmouth embraces diversity with the knowledge that it significantly enhances the quality of a Dartmouth education.

Dartmouth recruits and admits outstanding students from all backgrounds, regardless of their financial means.

Dartmouth fosters lasting bonds among faculty, staff, and students, which encourage a culture of integrity, self-reliance, and collegiality and instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world.

Dartmouth supports the vigorous and open debate of ideas within a community marked by mutual respect.

OUR LEGACY

Since its founding in 1769 to educate Native students, English youth, and others, Dartmouth has provided an intimate and inspirational setting where talented faculty, students, and staff – diverse in background but united in purpose – contribute to the strength of an exciting academic community that cuts easily across disciplines.

Dartmouth is committed to providing the best undergraduate liberal arts experience and to providing outstanding graduate programs in the Dartmouth Medical School (founded 1797), the Thayer School of Engineering (1867), the Tuck School of Business (1900), and the graduate programs in the Arts and Sciences. Together they constitute an exceptional and rich learning environment. Dartmouth faculty and student research contributes substantially to the expansion of human understanding.

The College provides a comprehensive out-of-classroom experience, including service opportunities, engagement in the arts, and competitive athletic, recreational, and outdoor programs. Pioneering programs in computation and international education are hallmarks of the College. Dartmouth graduates are marked by an understanding of the importance of teamwork, a capacity for leadership, and their keen enjoyment of a vibrant community. Their loyalty to Dartmouth and to each other is legendary and is a sustaining quality of the College.

Penn (citation is an about.com page because I can’t find a copy of this statement on the Penn website):

The University of Pennsylvania’s roots are in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy. But Penn’s reach spans the globe. Faithful to the vision of the University’s founder, Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s faculty generate knowledge that is unconstrained by traditional disciplinary boundaries and spans the continuum from fundamental to applied. Through this new knowledge, the University enhances its teaching of both theory and practice, as well as the linkages between them. Penn excels in instruction and research in the arts and sciences and in a wide range of professional disciplines. Penn produces future leaders through excellent programs at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels. Penn inspires, demands, and thrives on excellence, and will measure itself against the best in every field or endeavor in which it participates. Penn is proudly entrepreneurial, dynamically forging new connections and inspiring learning through problem-solving, discovery-oriented approaches. Penn research and teaching encourage lifelong learning relevant to a changing global society. Penn is a major urban university that is committed to strength and vitality in each of its communities. In this connection, Penn will: Encourage, sustain, and reward its faculty; nurture, inspire, and challenge its students; and support and value its staff; Strengthen and appreciate the diversity of its communities; Support free expression, reasoned discourse, and diversity in ideas; Pursue positive connections to the city, state, and region and a mission of service to its neighbors in West Philadelphia; Develop and support its connections to alumni and friends; and Foster the growth of humane values.

=OpenCourseWare at Dartmouth=

==Definition and Importance==

===What is OpenCourseWare?===

OpenCourseWare is the free and open sharing of course materials such as syllabi, lecture videos, response questions, and problem sets. OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems explicitly allow unrestricted use, redistribution, and adaptation of course materials. They typically do not grant degrees or award credits.

In the general movement for Open Education Resources, OpenCourseWare is one loosely-defined system. The name originates from MIT’s famous initiative unveiled in October of 2002. However, the label is now much more widespread as over 200 institutions make up the OpenCourseWare Consortium1, including UC Berkeley, Tufts, University of Notre Dame, and University of Michigan.2

Using the OpenCourseWare label is not necessary for sharing Open Education Resources. For example, Yale’s highly successful initiative is called Yale Open Courses3 and does not mention the term OpenCourseWare. However, the use of the OpenCourseWare label has great advantages in terms of recognition and access to OpenCourseWare Consortium resources.

===Why is OpenCourseWare a good choice for Dartmouth?===

It is socially responsible. President Kim has called on us to make the world’s problems our own, and one of the world’s most important problems is a lack of access to higher education. This has long been a particularly serious issue for the developing world, and the economic crisis has made it a more significant issue for the developed world as well. Freely and openly releasing our course materials would be a great help in addressing this problem.

It is the next logical step in fulfilling or mission as an institution of higher education. We are here because we all share an important value: the advancement of education and learning worldwide. In keeping with this value, Dartmouth has recently taken on two important initiatives:
The Dartmouth Youtube Channel4 is a public repository of over 300 videos associated with Dartmouth including lectures, talks and discussions by Dartmouth professors, faculty and students as well as guest speakers.
The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity5, announced this fall, features Dartmouth as an original signatory. Signatories pledge funding “to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature”

These initiatives communicate to the outside world and to our own community that we are not interested in the proprietary withholding of information. In this same vein, OCW allows Dartmouth to see itself as one part of a greater commons of higher education, inspiring us to draw from, build on, and add to this commons for the ultimate betterment of education worldwide.

It serves as great publicity, attracting students as well as potential professors and donors. In a review of their OCW effort, MIT found that more than one third of their freshmen were positively influenced by OCW before deciding to attend6. There are a number of things unique to a Dartmouth education which could be highlighted by an OCW system—our interdisciplinary approach to teaching Engineering is just one example.

It increases the quality of our work by reminding us to contextualize it within the broader goal of advancing knowledge and education worldwide. This means challenging ourselves to consider how our work at Dartmouth is incorporating and advancing outside work at the frontiers of our various fields.

It unites and strengthens our learning community. A 2005 audit of MIT OpenCourseWare7 showed that 71% of students, 42% of alumni, and 59% of faculty used it. Students use it to learn more about a course they’re considering, or to follow along with one that they can’t fit into their schedules. Alumni use it for continuing education and to maintain a feeling of connection with their alma-mater. Most importantly, professors use it to observe their colleagues (both on campus and at other schools) in order to learn from their teaching methods and to identify potential collaborations. In this way, OpenCourseWare expands learning across generations within the university.

It provides a great platform for innovation. Implementing an OpenCourseWare system can be much more than a simple copycat move. Since MIT’s initiative, there have been plenty more projects that have pushed the envelope. The University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan project, for example, has done a great deal to advance the movement as a whole by fundamentally rethinking the OpenCourseWare publication process and releasing free and open source software that makes is easy for new initiatives to adopt their innovative methodology8. Unlike many other innovative fields, OpenCourseWare embraces a sense of community and collaboration, so that innovation is achieved through openly sharing and building off of each-other for the ultimate betterment of Open Education.

==How to Cut Costs==

Historically, the costs associated with OCW have not been trivial. Utah State’s initiative costs $127,000 per year and the South African University of Western Cape spends $44,000 each year. MIT OCW, by far the most comprehensive effort, has an annual budget of $4.3 million and produces more than 540 courses in open formats every year. The costs include converting faculty material into publishable formats, providing administrative and technological infrastructure, and clearing intellectual property rights for any outside work which appears in the course material.9

Luckily, peer institutions and nonprofits provide great resources and case studies to inform cost-saving strategies.

===Ask for Help===

A number of well-endowed foundations have helped fund previous OCW initiatives. The MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Institute, Shuttleworth Foundation, Hewlett Foundation and Mellon Foundation have all provided financial assistance and leadership to universities pursuing open educational resources. In addition, government grants, corporate sponsorships, and user donations have served to offset costs for other initiatives.10

Additionally, there are a few nonprofit organizations that provide guidance and resources to institutions and organizations engaged in projects relating to Open Education Resources. The main two such organizations are the OpenCourseWare Consortium11, and ccLearn12. Through my work and research, I’ve gained contacts at both of these organizations. They are very easy to get in touch with and are excited about the possibility of a Dartmouth OpenCourseWare system.

Finally, observing and communicating with peer institutions can be a big help. Many initiatives, such as University of Michigan OCW, have embraced a spirit of openness even in their internal infrastructure, openly documenting their processes and history13. For those institutions which do not provide this type of open documentation, I have found that they are nonetheless very available to answer questions and provide advice. During my research, I’ve gotten very useful and enthusiastic responses from all of the parties that I’ve reached out to, including Open.Michigan, Open Yale Courses, Georgetown OCW, and MIT OpenCourseWare.

===Involve Students===

dScribe is a system developed at the University of Michigan to support their OpenCourseWare initiative. The dScribe system involves student interns working with faculty to collect, review, and publish course materials, reducing the need for more expensive person-hours in the publication process. The specifics of the dScribe workflow are very well documented on the open.Michigan wiki14. Additionally, the University of Michigan has freely and openly released a piece of software called OERca which streamlines the dScribe workflow, walking faculty and student interns through the necessary steps15. Adopting the established and well-documented dScribe system would greatly reduce the cost of implementing an OCW system at Dartmouth.

The dScribe system makes particular sense because it pairs students who are “digital natives” with professors who are often less comfortable with technology. More importantly, the dScribe system fosters closer student-professor relationships and reminds students that our work on campus ought to be contextualized within the broader intellectual sphere. The Neukom Institute has funding for student interns to work with faculty on using technology for their courses. These student interns could become dScribes.

===Leverage Existing Resources===

The dScribe system and OERca are two examples of existing resources created by outside institutions and designed for use in any OCW system. Another example is eduCommons, a full-featured Content Management system for OpenCourseWare websites which was originally developed for Utah State University’s OCW system16. In other words, this software provides a full web system for uploading, managing, and viewing course materials.

At Dartmouth, many departments already have infrastructure in place for capturing course lectures on video. The departments of engineering, astronomy, and physics regularly record lectures and post them on blackboard. Additionally, the computer science department already publicly posts on their website some combination of syllabi, lecture notes, homework assignments and practice exams for most courses17. Once we clear these materials with their respective departments (and, for videos, make sure that they respect study privacy in accordance with FERPA), adding them to an OpenCourseWare system would be trivial.

We also have have a number of open resources and initiatives at Dartmouth which are not course related. At the University of Michigan, their OpenCourseWare system is only one aspect of the larger Open.Michigan project. A similar system at Dartmouth could include the multitude of lectures, panels, and talks on the Dartmouth YouTube channel in addition to an OpenCourseWare project. Such a system could also highlight our other open initiatives, such as the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity and the history and source code of the open source Blitzmail system. We could send a strong message by bringing all of these materials together under one banner.

===Release in Phases===

As a simple proof of concept, I’ve drafted a rough strategy for releasing a Dartmouth OpenCourseWare system in phases. The goal is to use the above strategies to quickly and inexpensively reach a “soft launch,” which can be used to generate interest and solicit funding.

Phase 0: Initialization.
A “sneak peak” website is created at open.dartmouth.edu, which simply links to and has brief descriptions of existing resources and initiatives, including the Dartmouth Youtube Channel, the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, the Blitzmail source code, and Computer Science course materials18. Particular subsets of videos in the YouTube channel, such as lecture series’, could be highlighted as well. The goal in this phase to establish branding for an Open Education initiative at Dartmouth and quickly release an initial “sneak peak” product to drum up support.

Phase 1: Dartmouth OpenCourseWare Soft Launch
We use our initial project to continue to solicit support and funding. A Free and Open Source Content Management System such as eduCommons is installed for publishing new course material. The infrastructure for collecting, reviewing, and publishing course material is put into place. This will probably involve the establishment of a dScribes system which will use the Free and Open Source OERca software which streamlines this process. This system could exist as its own entity, or we could approach an existing body such as the Neukom Institute or DCAL to ask if they can incubate it.

A small number of courses have their materials collected, reviewed, and published as an exercise for the new dScribe system. These course materials are published quietly in a “soft launch,” where it is understood that this is not a final product. It is not advertised to the public, but people on campus are given the ability to visit the website and give feedback. This will be useful for getting professors and funders excited about Dartmouth OpenCourseWare.

Simultaneously, departments that already have course materials that are shared internally, especially those which already record lectures, are approached and asked if their course materials can be publicly published and openly licensed. We incorporate already open course materials into our system, such as those on the Computer Science website, adding useful metadata to make it more searchable. We connect Dartmouth’s legal council with organizations like the OpenCourseWare consortium and ccLearn to step through the legal issues involved in publishing course materials. This includes establishing waivers and systems of notice to address FERPA concerns, as well as establishing a framework for evaluating whether or not media embedded in course materials (e.g. unlicensed, copyrighted images used in lecture slides) counts as fair use.

Also, with the new federal law requiring that students have access to course book lists, it may be possible to incorporate this information in to an OpenCourseWare system. The body collecting book lists might also ask if professors are comfortable publishing their book lists and syllabi online.

The goal with this step is to move forward with building an OpenCourseWare system, at a pace appropriate for the availability of funding and resources. Because this is not a public product, the project can move slowly or go on hiatus as necessary. Similarly, if the initial steps inspire enthusiasm and support, we can move quickly.

Phase 3: Full Launch
Once we have a steady source of funding and a reasonably stocked product, we issue a full launch. At this point, the infrastructure (technology, staff, funding) is in place for a system that is sustainable into the foreseeable future. After a public launch, we continue to look through earlier material and attempt to clear the rights to openly license any materials that are not already openly licensed. Also, we continue to add technical infrastructure to make the website more scalable and open, such as standards-compliant markup, tagging and metadata, API access, open formats, and tools for translation.

==Other Questions and Concerns==

===What is Open Licensing, and Why is it Important?===

Open licenses are often used in OpenCourseWare systems to explicitly state that anyone is free to copy, adapt, and redistribute all original media. Otherwise, the copyright law of some countries (including the United States) would make such actions illegal by default. Some people think of licensing as taking away rights or charging money, but in this case licensing is free of charge and explicitly grants rights to users. The recommended license for OpenCourseWare projects is the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows all uses of materials as long as any copies or adaptations include proper attribution to the copyright holders. There are other Creative Commons licenses that occupy a middle ground between Creative Commons Attribution and the default “all rights reserved,” but they are not recommended because they make the course materials less useful as educational resources. Attaching a Creative Commons license to a published work is free and trivial, requiring only a short statement and link to a copy of the full license.

Open licensing is important because it allows the public to adapt your work to its needs and redistribute it in channels to which you don’t have access or to which you had not thought to distribute or don’t have the resources to distribute. For example, imagine a small school in a developing country. Imagine that this university only has one computer with internet access, and it uses a slow, dial-up connection. A teacher might download lecture notes and homework assignments from a Dartmouth course and then print out copies for each student in her class. She might also adapt the notes by translating them into her native language, or omitting homework assignments that require resources that the students don’t have, perhaps replacing them with other assignments. Finally, she might find that her adapted course materials would be useful to other schools in her area, so she may redistribute by posting them on a message board for her fellow teachers to download.

Who would prosecute this teacher if the course materials had not been openly licensed, making her actions copyright infringement? Likely nobody. However, she might be less able to redistribute her course materials or go to conferences to discuss how they have revolutionized her teaching. She might also be less able to propose to her community or country’s bureau of education that Dartmouth OpenCourseWare be incorporated into more course curricula.

This teacher has added value to our course materials and perfectly embodied academic spirit of collaboration and Newton’s idea of standing on the shoulders of giants. We should be encouraging and enabling the kind of work that she does, not telling her to hush about it for fear of being sued. Without open licensing, she might be less inclined to use the course materials in the first place, especially if her institution were more well-known and her work more forward-facing.

In conversations about open licensing, some people are concerned about being “ripped off.” The “Attribution” aspect of the Creative Commons Attribution license assures that you are always properly credited for your work. Improper or absent attribution in a copy or adaptation of your work still constitutes copyright infringement, and you can sue. Making a derivative work (for example, one that is ultimately less impressive than the original) and failing to make clear that it is not identical to the original work (in this case, making us look bad) is also a violation of the license. Thus the Creative Commons Attribution license allows the necessary sharing of scholarly work while still maintaining the important aspects of “intellectual property.”

Of course, I am not a lawyer so nothing I write here constitutes official legal advice. However, the ccLearn website19 includes numerous lawyer-approved resources about licensing, many of which are specific to Open Education Resources. I worked with their staff over the summer, and they are happy to offer help.

===What About Student Privacy?===

When capturing lectures on video, concerns for student privacy are very important, especially given the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Luckily, peer institutions have been doing this long enough that they have already tested out the waters and come up with systems that seem to be satisfactory for addressing these concerns. I contacted MIT, Yale, and University of Michigan, and they all said that they use some combination of these four things:
Established “Splash Zones” where students know that they might be captured on video. There were usually the seats in the front of the room.
Notice through mailings at the beginning of course periods or even at the time of course registration. Additionally, MIT posts notifications on the doors of classrooms where lectures are being recorded, as part of their particularly strict Student Information Policy (http://web.mit.edu/policies/11/sip.html). Notice allows students to choose to sit out of sight of the camera if they are concerned about their privacy.
Waivers stating that students understand that they may be recorded on video and that it is up to them to sit out of the way if they are concerned about their privacy.
Pre-Publication screening of Videos to remove or minimize the appearance of students in videos, especially those appearances which may be more easily tied to a particular student, and especially appearances of those students who have expressed particular concern about their privacy.

===Will Lecture Recordings Negatively Impact The Classroom Atmosphere?===

Professors might be concerned that students would be less willing to ask questions during class when they are being recorded. A policy could be made that questions are always repeated by the professor so that before publishing student questions are simply cut out. This might encourage students to ask questions more freely.

Professors also might have more personal concerns about having their lectures recorded. For example, they might feel that they would have to censor themselves or speak more formally. They may even be concerned that their lectures are not “good enough” for public consumption. Some of these concerns can be assuaged by assuring professors that there is always time to make edits later, and that they will have the ultimate say in whether or not their lectures are published online.

If a professor is uncomfortable with publishing recordings of her lectures, she may still be comfortable publishing other course materials such as syllabi, readings lists, homework assignments, and even lecture notes or edited lecture transcripts. This may also be the best compromise when a professor is particularly concerned about student privacy or student shyness in discussions.

If a professor is concerned that her discussion courses don’t lend themselves well to video capture, it’s worth considering other ways to represent the discussion to the outside world. For example, the Intro to Law and Technology course at Yale has a dedicated website20 that, in addition to a syllabus and reading list (all of the readings are available for free online) includes a blog where students post reading responses and short essays that tie their readings in to recent events. Anyone in the world can read and comment on these blog posts. One could imagine including a mailing list or online forum as well, so that the students enrolled in the course could further involve the outside world in their discussion.

===Will Students Stop Going to Class?===

Some people are concerned that if lecture notes or even lecture recordings are available online, students will stop going to class. Perhaps some students will attend fewer classes because of this, but the many courses which already publish materials for those enrolled in their courses (there are several such courses in Astronomy, Physics, Engineering, and Computer Science) continue to thrive, as do the many courses at our peer institutions which already have OpenCourseWare systems.

In my opinion, refusing to release lecture notes to students enrolled in a class is just another form of intellectual gatekeeping. Professors should be valuable resources because of their pedagogical expertise, not because they hold the secret key to information. We should ultimately be concerned with spreading knowledge as efficiently as possible, and giving students all the resources that we can in order to help them to learn easily and efficiently.

In the end, we college students are young adults and they can make responsible decisions for themselves. Many of us chose Dartmouth because it is a prestigious yet student-focused (and particularly undergraduate-focused) school, and we value interaction with professors.

Of course, participation in OpenCourseWare should always be optional for professors, so those who are particularly concerned that releasing course materials will negatively impact their courses should not be forced to do so.

==Ideas for Innovation==

As explained in the first section, one thing that makes OpenCourseWare a great idea for Dartmouth is the opportunity that it provides for innovation. Here, I present two ideas to help guide thinking about innovation in OpenCourseWare.

Explore ways to allow interaction between Dartmouth students and the outside world. As I’ve already mentioned the Intro to Technology and Policy class at Yale is a step in this direction because student work is openly published online. However, this creates a primarily one-way dialogue. A more direct solution could be as simple as creating an online message board where students and self-learners could meet to discuss readings and lectures. Of course, such a message board would be most effective if professors included posting to the message board as a part of coursework (akin to pre-discussion reading reflections). There may be interesting ways to mix this approach with community-based or service-based learning approaches, where students work directly with local communities to apply their studies to real problems—deepening the students’ understandings of real-life problems and the community’s understanding of theory.

Investigate cheap and scalable but effective methods to increase the pedagogical value of OpenCourseWare. Perhaps the largest shortcoming of OCW is that universities usually approach it with a “dump truck” mentality, publishing course materials onto a website without a whole lot of consideration for how they can be best presented for effective learning. One way to address this might be allowing visitors to create profiles where they track homework assignments that they have completed or lectures that they have viewed, perhaps with smart recommendations for what a user might want to look at next.

As OpenCourseWare projects continue to crop up with increasing frequency around the world, it’s becoming clear that OCW will play a large role in the future of higher education. However, the OpenCourseWare movement is still in its infancy. There are still plenty of questions to be answered and problems to be solved. By building on the work of our peers and adding our own unique twist, I believe that Dartmouth can truly advance the OpenCourseWare movement and even high er education as a whole.

Credits:
Thanks to prof. Mary Flanagan, Ahrash Bissel of ccLearn, and Kevin Donovan of Georgetown OCW for helping work through drafts of this document. Thanks also to the people at MIT, Yale, and University of Michigan who responded very helpfully to my email queries about various aspects of their Open Education systems.

Copyright:
This work by D. Parker Phinney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The full terms of the license can be found at . Sharing is caring.

I want to have all of these scripts in a central, open repository that invites contributions. (As an aside, I’d also like a more general central repository/tracker for bits of python that are useful for crawling websites–from a full, manual wikipedia scraper to something like a single function that gets you a logged-in cookie for gmail.com). Once I have this repository, I want to pack all the software together with an easy front-end where you simply enter your login credentials for all the network services that you use. I want this to run every single night, doing incremental backups of all of my data.

I want this for the implication for computing autonomy–using proprietary network services is still bad because I can’t understand or build on (or share) the code that I am running (or, more closely, causing to be run), but at least this way I can feel like I have more “control” over my data (more on this two paragraphs down).

I also want this for the practical benefits. Techies sometimes say about computer data that “if it isn’t backed up, it doesn’t exist.” We often (rightfully) think of putting our data into a network service as making it more likely to live forever–after all, they often have their own backup system which is much more robust and heavily funded than ours. But of course we should not assume anything about what a proprietary network service is doing behind the scenes! There may be no backup system at all, or it may fail (see the sidekickocalypse), or the service-providers may just decide to pull the plug and let all your data die (see the Geocitenocide). Also, if a service goes down but it has backups, there is nothing you can do to expediate the process of having those backups restored. Your data is “safe” but it’s locked up until further notice. This is why I want a client that runs these scrapes every night, ideally using incrementation (maybe a browser plugin can track when you add data to a site? Maybe this whole idea ought to be implemented as a browser plugin?).

Of course, knowing that I always have access to my data in easily-parsable formats has another important advantage: it makes it easier to leave one network service for another (or just altogether), especially if an additional part of this project is to collect scripts that can take these exported chunks of data and import them back in to other services or just other pieces of software (I’d like all of my flickr photos on facebook and also my on-disk copy of F-Spot. Also post profile data from facebook back on my myspace. kthxbai.) Locking up data has long been a malicious strategic device used to keep people using your software/service even after you’ve decided you don’t want to anymore–from network services that are data black holes to locally-run software that uses DRM or generally proprietary file formats.

With this type of control over my data, it’s easier to leave a proprietary network service (this is a good reminder that computing autonomy is strongly related to data control–or data ownership, if you prefer). This has useful implications for people who occupy a middle ground on computing freedom in relation to network services. These people may believe that the usefulness of a computing resource is more important than its respect for one’s freedom–these are the “I’d use a Free alternative if one existed that was as good (or at least nearly as good)” people. These people will be have fewer excuses when a great piece of free software comes together that fits their needs (and, conversely, they’ll have the freedom to leave if/when a nicer proprietary service comes along).

Of course, the TOS for some (most?) of these services may be violated by the use of the software that I’m describing. However, I for one would love to see what happens when a bunch of people violate TOSs by doing this. Can we script cleverly enough that the service can never tell? Do people get found out and all lose their accounts? Do they really care that much, now that they have all of their data? Do they write angry blog posts about how they were “booted off of facebook for trying to download [or even 'take back'] their own data,” which eventually end up on larger news outlets? Do these stories make people care more about data portability and computing autonomy in network services? Does facebook come back with its tail between its legs and implement its own export feature?

The problem:
Though these emails include a few statistics about the user (number of tweets, number of followers, number of people following), they don’t include any of their actual tweets. This is unfortunate, because the best way to tell whether or not you care about someone on twitter is to look at what they say! As it is, I have to click a link in the email to visit their profile if I want to do that.

The solution:
Some python that I wrote, which logs in to your email, finds these messages from twitter, deletes them, and sends you more useful messages that
include recent tweets by the person who has just followed you!

In the future, I’d like to make this happen for identica as well. Also, I’d like to (and am very confident that I can write the code to) be able to follow the person back by responding to the email.

Code on pastebin

update: github’d

I’m still waiting to see whether or not The Dartmouth will publish my response. So far I haven’t heard anything back.

I am writing in response to “No Such Thing as Free Learning,” from the September 30th issue of The Dartmouth.

In her article, Johnson questions the benefits of OpenCourseWare, writing, “we should not fool ourselves into thinking that publishing course material serves any purpose but to garner publicity for the College.” Publicity is only one advantage of OpenCourseWare, and it is perhaps the least important one. OCW also has immense advantages within the university. The 2005 audit of MIT OCW showed that 71% of students, 42% of alumni, and 59% of faculty used it. Students use it to learn more about a course that they’re considering signing up for, or to follow along with one that they can’t fit into their schedules. Alumni use it for continuing education and to maintain a feeling of connection with their alma-mater (donations, anyone?). Most importantly, professors use OCW to observe their colleagues (both on campus and at other schools) in order to learn from their teaching methods and to identify potential collaborations. In this way, OpenCourseWare expands learning across generations within the university itself.

However, the whole point of OCW is that it expands learning beyond the university. In her article, Johnson challenges the idea that OCW systems are effective learning resources, writing “A student would have to be a very rare breed of self-starter to be able to gain anything from the available course materials.” Now, I’ll be the first to say that there’s nothing quite like being in the classroom and taking part in a dialogue involving both students and professors. It is my humble opinion that this is the most effective way to educate, and Dartmouth professors ought to stress discussion more in their courses. This is also the reason why a Dartmouth OCW system would never de-incentivize enrollment in the college.

That being said, lectures and syllabi can be incredibly useful to people who don’t have access to high-quality learning resources or who just need something that is free, accessible, and fast. Imagine the farmer in Kenya who wants to increase his crop yield or the student in Argentina who can’t understand her out of date textbook. One student in the US used MIT’s OCW to help him study for the physics AP exam. The front page of the MIT OCW website has a large banner linking to a page with many of these stories of how their system has been useful to students, educators, and independent learners around the world.

Clearly, OCW is not just something that worked once for MIT because they’re a big name and they were the first. The OpenCourseWare Consortium has over 200 member universities, and that doesn’t include many other open course projects such as Yale Open Courses and Harvard Medical School’s MyCourses. The future of education allows people of all backgrounds access to learning resources from top professors around the world with the click of a button.

If we are to make the world’s problems our own problems, as President Kim has urged us to, there is an obvious moral argument for why we as an institution should not be hoarding the great learning resources that we are creating. The demand for higher education is increasing far more rapidly than our universities can accommodate. Our mission should be to expand education and knowledge worldwide, from Hanover to Hanoi.

Johnson’s article brings up a cost-benefit analysis, which is an important thing to consider. It’s true, MIT OCW is expensive. However, it is largely funded by outside grants (from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to name a few), thus it is not true that every dollar put towards OCW is taken away from another aspect of the university. Furthermore, MIT is not the only model—the University of Michigan significantly reduces costs in their OCW system by using students in the publishing process through their dScribe system. Here at Dartmouth, many courses in both Thayer and the Physics & Astronomy department are already being captured on video for internal use. Also, many courses in the computer science department have lecture notes, syllabi, homework assignments, and even practice exams that are publicly available from the department’s website. The cost of making these materials OpenCourseWare would be very small—the barriers are almost purely administrative.

Finally, implementing OpenCourseWare at Dartmouth would be far more than simply a hop on the higher-ed bandwagon. Because of the transparency of OCW, each new system has the ability to observe existing ones to learn from and build off of them with fresh ideas. Though it’s clear that OpenCourseWare is part of the future of higher education, it’s not yet clear what the most effective system looks like. Dartmouth could really push the movement by exploring how OCW systems could be more collaborative and participatory. I sincerely believe that by building on the work of our peers and adding our own twist, Dartmouth can use OpenCourseWare to truly advance higher education in a lasting way.

This thing I put together instead of doing something else: Dontxmebro.com.

fine print fail

The Issues:

• Privacy policies are unclear. They are written in legalese that laypersons can’t understand.
• Privacy Policies are unreasonable. Because people don’t read them and because “users” have no alternatives, companies are free to retain the right to do whatever they want with your information
• Privacy Policies are non-negotiable. You can either accept it or refuse to use the product/service. There is hardly ever an alternative product/service with a more liberal privacy policy.

In response to these issues, a few things have been proposed. There were two parallel but different approaches that each involved what I think of as a Creative Commons-like model (It’s worth noting as well that Ryan had another fascinating idea involving incorporating human avatars into interfaces, about which he has a blog post). Essentially, the two ideas, as i recall them, broke down thus:

1. The user could brand her content with the privacy options that she wants, with some sort of badge.
2. The service could brand its privacy policy with some sort of human-readable badge or notice.

The former seems more difficult to successfully implement—you would need all participating services to comply. I’m more interested in the latter proposal, mostly because it seems so elegant in its simplicity. I’m imagining shamelessly copying some aspects of Creative Commons licenses:

• Three-tiered views: lawyer-readable legalese, human-readable plain english (in simple, bullet-pointed terms), and machine readable metadata (RDFa or something).
• Standardization: all privacy policies generated from a set of more-or-less on/off switches, like CC’s commercial/noncommercial, remix/no-derivs, copyleft/noncopyleft.

My idea is that the service-provider would go to mycoolprivacypolicy.com, and use a simple interface like the CC license chooser to piece together their privacy policy. They would be given the legal code as well as the machine and human code.

The readability issue with privacy policies is solved by the the human-readable code. The unreasonability and non-negotiability of these privacy policies is also helped, but less directly.

With the two characteristics I outlined above, you could imagine browser plugins that allowed users to engage in a dialogue with the privacy implications of their browsing. For example, you could tell your browser to notify you whenever you were on a website that reserved the right to use your information for promotional purposes. You could have it remember when a privacy policy stipulates that it can change at any time, and alert you when a change occurs. Basically, this adds up to a system where people take privacy policies seriously again—where they are actually read and thought about. When people are paying attention to privacy, services will compete over it, and users will win. In other words, more reasonable privacy policies will crop up because services will want to be the first to Truly Respect Your Privacy ™, which will help with the unreasonability issue was well as the negotiability issue (policies won’t actually be negotiable, but users will have choices).

Perhaps the first step in implementing such a system is figuring out the standard for these privacy policies. In other words, what are the yes/no questions that need to be answered in order to build a full privacy policy. Perhaps services require the ability to have different answers for different pieces of data? I might write here again soon with a first stab at such a list.

P3P is a (now defunct?) project that i really ought to research further, but basically seems to be exactly what i’m discussing here. It might include the necessary standards that I just mentioned.

If P3P is now defunct, why did it fail? As I recall from our conversation that friday, the answer was “nobody implemented it.” I’d like to close with this thought: perhaps we are at a unique moment where P3P or something similar is about to have many great opportunities to be adopted, if the right people talk about it soon. Let me explain.

During my last week in San Francisco, I saw Evan Prodromou of identi.ca and autonomous, as well as my boss Nathan Yergler and Google’s Chris DiBona, speak at CC Salon SF. Evan talked specifically about Free Network Services, and one thing that he said that really struck me with its blunt simplicity was that we need to basically clone all networking websites … twitter, facebook, dopplr, digg, last.fm … everything. Before you accuse Evan of trivializing the development of Free Software, I should note that he also said that we could make this process fun and improve on these services in ways beyond simply making them free. Indeed, the project is already under way, with sites like identi.ca and libre.fm already picking up steam, and mumblings about many others floating around.

Perhaps privacy is relevant enough to computing freedom that it ought to be included in any sort of definition of a Free Network Service. Perhaps not. Either way, there is certainly a great deal of overlap. Libre.fm even devotes (at the time of writing) almost half of its home page to a statement about its liberal privacy policy.

My point is that if we’re going to be rebuilding the social web right now—and we are—then we ought to make sure that it ships with a “solution” to privacy. We need to make discussions about a P3P-like system part of our discussions about Free Network Services.

This thing I made

It was a friday night, early last quarter at Dartmouth. Nobody had much work to do. I could have gone out to some shitty frat party and had an okay time. I could have sat in my room and listened to music or blogged or something.

Instead, I threw some duct tape in my backpack and headed to Cole’s dorm. I’d had a lot of fun hanging out with some friends from hellosilo over spring break, who turned me onto the idea of coworking. Perhaps the best thing one can do with her time is create things. Having interesting conversation is a close second. With coworking, she gets both.

The next morning, a lot of my friends had nothing to show for their previous nights’ work other than the occasional hangover. I had a chunk of duct-taped cardboard. I think I win.

Attention Tree! by Philipp Klinger (Off to Ville de Québec) on flickr, cc-by-nc-nd

That is, every set of information and logic should be organized into a data structure, such as a tree.

I came up with this idea while I was taking a course called Technology and Power, which was basically a philosophy course. We read Heidegger, and I decided that I hated philosophy (we later read some other philosophers who convinced me that I didn’t _actually_ hate philosophy, such as Foucault). But I just kept thinking, “there’s got to be a better way to get these ideas across.” We happened to be working with file structures in a computer science course that I was taking at the time.

As I was reading all of this philosophy, I quickly became skeptical that the authors were descending into poetry and losing track of the logical flow of their arguments. This is something that I do _not_ appreciate. I like poetry and I like logical arguments, but mixing of the two does both a disservice. A statement that sounds profound and important and interesting and just ooey-gooey-delicious is no substitute for a statement that is supported by logic.

Basically, these logic trees would allow us to call “bull shit” on philosophers. If they are forced to present the order of their claims, with no holes in between (think mathematical proof), then we can get through the poetic bullshit and actually take a look at what they are saying (again, I love poetry, but “sounding smart” isn’t enough). We wouldp be able to look at which claims are taken as granted (“postulates”?). A claim that “sounds right” seems much less convincing may seem much less convincing when you can easily trace it back to the premises that its based on, and how many statements need to be accepted without proof along the way.

Furthermore, once a philosophical argument is organized into a tree, you can do interesting things with it. Certainly it would be a lot to ask for each philosopher to start from square one in each work–thus a philosopher could add in a whole tree from another work, perhaps by another philosopher altogether. For example, if one logic tree made a compelling claim for the existance of the universe, perhaps that could be incorporated into a larger tree that used that applied said argument in order to prove that individual people exist, which would then in turn be used to prove that people have free will, etc etc. The trees could be collapsible, so that you could first look at the argument for the existance of individual people with the existence of the universe taken as a given, then simply “expand” the argument for the existence of the universe if you decide you’re skeptical.

One could also manipulate the tree herself in order to grapple with the concepts, as could other philosophers. For example, one might decide that the argument for the existence of the universe really isn’t compelling (perhaps there’s a blatant logical flaw). She could remove that argument, and attempt to apply a new one of her own development, or someone else’s. She could also encounter a convincing argument for why it is false, remove the assertion from the tree, and see what is left. Perhaps the original argument for the existence of original people depends on the existence of the universe only to prove that people are individuals, but not to prove that they exist (okay, these examples aren’t great, but hopefully you get the idea).

Heck, even a flowchart would be hugely valuable for a lot of logical arguments. That way, at least the reader could clearly step through the argument bit by bit, and discover the weak points. If bits of evidence were tied to nodes in the argument tree, it would be much easier to see how strong a claim is (how many bits of evidence it has). Also, again, if a bit of evidence turned out to be false, or a whle set of data turned out to be garbage, it could be plucked from the tree, and one could quickly and easily examine the extent to which the argument still holds. Again, bits of evidence could be collapsed, so that only the important details are visible, or expanded, so that one could examine a whole data set and see how it was obtained, so that it can be treated with a healthy dose of criticism. Plenty of people have talked about the recurring weirness of Gladwell’s arguments, both in terms of potential logical flaws as well as simply unbelievable data sets. A carefully organized flowchart would make these weak points more transparent.

Imagine the beauty of such a consolidation of argumentation. Imagine how its organization could be crowdsourced, ala wikipedia, so that with little to no cost, all great works of philosophy and even bits of argumentation were arranged in a bunch of intertwining trees that could be easily traversed with mouse clicks. Imagine parsing arguments by religious apologetics into such trees (note: this is the other case where I get frustrated by a mix of argumentation and poetry), to see where the larger argumentational leaps are, and just how much scripture needs to be taken on its word. Arguments could be constructed with clear holes, so that others can fill them in later (“I suspect that we can get from this claim to this claim, in fact, the relationship may be obvious on some level, but I can’t come up with a compelling reason why”).

Imagine how this could re-shape our discourse. When I started organizing sldeshow presentations with a loose format that enclosed sections in html-style tags, I came up with much more logical and easy-to-follow presentations. If people were forced to simultaneously present their argument as a tree or flowchart, their arguments would be much clearer and less full of BS.

Note that I’m not necessarily advocating that these flowcharts _replace_ formal arguments–they might serve better as a supplement. These trees would have enormous advantages, as I’ve described, but I’m very willing to accept the claim that “something is lost” when a piece of philosophical writing becomes an argument tree. I suspect that most (and perhaps even all) of the potential losses in terms of important aspects of the argumentation could be avoided through very careful (and perhaps complex) tree design. It would be great to come up with a system so fool-proof that we could comfortably declare that if a work could not be parsed into a convincing logic tree, it is not a convincing argument (we blame the argument, not the tree structure).

I’m sure there’s already some scholarship on this, and I’m sure that this idea needs to be fleshed out further. In particular, I want to start applying it to real-world examples. Perhaps I could try to parse a chapter of gladwell into a flowchart? Please comment, email me, or strike up a conversation about this in person. To be continued.

Editor’s note: i’m posting this early, but I’m hopefully going to proofread and edit it tomorrow. Please excuse the errors and lack of styling and links.