[Alex Kinnaman] All right we'll officially get started. Thank you all for
speaking out and attending the Open Education Symposium
lightning round and expo. These speakers will have
90 seconds to pitch their topic and then folks can kind of wander around to learn
a little bit more. So I'm just going to pass it off.
I will start my timer. If you go over time, you'll hear a very obnoxious duck sound.
So we should be good.
Alright so my name is Lisa Becksford. I'm the manager of the Odyssey learning
object repository. Odyssey is an open repository of
learning objects created and maintained by the University Libraries at Virginia Tech.
It was launched about two and a half
years ago and it currently has 47 videos, 12 handouts, and six
interactive tutorials, with more in production right now.
The content in Odyssey covers a wide range of topics included in library
instruction, such as poster development, data ethics,
and research proposals, as well as citations and citation
management, database searching and more. One of our motivations in developing
Odyssey is what we saw as a lack of high quality openly licensed
library instruction resources. All items in Odyssey have a CC BY
license giving others the right both to use an item as-is
and to modify it with attribution. In fact if someone wants to modify an item
to fit their context we will gladly send them the source files and anything
else they need to make the update. Without clear licensing it can be really
difficult to know whether something can be reused or if it's original creators
would be open to the idea of modification.
We've chosen this license as a way to make our content available as broadly as
possible and we see this repository as helping to
fulfill Virginia Tech's land-grant mission on a global scale
by making high-quality library learning resources available to all.
We hope that it's a resource that can be used by librarians as well as other
teachers to help students develop the research skills they need to succeed.
Thank you.
My name is Kirsten Dean and I, like Lisa, work in teaching learning
engagement in the Libraries and I'm also here to pitch a repository.
So the Open Textbook Library is one of the top sources for
free, openly licensed, and well-curated textbooks, and
unlike a broader OER repository like Odyssey, which includes
multiple types of learning objects, the Open Textbook Library
as indicated in the name focuses solely on textbooks. So there is an advantage
there that you know exactly the type of source
you're going to find when you go to the open textbook library.
It also includes reviews from faculty members who have adopted or at least
considered adopting the textbooks, so there are some sort of peer review
resources that are right there on the page.
And the library is run by the Open Textbook Network which started in 2012 at the
University of Minnesota, since then has grown to 120 member institutions.
Virginia Tech is one of those members
and so as part of the network that community curates the
Open Textbook Library as well as providing resources and
training for open textbook authors, advocates, etc. So my last pitch other
than come talk to me and explore the library
is that if you're interested in reviewing
a textbook from that library, learning more, Anita and I will be running a
workshop on April 3rd so I have flyers for that and
you can earn two hundred dollars for reviewing
a textbook in the library.
Well there are three of us here, I'm Mike Napier
from the College of Veterinary Medicine and I'm the instigator
of the virtual animal project. So the goal of the project is to
bridge the gap in virtual reality between two-dimensional drawings
and textbooks and live animals and cadavers for teaching veterinary
anatomy, and also to replace
what are currently for-purchase items that the students can use.
So right now we're goal our goal is to create detailed anatomical
representations of our three major domestic species,
the dog, cow, and the horse. We're most of the way through the dog, part
of the way through the cow, and just starting on the horse.
Those are all freely available and downloadable for anyone with an
HTC Vive set through the University Libraries
and soon to be expanding into both of the Oculus products as well.
And the goals in the future actually starting to develop a
content of, or a our a community of content creators
and we have it out being piloted in several veterinary schools around the
country as well as usage for
other agricultural or anatomical teaching. We have it in Blacksburg middle
school right now.
My name is Joe Forte. One of my favorite things in the world is a portmanteau.
That's when you combine two words or parts
of two words to make a brand new third word. What's so great
about that is that you take something that is, combine it with
something that is, and end up with something that had
not previously been but as it turns out can be and what's so
and what's so great about that and what I like so much about that is that it
confirms for me the belief that human society is the architect of its
own reality, right? This is borne out by history repeatedly
um the historical record repeatedly including within
recent media trends uh that despite a uh tenacious
sort of support for a model of mass distribution
of a centrally created content and centrally controlled content have seen
in recent years the rise of an increasingly social
and decentralized media landscape and potentially nothing illustrates this
better than my favorite portmanteau, podcasting, which is
broadcasting to the iPod, right. So this is the thing with which
people have chosen to mediate their communication. This is the thing we want
to communicate. Let's bring our thing to this thing
let's broadcast to the ipod podcasting right and all that stuff in the middle
between our thing and this thing that makes the podcasting possible
um that's the internet and to which everyone has uh
access as uh content creators and content
i'm sorry as content creators and as content consumers so
everybody democracy writ large right not quite that simple so you might really
understand about the tenacity of mass media
um but even still wanted to have to speak to the potential for
podcasts uh to support the goals of open education it seemed so selfish
and evidently obvious that I felt it would be difficult to fill these 90
seconds yet here I am over time so if you want to
learn more about the way which Virginia Tech Publishing is
conceptualizing the way in which podcasting
can be a vehicle for scholarly publication and communication within an
open arena and on the new digital libraries
platform come and talk to me about it.
All right, hi I'm sarah Mease from Virginia Tech Publishing and I'm talking
about collaborative publishing platforms. So they provide a means to organize
teamwork, whether your team members are across
the room, across campus, or across the globe. A shared online work environment
provides structures, tools, and workflows to produce polished publications.
We provide access to - University Libraries provides access to two
different publishing platforms, Overleaf and Pressbooks.
Both of these platforms provide a collaborative online work environment
that can accommodate multiple users and version control.
Both platforms provide an editing interface and multiple templates for
formatting publications. So the most common use for Overleaf is
collaborating on papers that can be submitted to journal publication.
Overleaf is good for formatting math and provides automatic submission for journals.
Overleaf outputs to PDF only but it is
available for anyone with a VT email address to use. Accounts can be set
up just by visiting their website. And then the second collaborative
publishing platform is Pressbooks. So that's more commonly used for like book
length works like open textbooks and edited volumes.
Pressbooks provides the ability to create interactive quizzes that are
great for classes or to use as practice questions,
and it provides different roles for authors, administrators, and editors.
So like we use this a lot with like student workers they can go and edit
something and then authors can go in and work on it and you
can also have like administrators so users can output as a PDF or EPUB
and templates can provide formatting for web and print editions.
And that's what we use for a lot of our student book projects, so you can come
back and talk to me and then Robert will be here shortly and we'll
talk to you about collaborative publishing platforms.
Okay hi good afternoon my name is Anita Walz. I'm the assistant director
for open education and scholarly communication librarian
here at the University Libraries and I'm talking to you about
Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses specifically
were created in 2001 by a group of frustrated
copyright attorneys who wanted to make it very clear to
copyright owners what they needed to do to have other
people allowed to do their use their work.
Creative Commons licenses are a layer
that one puts on top of copyrighted work that
you of which you own the copyright.
They allow the owner to communicate that the work
is moving from some, from all rights
reserved to some rights reserved. They allow the owner
to retain ownership, to retain copyright of the use
of the work while allowing certain freely
available uses. These uses can include the right to copy, the right to revise,
the right to remix. They can also include
the indication that something is in the public domain or donated to the public domain.
So there are six different
markers within the Creative Commons suite
at this point. They're inspired by the free software
movement so the
the quacking is nice
They're inspired by the free software movement and are intended to be used
on works that are not software but that would typically fall under a copyright.
And they power most of the open educational resources so
if you are looking at any open textbook look for a Creative Commons license or
something like it, and that's what will tell you whether or
not it is truly an open textbook. Thank you.
All right, a round of applause for our speakers please.
That is it for the lightning talks, now is just the expo, you can wander
around, check in with folks and see what
they've got going on at their stations. Thank you.