K12 Open Technologies

We have moved from the Information Age to the Participation Age and copyright law is having trouble keeping up. One solution is to let the new copyright holders – including you and other members of the education community – determine what rights we are willing to grant.

A growing a central repository for freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media of all sorts.

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing textbooks and related non-fiction books (with supporting books and booklets; such as annotated literary and other classics) about different subjects.

Wikipedia is a standard web-based reference tool that has been built and vetted by its users. The depth of articles is a model example showing how an open content collection can be constructed and vetted by a large community.

Sofia promotes faculty and institutional sharing of online content. Modeled after MIT's OpenCourseWare Initiative, Sofia encourages the free exchange of community college-level materials on the web.

An online collectin of 18,000 ebooks. The books are available free of charge and most have free copyrights.

A library of free photos that can be used in not for profit educational settings.

An informative website from Gary Stager that provides information for using podcasting and RSS feeds in education. The portable MP3 player may become a significant channel for educational programming.

Opsound is an experiment in applying the model of free software to music. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons.

OpenCourse is a collaboration of teachers, researchers, and students to develop open, reusable learning assets (e.g., animations, simulations, models, case studies, etc.). Subject focused collaboratories provide links to many reusable learning objects.