[A2k] Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

[Manon Ress]

http://benetech.blogspot.com/

Monday, November 23, 2009
Bookshare to Convert Open Content Textbooks to Accessible Formats
Just spent a week in Washington DC doing all kinds of things,
including actual lobbying (it's fun!) as well as meeting with our
Bookshare funders at the Department of Education. One of the coolest
meetings was with Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, who
headed our local community college here in California before getting
the appointment. She and her senior policy adviser, Hal Plotkin, are
huge fans of Open Educational Resources (OERs), having been involved
in starting that movement in community colleges.

Our new announcement about the Department granting Bookshare
supplemental funding to convert open content textbooks to accessible
formats went over very well. We're promising to do highly accessible
versions of 80 open content textbooks. There's even a quote from
Governor Schwarzenegger in the press release!

Accessibility is a huge asset of open content materials, which are
frequently released under the Creative Commons licenses and are freely
distributable. Since they are open, we can get them and do the
adaptations for accessibility. We also can (and do) make them freely
available on our website. That's a huge difference compared to
copyrighted works that we convert under the copyright exemption, which
we have to keep under tight controls to restrict copyrighted works to
only the use of people with bona fide print disabilities in the U.S.
These new textbooks will be available to everybody, with or without a
disability, for free, globally. They should be great examples of
accessible textbooks, and allow teachers in training to access them,
parents, assistive technology developers and so on. It's also a chance
for us to start looking to the best ways of making these textbooks
more usable for more people.

I recently blogged about seeing David Wiley's talk about Flat World
Knowledge, the open content textbook company (for-profit, but giving
away the digital versions of their textbooks for free under CC
licenses), at the BYU ESR conference. We've been big fans of OERs and
CC licensing, and it seems like the field is on the brink of really
going to scale. Our mission is to make more of these materials matter
to many more people: how can OERs be directly usable by millions of
people?
Posted by Jim Fruchterman at 6:05 AM 0 comments

***************************************************************************
Manon Ress
manon.ress@keionline.org
Knowledge Ecology International
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Fax: +1.202.332.2673