[Foundation-l] Open teaching materials in the Netherlands

[effe iets anders]

2009/5/19 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk op googlemail.com>

> Hello,
>
> Maybe this is interesting for Wikimedians too, certainly for Wikibookians.
> The Dutch ministry of education is going to set up "Wikiwijs", a project to
> develop provide open and free school books or teaching materials to Dutch
> schools. In the elections the parties promised to abolish parents' payments
> for school books, and now the government has to cope with the costs.
>
> On a seminar in Amersfoort at Friday it became obvious that many questions
> are still unanswered. Wikiwijs is intended to be a platform for
> collaboratively developping teachings materials, but also link to already
> existing materials (also commercial ones). Although a letter of the
> minister
> to the parliament said that only teachers will be able to edit on Wikiwijs,
> now this remains to be discussed.
>
> Kennisnet (a government foundation known to Wikimedians because it
> supported
> Wikipedia with technological help) and the Open University are commissioned
> to create Wikiwijs. The man from the Open University admitted that Wikiwijs
> will not work like a wiki, and Marjon Bakker from Wikimedia Nederland asked
> him why the name is Wikiwijs then. (But on many occasions the minister and
> others compared Wikiwijs to Wikipedia - are they exploiting our good name?)
>
> The organisation of Dutch high schools wants to set up a different project.
> This has to do a lot with the distribution of power between the agents in
> the educational system in the Netherlands, and also within the schools.
>
> Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the
> CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was
> told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right
> to
> commercially exploit their work...


Correction, it was actually mentioned that the Wikiwijs project was
intending to use the CC-BY license. And I'm in conversation with at least
one other organisation that intended to use NC, but might change their
might. Things are not as NC as they seem at first sight :)


>
>
> The project manager of the organisation of Dutch high schools gave me a
> very
> striking reason against a license that allows commercial use: Most of the
> teachers want to teach with the help of ordinary school books, with
> additional material taken from the internet. They want to have something on
> paper. If the school book publishers are allowed to make print versions
> from
> open content, then the teachers want those print versions. They will put
> pressure on their head masters to buy them, and then the shift from print
> to
> digital will not occur, and the plan of the organisation to save 385
> millions €  will not become reality. So, the manager says, the better if
> the
> publishers cannot sell print versions.
>
> Ziko van Dijk
>
> read more in German on
> http://groups.google.de/group/infobrief-wiki-welt/msg/21c9f6c00634d13c?
>
>
>
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> NL-Silvolde
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