Free Software Linux

CC BY (Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean)

ccLearn welcomes its very first legal counsel, Lila Bailey, who will join our current team of two in February of next year. We have been seeking a counsel for months, and though the process has been long, it has been thorough and patient. We feel confident that we have found an excellent match in Lila, who fulfills the necessary qualifications and also brings a vitality and passion to her forthcoming role as an advocate and counsel for open education.

© Frances Pinter

Although we’ve already had a weekend plus a Monday to digest COSL’s Open Ed ‘08, the events from the conference and general good feeling inspired by speakers and individual conversations still drives us forward into the week and the beginning of next month. This year’s conference featured several notable speakers; the keynotes themselves were given by WikiEducator’s Wayne Mackintosh, Magnatune’s Teresa Malango, and MITE’s (Monterey Institute for Technology and Education) Gary Lopez .

Photo by Petri Tuohimaa for GMRI, CC BY-NC-ND “Sarah on a beach near Portland, Maine looking for two species of invasive marine crabs – Carcinus maenas (European green crab) and Hemigrapsus sanguineus (Asian shore crabs).”

June slipped by before we knew what was happening, so this is a two-month update. These past two months have seen ccLearn giving a presentation at CSU Sacramento relating open education and universal design, attending the first CC tech summit, and plowing along on the various projects already underway. Also, we welcomed a summer intern, Grace Armstrong, who is coordinating with CCi and open education leaders in Latin America and beyond on holding meetings and identifying promising collaborative opportunities. More on this later this summer.

Work on tools and resources that we hope will help to enable engagement with open education continues here at ccLearn. We’re getting into the testing phase for the Universal Education Search project, and we are currently writing a first report on licensing policy diversity among open educational projects and web sites.

In April, ccLearn crossed telephone lines with Italy and Ukraine for the first time. Executive Director Ahrash Bissell spoke with eIFL.net, Electronic Information for Libraries, an international nonprofit organization whose interests, among many, lie in open access publishing and fair and balanced intellectual property laws for libraries. Below is a follow-up interview over email with Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, and Iryna Kuchma, Program Manager of eIFL-OA (Open Access). First, can you say a few words about yourselves and eIFL? How did you come to get involved in eIFL and to hold your respective positions within the larger framework? What about eIFL attracted you?