What is "Open Education" and what does it mean for the future of learning? What role can Australia play?

"Lessons from the open access movement are now being applied to open education. Building upon the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first defined open access in 2002, educators, internet pioneers, and foundations launched the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in January 2008. The declaration calls for publicly funded educational materials to be made freely available over the internet, the use of open content licenses, and the collaborative production of materials." - Melissa Hagemann, Open Scholarship

Convenor: Professor Brian Fitzgerald, QUT/OAK LAW/CCi
Special Guest: Melissa Hagemann, Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network
Discussion Leaders (include):
John Wilbanks, Science Commons
Delia Browne, Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA)
A/Professor Cushla Kapitzke, Faculty of Education (QUT)
Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology OAK LAW
Professor James Dalziel MELCOE Macquarie University'
Carolina Rossini, Berkman Centre Harvard Law School
Jessica Coates, Creative Commons Clinic (CCi)

BIOGRAPHIES

Melissa Hagemann

Melissa Hagemann manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 that led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OSI has been active within the Open Access movement, which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature.

Hagemann has held several positions within OSI, including managing OSI's Regional Library Program (1995-1997) in Budapest, as well as the Science Journals Donation Program (1998-2001).

Hagemann currently sits on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia as well as other leading open content projects, and has served on the Member of Experts' Group of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Global Library Initiative. She was profiled as a SPARC Innovator in December 2006 for her work within the Open Access movement.

Prior to joining OSI, Hagemann received an MSc from the London School of Economics and worked in the European Parliament in Brussels.

John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks is currently the Executive Director of Science Commons. Science Commons is an exploratory project to apply the philosophies and activities of Creative Commons in the realm of science. Their goal is to encourage stake-holders to create areas of free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and other means; a 'Science Commons' built out of voluntary private agreements.

John came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He was previously a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark and a grassroots coordinator and fundraiser for the American Physical Therapy Association. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica's Digital Communities awards.

Delia Browne

Delia Browne is internationally recognised for her work in the area of intellectual property law especially as it relates to the creative and education sectors. Prior to her role as the National Copyright Director of the Copyright Advisory Group, Delia worked at Minter Ellison providing specialist copyright advice to the education sector. Delia has considerable experience in law reform and lobbying. In her role as the Executive Director of the Arts Law Centre of Australia (1996 – 2002), she advised the arts sector in respect of legislative reforms and policy in intellectual property and taxation. In her current role as the National Copyright Director, Delia manages the newly formed National Copyright Unit of Copyright Advisory Group which provides specialist copyright advice to schools and the TAFE sector, implements smart copying initiatives and conducts negotiations with collecting societies on behalf of schools and TAFE institutes. In 2005, Delia led the education sector in its lobbying efforts for copyright law review. This resulted in the introduction of new legislative exceptions with significant benefits to the education sector.

Delia is a strong advocate of the open education movement. Recently, Delia attended the Cape Town Open Education meeting convened by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education internationally. Delia has been invited to attend the Isummitt Open Education Track in Sapporo in July of this year and continues to work closely with CC Australia in promoting open education in Australia.

Brian Fitzgerald

Brian studied law at the Queensland University of Technology graduating as University Medallist in Law and holds postgraduate degrees in law from Oxford University and Harvard University. He is a well-known Intellectual Property and Information Technology/Internet lawyer who has pioneered the teaching of Internet/Cyber Law in Australia. He has published articles on Intellectual Property and Internet Law in Australia, the United States, Europe, Nepal, India, Canada and Japan and his latest (co-authored) books are Cyberlaw: Cases and Materials on the Internet, Digital Intellectual Property and E Commerce (2002); Jurisdiction and the Internet (2004); Intellectual Property in Principle (2004) and Internet and Ecommerce Law (2007). Over the past seven years Brian has delivered seminars on Information Technology, Internet and Intellectual Property law in Australia, Canada, China, Brazil, New Zealand, USA, Nepal, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, Croatia and the Netherlands. In October 1999 Brian delivered the Seventh Annual Tenzer Lecture - Software as Discourse: The Power of Intellectual Property in Digital Architecture - at Cardozo Law School in New York.

Through the first half of 2001 Brian was a Visiting Professor at Santa Clara University Law School in Silicon Valley in the USA. In January 2003 Brian delivered lectures in India and Nepal and in February 2003 was invited as part of a distinguished panel of three to debate the Theoretical Underpinning of Intellectual Property Law at University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. During 2005 Brian presented talks in Germany, India and China and was a Visiting Professor in the Oxford University Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Program in Beijing in July 2005.

In 2006 he was nominated by DEST to attend and present as an Australian expert an OECD Workshop on Research Use of Patents held in May 2006 in Spain and in February 2006 was invited as international expert to present at an OECD Workshop on Open Educational Resources in Sweden. In April 2006 Brian was also invited to speak at the Fordham University International Intellectual Property Conference in New York and the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Conference at Yale University Law School. In April 2007 Brian organised the Knowledge Policy for the 21st Century Conference with the University of Western Ontario Law School in Canada and presented at the Fordham University International Intellectual Property Conference in New York. In May 2007 he organised the Legal and Policy Framework for the Digital Content Industry Conference in Shanghai China and in June presented at the Creative Commons iSummit in Dubrovnik Croatia. In July he organised an International Conference on the Legal Framework for e-Research held on the Gold Coast Australia and also taught in the Oxford Internet Institute Summer School at Harvard University Law School.

Brian is a Chief Investigator and Program Leader for Law in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Creative Industries and Innovation and Project Leader for the DEST funded Open Access to Knowledge Law Project (OAK Law) Project looking at legal protocols for open access to the Australian research sector and the DEST funded Legal Framework for e-Research examining the legal framework needed to enhance e-Research. He is also a Program Leader for CRC Spatial Information. His current projects include work on intellectual property issues across the areas of Copyright, Digital Content and the Internet, Copyright and the Creative Industries in China, Open Content Licensing and the Creative Commons, Free and Open Source Software, Research Use of Patents, Science Commons, e-Research, Licensing of Digital Entertainment and Anti-Circumvention Law. Brian is a Project Leader for Creative Commons in Australia. He has organised numerous conferences on Intellectual Property and Internet Law in Australia, is a regular speaker at international and national conferences and has made a number of significant submissions to government in the area of Internet and IP Law.

From 1998-2002 Brian was Head of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia and from January 2002 – January 2007 was Head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane. He is currently a specialist Research Professor in Intellectual Property and Innovation at QUT.

Professor James Dalziel

Professor James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. James leads a number of projects including: LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), including roles as a Director of the LAMS Foundation and LAMS International Pty Ltd; MAMS (Meta Access Management System), a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector; RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities), a project investigating open standards authorisation and e-Research workflows, and ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software), a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australian higher education and research sector.

Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney.

Anne Fitzgerald

Anne is a professor of law at QUT and recognised expert in the field of intellectual property law, which is demonstrated through her outstanding contributions to research, publication, training, teaching and professional practice. Anne has specialised for the past 15 years in intellectual property law, in particular its application to information technology. During this time she has gained extensive practical experience in intellectual property and technology contracting and recent hands on experience negotiating, drafting and advising on information technology and biotechnology contracts for the Queensland Government.

Anne has conducted extensive research in these fields, resulting in the publication of several books, numerous articles and book chapters on intellectual property law (particularly as it applies to digital technologies), and electronic commerce law. Since 1991, she has taught courses in the areas of intellectual property and e-commerce law to students in law, biotechnology, information technology, multimedia and electronic commerce courses, as well as to information technology professionals, writers and designers. Each year since 2003 she has taught the Intellectual Property Law course offered by Macquarie University’s School of Law as a summer intensive and since 2004, she has been the co-coordinator (with John Stonier) of the Patents and Commercialisation course in the Master of Laws program at QUT Law School. Anne teaches in the undergraduate Internet Law and E-commerce Law and Technology Contracts courses offered at QUT Law School and has taught in the Cyberlaw course in Southern Cross University’s summer law school program since 1998.

Anne was an initiator of the Going Digital series of seminars on legal aspects of e-commerce, multimedia and the Internet which were held in Brisbane, Melbourne and Hobart in 1997 and 1998 in association with QANTM Australia Co-operative Multimedia Centre. The project culminated in the publication of Going Digital: Legal Issues for Electronic Commerce, Multimedia and the Internet (Prospect Media, now LexisNexis/Butterworths) in August 1998. A second, completely revised, edition of the book, Going Digital 2000: Legal issues for e-commerce, software and the internet was published in February 2000.

Carolina Rossini.

Carolina Rossini is an attorney and holds degrees from the University of Sao Paulo-USP, Brazil (Bachelor in Law), Instituto de Empresa-IE, Madrid, Spain (MBA in E-Business), Sao Paulo State University-UNESP, Brazil (Master in International Negotiations), Certificate Course in Industrial Property from University of Buenos Aires and a Post-Graduation Course in Internet Governance from Diplo Foundation (E-Learning Certificate).

She is pursuing the Master in Law from Boston University, focused on Intellectual Property and Innovation Policy and working at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School as a research assistant and at Diplo Foundation, as a Fellow with reserach focus on IP policy and the impact of the Internet.

She is an active member of the A2K, UNESCO-OER, FLOSS and cyberlaw communities. She previously worked as Coordinator of Legal Clinical Programs at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) School of Law (2006-2007) and as Lead of Projects at FGV's Center for Technology and Society (2005-2007) where she worked in projects such as Creative Commons and Open Business, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Carolina has experience as a professor of Intellectual Property and Internet law and has served the Ford Foundation as a consultant. She also has more than six years' experience as an in-house attorney for Telefonica Telecommunications and Internet Group in Brazil (from 1999 to 2005).

Carolina has publications in her area and took part in international and national conferences as a speaker. Her last article (The Open Access Movement: opportunities and challenges for developing countries. Let them live in interesting times http://campus.diplomacy.edu/env/scripts/Pool/GetBin.asp?IDPool=3737) was chosen to two conferences: "The Politics of Intellectual Property," at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Rennes, France, April 2008 and First Pan-African Forum on Open Education Resources (OER) Ghana, Africa, on May.

Carolina is the co-author of a study commissioned by the Brazilian Internet Committee related to the Regulation of Spam in Brazil (http://www.cgi.br/publicacoes/documentacao/ct-spam-EstudoSpamCGIFGVversa...).

Jessica Coates

Jessica Coates is the Project Manager of the Creative Commons Clinic, a program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. The Clinic aims to further the implementation of the international open content licensing movement, Creative Commons, through the promotion of Creative Commons research and usage in Australia.

Prior to joining the Clinic, Jessica spent most of the last decade as a copyright and communications policy officer with the Commonwealth Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA – now the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy). At DCITA, Jessica worked primarily in the Intellectual Property Branch, where she took a major role in the development and implementation of copyright reform, including the Digital Agenda Amendments and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. Whilst with DCITA, Jessica also worked on the ABC and SBS policy and on IT usage by museums.