I believe that a small redefinition of producer and consumer solves a lot of the problems we are having with this analogy [I don't think collapsing it is useful]. The party with the strongest incentives to produce learning materials seems to me the student, rather than the teacher. In this context, focusing on producer(=student)-driven OERs might be a more sustainable and effective strategy than the not-producer-focused-but-actually-wrong-producer-focused mental acrobatics the OER community is currently struggling with. Just as the author of a textbook probably learns more in the process of writing it (and the process leading up to being able to write it) than the person reading it, let’s look at OER from the student (as producer) perspective. In Budapest, students have built a vast repository of lecture notes (including audio recordings) and readings – without funding, without target group analysis, without anyone telling them to do so. Why? Because they did not want to go to class, so the few that went to class recorded it – and the others could stay in bed. Now, trying to sleep-in is the kind of itch that will lead to production of OER (that, and Hewlett funding *grin*).

/P

Very stirring post–I got here via The Fish Wrapper (q.v.).

I think this is a key point. When Raymond says, “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” he is talking about people who know how to scratch in the first place. When we move that to an instructional setting, a person might know how to teach a concept, but they may not know how to capture that instructional event and put it on the web for other people to use. They need the assistance of a web developer to help them ’scratch that itch’, in the sense of sharing.

In this way, the context of a learning object becomes effectively shifted, and it can take on new meaning/new life in its new context. In your 4 point breakdown of OSS, point 3 requires some specific examination here: “other specific people with the same or a very similar specific need find the solution and adopt or adapt it to solve their own specific problems” — they are able to adapt the original solution because they have the entire body of source code available to them to tinker with, and they can get it easily.

There is no easy equivalent — yet — with open content. Most of the open content solutions do not allow for easy export of large quantities of content. While some types of content can be effectively moved or shared between sites via rss or other formats, there is nothing that is immediately accessible and reusable (and I mean a course full of material click-here-and-download accessible, like a tarball for an open source project). Ultimately, OER is less about content and more about movement. If content is freely accessible, freely editable, and yet not easily portable to a new site and context, it will remain only partially open.

Cheers,

Bill