pragmatism over zeal
Chris Snyder at Wired exercised his detective skills on Bijan Sabet’s recent tweet to find out who Spark Capital (one of the VCs that funded Twitter) has been talking to recently:
i had a mtg with a company today & one of their execs had the title ‘Chief Openness Officer’
What company is so committed to openness that it has someone like this? Flat World Knowledge of course! 
Version 1.3 of the GFDL was released today. Section 11 contains directions for Relicensing, giving “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Sites” (why can’t Richard just call them wikis like everyone else?) like Wikipedia the option to change away from the GFDL and adopt CC-By-SA as their license. This is a glorious day for license incompatibility in the open content world, and one I had thought we might never see. Creative Commons also has coverage. Now the Wikipedia community just needs to choose/decide to relicense its work CC-By-SA.
What does it say about a license when it’s most anticipated new feature is a way to migrate away from it?
Just a quick link to a collection of “standards” for determining whether your online courses are of sufficient quality or not. I wonder how my open courses would rate…
Something Scott wrote today reminded me today of one of my favorite quotes:
“There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”
Versions of this quote are attributed to Emerson, Truman, John Wooden, and even former LDS Church President Harold B. Lee. Scott joins the lofty ranks of these folks by ending his description of the very interesting looking Free Learning with his emphatic assertion:
“See - I DON’T CARE if you use THIS site or SOME OTHER SITE. I just care that people ACCESS OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES.”
If everyone involved in the OER world had this opinion, we’d be much further down the path. Does this run counter to the popular thinking that each OER project should establish, promote, and protect its OER brand? Yes. Does that make it wrong? Absolutely not. You go, Scott. Spread the selflessness!!
Here’s something you probably never thought you’d see: a list of 100 colleges and universities where you can earn your degree without paying any tuition. Most of the programs on the list look legitimate. And yes, they all have some qualification criteria you must meet to get the free goods.
If open educational resources, open learning support, and open accreditation are just too hard, why not simply participate in one of these programs? After all, isn’t our ultimate goal to provide access to educational opportunity to those who go without?
Yes, but our goal is more than simply being free or inexpensive. For example, we need to remove entrance requirements, we need to provide rights to make local adaptations to the curriculum, etc. In short, we need to be able to scale open education to everyone. Even if there were no entrance requirements at all, 100 tuition-free universities will bless some people’s lives but will not address the larger problem. And the answer isn’t to build more free universities.
To borrow and adapt a analogy (originally a critique of AI) from Dreyfus, building universities to educate mankind is like trying to climb trees to get to the moon. Once you reach the top of a certain tree, you say to yourself, ‘this approach isn’t going to get me there… I need a radical new approach!’ So you climb down, find a different tree that looks taller, and begin climbing it. The trouble is, of course, no matter how many trees you find and climb, while each of them will get you slightly closer to the moon, none can actually get you there. You need to give up tree climbing and start developing space flight.
Another analogy I really love comes from Richard G. Scott. Speaking of the favorite Utah irrigation analogy of “getting the water all the way to the end of the row,” Elder Scott suggested that we should instead focus on getting it to rain.
What these analogies tell us about universal access to education is that we cannot simply scout out taller trees or increase the water pressure in our canals - we need to find completely different ways to approach the problem and abandon bankrupt techniques. And Elder Scott’s analogy reminds us that we should not hesitate to call on God for help - after all, these are His children whose lives we’re trying to bless.
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