Linking to my article for the October / November issue of Innovate on openness in education. Check out the rest of the articles too… interesting issue.
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
Pedro Pernias from the Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos de la Universidad de Alicante (you may know as the author of CMS4OCW used by the UNIVERSIA consortium) has let me know that he has finished translating Getting Axiomatic about Learning Objects into Spanish and posted on his Contenidos Abiertos website. Pedro is doing many things to promote open content in the Spanish speaking world. If you don’t know his site, check it out.
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One of the most amazing quotes I’ve seen in a while comes from Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs of the Association of American Publishers, in an article about Open Access to Research.
[Mr. Alder] rejected the idea that taxpayer financed research should be open to the public, saying that it was in the national interest for it to be restricted to those who could pay subscription fees. “Remember — you’re talking about free online access to the world,” he said. “You are talking about making our competitive research available to foreign governments and corporations.”
There are just so many problems with this thinking that I don’t even know where to start. If the cost of making information available to the public who sponsored it is making it available to everyone on the planet, so be it. Let’s not use national security as an excuse to deprive the public of yet another right due them, let alone to further reinforce the problem of the rich getting richer.
And what are we afraid of, anyway? That our 5% of the population won’t be able to continue indefinitely in a lifestyle that consumes 25% of the planet’s resources? That someone else might improve their quality of life at the cost of our own?
As per the alternately infuriating (do we need another reason to *hate* MicroSoft?) and comical article at InsideHigherEd, the US Secretary of Education’s Commission’s on the Future of Higher Education *did* succeed in getting some language around open content into the Commission’s formal recommendations / report - but just barely.
The original recommendation in the report read as follows:
The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education.
However, after MicroSoft Corporate Vice President Gerri Elliott threw a hissy-fit about the inclusion of the phrases “open source” and “open content” in the report, things were up in the air for a while. The final recommendation in the report now reads as follows:
The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of information-technology-based collaborative tools and capabilities at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling access, interaction, and sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Both commercial development and new collaborative paradigms such as open source, open content, and open learning will be important in building the next generation learning environments for the knowledge economy.
The long and short of it is that the commission *is* recommending the creation of incentives to promote the development of open source and open content.
It’s been 8 years since I first said “open content” and started pushing the idea and the meme. I must say that it is extremely gratifying to see that open content has made its way into this recommendation that will potentially effect all higher education in the US, and even more gratifying to read Chuck Vest saying ‘the phrase “open source’” could go, but “open content” has to stay in the report.’ Obviously the idea of open content has thousands of champions, many of which are more influential than I am. But it is quite the thrill to see the words in the recommendation.
Now for the hard part… we just have to make the recommendations happen. 
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