Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Full Text of Federal Public Access Bill Now Available

Published on June 30, 2009 in open content. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Check out the full text of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 on GovTrack. If enacted, this would give the public (us!) free public access to the results of the research we’ve paid to have conducted through NIH, NSF, the Departments of Education, Agriculture, Labor, Energy, and more. Passage of this bill will fully tip the scales of knowledge creation to the side of almost unrestricted innovation. As we all know, technology is seldom the impediment – policy generally is. Passage of S.1373 would finally allow the Internet to deliver its full potential for transforming the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Section 4(d) includes a list of types of research that are exempt from the public access requirement. Section 4(d)(3) includes this exemption:

research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent;

It will be interesting to see how this exemption plays out as the bill moves forward… Unfortunately, this bill won’t be bringing us open textbooks, but I guess there will be other legislation for that. ;)

Arguing About Free and the Future

Published on June 30, 2009 in forecasting and open content. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

The hype continues to build around Chris Anderson’s upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell’s review “Priced to Sell: Is free the future?” in the New Yorker rubbed me the wrong way. Apparently, it rubbed Seth Godin the wrong way, too. In his response, Malcolm is Wrong, he speaks plainly so that no one can misunderstand:

[Malcolm's] first argument that makes no sense is, “should we want free to be the future?”

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, “how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?”

Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

I must admit to agreeing with this analysis, and there is a message here for higher education. His later comments are even more relevant for those who work at universities that are trying their best to ignore the free / open revolution occurring around them:

Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won’t work. The big reason is simple:

In a world of free, everyone can play.

This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage.

Competition! Massive amounts of almost-no-barrier-to-entry competition. Much of it will be poor. I suppose you can take some comfort in that. But some of it will be very, very good. And that should scare existing institutions silly. The education game is about to change, and you (your institution) have three choices:

1. Innovate your way forward. If you allow your business model to become flexible and responsive, you can feel your way forward, influencing the emergent educational context as it simultaneously influences your business model. (A dynamic system!)

2. Wait for others to innovate their way forward. Let them shape the future educational context without your input, and hope that 10 years from now higher education is still a place where your institution is relevant. (If it isn’t, you’ll have only yourself to blame.)

3. Ignore / deny that anything is changing (or will ever change). Higher education is too important, too deeply woven into the fabric of society, too critical for employers, and too big a business to fail. (See you on the other side with GM and AIG.)

Chris’ book may or may not deal with higher education specifically, but higher education will have to deal with his thesis as surely as I’m typing this post. As Lehi taught, there are two types of things in this world – “things to act and things to be acted upon.” The day is close at hand when each university will have to decide which they are.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-29

Published on June 29, 2009 in meta. Closed Tags: .
  • Working on the McKay School's WPMU-as-OCW-/-open-teaching platform. @jimgroom, I'll probably be calling on your many skills today! =) #
  • @jimgroom First ?. My themes are a mess. I only want there to be one theme, and I want to enforce it site-wide. Tips or links? #
  • @jbasdf When will I be able to get search results out of folksemantic? I'd love to do some demos during upcoming trips… #
  • Getting ready to chat with Andrew Jensen, Executive Director Utah Student Association, about textbooks, affordability, and what we might do. #
  • Don't the arguments against universal socialized medicine also argue against universal socialized education (i.e. public schools)? #
  • At the Curriki-Hearst OER Fellows meeting in West Chester, PA #
  • @gsiemens If there's time for questions, ask Merrill to summarize the empirical literature on learner control. =) in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens It will feel like a public flogging at first, but that will give you an opportunity to provide a compelling response! =) #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens Absolutely! #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens Key phrases to watch out for – "blind leading the blind" and "pooled ignorance." #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens Based on the ideas that became the self-org paper, Merrill and I have been having this argument for 10 years now. #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens "Successful learner control" is highly correlated with learner expertise. #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens Merrill's critiques of learner control will all deal with "novices." #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens Try to make him cede this point publicly. :) #edmedia in reply to gsiemens #
  • @gsiemens You're an expert and have context in which to interpret your learning. #edmedia #
  • @gsiemens The problem comes when we ask novices to learn as if they were experts. And Merrill is more interested in novices. #edmedia #
  • After Star Trek, my 12 yr old demands to know how to calculate the radius of a black hole's event horizon. Thank you, WolframAlpha! #
  • Date @ Olive Garden tonight. Our server was very unresponsive. E and I decide the appropriate tip is $4.04 and die laughing. Best wife ever! #
  • @gconole You calculate the $4.04 tip for a poor server as follows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_404 in reply to gconole #

Coming Dangerously Close

Published on June 29, 2009 in open content. Closed Tags: , , , .

In my science fiction tale of the future of the open education movement, the OpenCourseWars, I predict a time when the federal government creates a funding pool to support the creation of open courses to which the public would have free access:

In the most unbelievable part of the history of openness in education (for me as a native West Virginian, anyway), West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd announced that his current term in office would be his last. (I think he was like 108 at this point.) His final piece of legislation would be a third Morrill Act that would support the land grant institutions in creating OCW-like projects to provide increased access to educational opportunity to the general public. The so-called “Byrd Bill” passed, creating a small pot of dedicated monies for public schools to draw on in order to support their OCW initiatives.

I suppose thinking that Byrd would introduce the bill was a bit too self-indulgent on my part, but today Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a U.S. Push for Free Online Courses. Byrd didn’t write the language himself, but it does appear to come during Byrd’s last term in office (unfortunately for WV):

Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration. The funds envisioned for open courses — $50 million a year — may be small in comparison to the other ideas being discussed. But in proposing that the federal government pay for (and own) courses that would be free for all… the draft language suggests that the administration is throwing its weight behind the movement to put more courses online — and offer them free.

If my predictions continue to be (largely) correct, we next wait to hear a deafening silence from the online curriculum and textbook publishing industries…

Let’s EXPAND Copyright!

Published on June 28, 2009 in open content. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. An article published in the Journal of Legal Studies identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of all time, and the New York Times called him one of the most respected judges in the United States.

In a blog post titled The Future of Newspapers, Posner opines that the best solution to the newspaper industry’s problem may be expanding the scope of copyright law:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Now, I’m certainly not one of the country’s most respected legal scholars, but here’s some advice for the newspapers: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE LINKING TO YOUR CONTENT, DON’T POST IT ON THE WEB. That’ll be $2500 / hour for legal consulting, please.

On the other hand, there may be something useful hidden in this recommendation. Imagine momentarily that the Web had turned into a place where you could only link to pages whose rights holders had given you explicit consent to do so. The best mechanism for giving this kind of consent is, of course, the Creative Commons licenses. This proposal could go a long way toward eliminating links to fully copyrighted content, effectively eliminating it from the network (consider – if a writer posts a story in a forest but literally no one links to it, does it exist? Google and Yahoo can only crawl pages that someone links to) and leaving only a huge interconnected graph of CC-licensed material.

Not to mention the fact that all material is copyrighted, meaning that you wouldn’t be allowed to link to anything without the owner’s previous permission. And if you couldn’t link to it to look at it, how would you know whether you wanted to link to it?

If anything, this blog post shows that Posner understands nothing about the Internet. How embarrassing for him! Perhaps I needed to ask for his permission before linking to and commenting on his post?