Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Come, now…

Published on August 31, 2009 in open content. 10 Comments Tags: .

In response to an article about the death of instructional design, Stephen says… “there is not a (practical) sub-discipline that is (strictly) the design of instructional materials.” There are many parenthetical caveats in this statement, but it is still wrong. Stephen’s evidence for the argument that there is no discipline of instructional design?

The success of sites like Common Craft, designed with an apparent indifference to instructional design principles (“The Lefevre’s have no instructional design background at all,” writes Schlenker) seems to me to be evidence of that.

It’s like saying, “The success of the bridge Bob built over the irrigation ditch in front of his yard, with an apparent indifference to engineering principles (“Bob has no engineering background at all”), is evidence of the fact that there is no practical sub-discipline of structural engineering.”

Which is most likely: (1) that Bob and the Common Craft folk have learned important principles through life experience without having ever taken courses on these topics and applied them successfully, or (2) the fields of instructional design and structural engineering don’t exist?

It’s difficult for me to believe that Stephen would argue that the only disciplines that really exist are those that require formal training to gain proficiency in…

A few notes about openness (and a request)

Published on August 26, 2009 in open content. 16 Comments

I have something much longer and comprehensive coming on this topic, but these few notes will have to do for now.

First, “open” is a continuous, not binary, construct. A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term has no nuance. Alternately, they may adopt an artificial definition, in which a door opened 20 cm or more is considered open, while a door opened 19 cm is not considered open. But this is unsatisfactory as well.

For example, the “open” in open source is not nuanced at all and has been artificially binary-ized. The open source definition tells us very clearly what a license must and must not do in order to be permitted to describe itself with the trademarked term “open source.” In the eyes of the defenders of the “open source” brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.

I made an explicit choice with open content not to go down the open source path of imposing my will on others. People make the choice to be open for a variety of reasons. They choose the path of openness in order to help them accomplish goals that are very personal. It is just as inappropriate for you to try to force your goals on others as it is for others to try to force their goals on you. Who am I to say how open is open “enough?” I didn’t 11 years ago and I’m not about to start now. Who are you to judge me for not being open “enough?” I didn’t choose openness as a path to accomplishing your goals, I chose it as a path to accomplishing my own goals. If the way I express my openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, ignore my openness – don’t criticize it.

Starting with the Open Publication License and including the Creative Commons licenses, the open content licenses have been crafted in a way that recognizes that people choose the path of openness for different reasons. The licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. Let me begin.

In a post earlier today I argued that our collective purpose should be “increasing access to educational opportunity.” That was a mistake on my part. Increasing access to educational opportunity is the reason I chose the path of openness and launched the idea of open content upon the world. But that goal is my own, and I shouldn’t and don’t expect others to accept it as their own. As I have tried to be open, I’ve discovered additional reasons one might choose to be open – like the way that openness facilitates the unintended. This is another, though secondary, reason I choose to continue to be open.

Without any special authority to do so, may I please give you a homework assignment? Would you please blog about why you choose to be open? What is the fundamental, underlying goal or goals you hope to accomplish by being open? What keeps you motivated? Why do you spend your precious little free time on my blog, reading this post and this question? If each of us put some thought and some public reflective writing into this question, the field would likely be greatly served. The more honest and open you are in your response, the more useful the exercise will be for you and for us.

More Response to George

Published on August 26, 2009 in open content. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

George has responded to my response to his earlier post as a comment on my recent post. It’s a great bit of thinking and writing worthy of being its own post! I respond below:

My point is that openness is the virtue to be pursued (I feel silly making this statement to you – you’ve done more for this “movement” than almost anyone else has). Not sorta-openness. Or sorta-affordable openness. Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is the target. Settling for affordable quasi-openness may sell cheaper textbooks and may delay more foundational change.

I’m not sure how content licensed By-NC-SA can be considered sorta-open, unless we’re heading down the path toward an NC discussion (let’s please not go there). Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is what people have with FWK books because that’s what the license provides. What is the criticism here?

What are our organizational models missing when individuals are not capable of collaborating in writing complex resources (like textbooks)? Is it about incentives?

At least partly, if not primarily, yes.

Could we have networks of educators write textbooks?

With the proper incentives, of course we could. If we paid each faculty member $10,000 I bet we could get them to participate.

Let’s say a group of psychologist profs got together and decided to write a full text for first year students and posted resources in a wiki.

But – and I’m not trying to be thick-headed here – wouldn’t the size of the group of profs need to be rather large before this activity became interesting to you? When you say ‘a group of psychology profs’ I think of a group of 5 plus or minus a few. Is that a network? How is it different from five authors who develop a By-NC-SA textbook for FWK? In theory, one difference might be that anyone outside the core group could contribute to the text, but in practice we see that participation in “wikibook” projects from outside the core group is basically nonexistent.

If FWK is trying “trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can” why not experiment in serving as an infrastructure role in openness at this self-organizing level with profs?

(A) Because Wikieducator, Wikibooks, PBWorks, and a hundred other sites already provide the infrastructure necessary for the kind of experiments you’re talking about. (B) Because all the data to date confirm that those experiments fail to result in quality textbooks. In other words, the world doesn’t need FWK to enable these experiments – they’re already sufficiently enabled and they’re already failing to succeed.

Should we still be thinking in textbooks? What is it about textbooks that is so valuable that we transition the concept fully into the digital world? Maybe we should first abandon the textbook model.

We don’t get a clean slate when thinking about changing a system – we have to respond to the realities of the system. Some in the open education community seem to be arriving at a conclusion along the lines of, “the constraints of higher education are too confining, so let’s disconnect ourselves from HE completely and go innovate over there.” I wish them luck.

Does FWK permit one student in a class to download a book and then distribute copies to other classmates without fee? Can an educator download the book, copy and paste into a wiki and then edit it to customize the text?

Yes, full stop. The license FWK uses for all of its books, CC By-NC-SA, allows anyone and everyone to download, adapt, and redistribute the book, students and educators alike.

Collaboratively produced resources, in the wikieducator sense, are better suited for reuse because, in theory at least, no one has a motive – such as profit – other than to produce learning resources… Even the small reading window for reading a text online is an illustration of control exerted to influence purchasing the text. If a group/network collaborates on the text, then (again) in theory, they wouldn’t need to play “soft control” games of this nature.

There’s a lot of “in theory” in this line of thought. (As Firefly’s Jane once said, “I smell a lot of ‘if’ coming off of this plan.”) “In theory” is difficult for me to accept given the rather large amount of actual data and experience available to us to base our judgments on.

Pure openness would be the target.

I actually just finished blogging about this in Feeling Out of Place.

In my view, if it (research, course content) comes from the public purse it belongs to the public. If it’s privately funded, it’s a different matter. FWK is a private entity that is in business to make a profit. Nothing in the world wrong with that. But is it the best way for academics to approach opening up content/curricular resources?

It depends on their goal. To me, openness is a means not an end. So, to answer your question, we must ask what is the faculty member’s goal in being open? If “being open” has become the goal in and unto itself, I would propose that there is a problem.

David, whether you lay claim to the title or not, you are the (or at least “an”) ideological leader of openness in education. Which is why I was a bit surprised to see you accept the FWK model. I’m sure there are considerations I’m not aware of, or philosophical views that are perhaps not as strident as might be expected from a leading figure. To me, it seems to be trying to balance openness with economics… and the economic model has precedence (i.e. charges for downloads of digital versions).

One of the greatest heartbreaks of my life came when I left USU to come to BYU. For a complexity of reasons, some of which were my own fault, when I left USU the grant funding for many of the “open” projects at USU ended. Within 30 days of my coming to BYU, much of what I had worked to build over a 5 year period was gone. It was personally devastating. I committed to myself then that I would never again waste my effort on projects that can disappear overnight when grant money dries up. This has led me to adopt a keen focus on the sustainability of open education projects (see, for example, the study on making OCW pay for itself we’re conducting at BYU). If open education is to have a long-term impact we have to insure that it will survive over time. So, when you think you see an emphasis on economics in my work you are quite perceptive and absoultely right. However, I’m only interested in the sustainability of open projects – I have no interest in the sustainability of pseudo-open projects.

When Jeff and Eric first approached me about being involved in FWK (I’m not a founder, but am hire number one), my very first thoughts were “Are these guys going to do it right? Are they going to (1) get the openness right and (2) be sustainable enough to make a large-scale, long-lasting difference? Or are they going to take some half-open approach and/or botch the business part of it and be gone three years from now?” I was convinced FWK was going to get the business part of it right, and could sense that they wanted to get the openness part right. That’s why I joined as Chief Openness Officer – my core function is to make sure we get the openness part right. And because FWK produces Creative Commons licensed textbooks that are just as open as any content you will find anywhere, and because we have 40,000 students lined up for fall, I think the openness and the sustainability aspects of our work are going awesomely.

Your work around advancing openness, by nature of this role, will be subject to scrutiny. If you have a view on copyright or commercial reuse, it will be criticized. If you have a view on how to increase the impact of openness at the school or university level, it will be scrutinized. Is it fair? No. But that’s a burden that comes with the role.

No, the increased scrutiny is not fair at all – it is a great blessing that very few people have access to. It is a manifestation of the classic problem of the “rich getting richer” – I think I have some reasonable ideas on the topic of openness and education. These draw scrutiny, which I weigh seriously. Then my reasonable ideas get a little better, which gets them pushed out further, which draws further scrutiny, etc. Its a virtuous cycle that I am deeply grateful for; I actually feel guilty sometimes that other people’s ideas don’t get the “airtime” and the scrutiny that mine do.

And I’m enjoying this specific conversation that we’re having quite a bit.

Feeling Out of Place

Published on August 26, 2009 in open content. 9 Comments Tags: , , , .

I had an odd sensation at the recent conference Open Education 2009. As you know, I founded the conference and have been deeply involved in its planning and execution each year. This year was really, truly excellent in that I was surrounded by so many smart, thoughtful, genuinely goodhearted friends both old and new. But the more conversations I had, the more out of place I felt. Something is changing in our field.

While I think everyone in the field of “open education” is dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity, there is an increasingly radical element within the field – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. At the conference I heard a number of people say that things would be greatly improved if we could just get rid of all the institutions of formal education. I once heard a follow up comment, “and governments, too.” I turned to laugh at his joke, but saw that he was serious. This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.

I am concerned that open education is on the path to becoming as radicalized as the free software movement had in the late 1990s.

After a few years of Richard Stallman telling people that they had to unconditionally support free software and completely reject proprietary software – unless they were vile, unworthy, valueless, evil human beings – people got sick of being insulted. Additionally, the messaging of “free software” was wrong, which was problematic as well. Even today, the FSF website says, “We call this free software, because the user is free.” Huh? Because an agent capable of action (a user) has been granted certain rights you’re going to anthropomorphize 1s and 0s (software)? How does that follow? Everyone knows that software is incapable of experiencing or exercising freedom, so when they hear the term “free software” they are left to conclude that “free software” can only mean software that doesn’t cost anything. But I digress…

Anyway, telling people they are immoral wretches if they disagree with you turns out to be a poor strategy for motivating most people. So in early 1998, a group split off from the free software movement and became the “open source” movement. They were very careful to be pragmatic (rather than dogmatic) in their approach, and they tried hard to craft a message that was easier to understand. But the field was split (philosophically and methodologically) forever. This is unfortunate because energies are divided, efforts are duplicated, and worst of all, time is wasted on perhaps THE most pointless arguments ever known to mankind.

Now, don’t get me wrong – open education is not at this crossroads yet. We don’t really have a Richard in our field yet that people are rallying around and strapping bombs to their chests for. However, we need to get this conversation going before we reach a real crisis.

What is our collective purpose? I believe it is to increase access to educational opportunity.

As I recently tweeted, openness is a means, not the end. Increasing access should be the “end” of our efforts. Making everything open is not our goal. (Stephen has previously outlined a number of possible scenarios in which things are made open but there is no net increase in access.) Making things open is only one means to then end of increasing access. However, we can look around the community and see individuals who seem to have confused the means with the ends, and have made their ultimate goal the opening of all educational content. Problematically, when the means become the end, new means that might better achieve the original end are overlooked and frowned upon.

So, am I misunderstanding something? Or missing the boat? Perhaps I’m just not sufficiently radical to be involved in this field anymore?

A Response to “Change that prevents real change”

Published on August 26, 2009 in open content. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

George Siemens has written a very thoughtful analysis of Flat World Knowledge (and the change process generally) titled Change that prevents real change. I want to respond to a few of his thoughts.

FWK will succeed for the wrong reasons. It will succeed because it tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole. FWK is integrated into the system of education: authors, bookstores, faculty, and students. It uses existing reward metrics (recognition and a little bit of revenue for the author) and addresses the biggest complaint students have about textbooks: costs. Essentially, the existing system is used as the infrastructure for FWK model. And that’s the problem.

I would argue that using the existing system as infrastructure is the most brilliant part of the FWK strategy (disclosure: I am the Chief Openness Officer of FWK). Because FWK recognizes and works within the existing context, it is actually able to affect real change. Over 400 faculty and 40,000 students will use openly licensed, DRM-free FWK textbooks this fall – enabling extensive, legal faculty localization of materials and saving students and their parents over $3 million. No matter how you measure it, FWK will have a larger direct impact on higher education affordability this fall than all of the previous open educational resources projects have had combined.

With regard to educational reform, our thinking should be future-focused. What is the impact of FWK? Is there a better way? Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model? What could that possibly look like?

There is undoubtedly a better way – no right thinking person or organization will claim that they have discovered the universal best way to do anything that can never be improved upon throughout all eternity. In answer to the question “Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model?” the answer is also yes. However, there is a very small number of situations in which an anti-textbook model exists. Textbooks are a critical piece of higher education, whether we like it or not. The question is like asking, “Can we improve the speed of race cars in an anti-tire model.” Cars today have tires – they just do. In a future world they may not. And in a future world, where higher education doesn’t rely heavily and extensively on textbooks, there may be an opportunity to affect a large-scale change in affordability of content without working with textbooks. But that future world is not here today. There is a critical need for people like George who are willing to dedicate their energy and resources to decade or multi-decade reforms. And I can confidently say that creating an broad culture of rejecting textbooks in higher education is at least a ten year project, if not a longer one.

Perhaps we should pursue a more visionary approach – one that is tied to high ideals and provides the greatest number of future options.

As I said above, long-term work creating viable future options is something important that desperately needs doing. However, improving affordability and accessibility for students taking courses fall 2009 is important as well. At this point in my career I want to help as many people as I can here and now. When the future scenario becomes the current scenario, I’ll adapt my work for that context to help as many people as I can. This is FWK’s approach as well. You certainly can’t build a sustainable business that makes a large-scale impact on affordability and accessibility if your assumptions about the market won’t be true for another 10 years.

George reviews arguments from Scientific American, myself, and Yochai Benkler, all of which argue empirically (instead of theoretically) based on existing books (and not potential future books), that collaboratively written textbooks fare poorly in comparison with textbooks written by one or a few authors.

Simply stating that collaborative projects have to date not produced the quality of resources that has been produced under the traditional authorship model is not satisfactory… It’s too early to convincingly declare select-authorship models of textbooks to be superior to wiki-created textbooks. Or, if we do make the declaration (as Wiley, Benkler and others have done), we need to focus on understanding why. It seems wrong to declare that connected intelligence is not capable of achieving the same level of quality as individual intelligence.

I don’t think anyone is making a blanket judgment or general statement about what “connected intelligence” is or is not capable of doing. I think we’re saying something very specific about textbooks. We’re saying that all the empirical data indicate that “select-authorship models of textbooks [are] superior to wiki-created textbooks.” Neither George nor anyone else who is unhappy with this conclusion has pointed to counter-examples in their arguments; as far as I know there’s not even a single exception to this rule. The argument is always one of potential, an argument about what could be. I would love to be proven wrong on this point, because the implications for the scalable provisioning of high-quality initial content would be earth-shattering. However, without a single positive example, and with several less than positive examples, I won’t allow myself to be caught up in the hype.

Books on the [FWK] site are primarily confined to business and finance – another drawback: mediators seek areas of highest return first.

This is a simple misunderstanding. FWK started with business textbooks because the company’s two founders both came out of the business textbook division of a major publisher, and this is the world they know best. We’re expanding very quickly into general education areas now that we’re up and running.

The concept is open enough to keep many revolutionaries at bay (isn’t that often the main intent of partial change? provide enough change to satisfy the slightly less peripheral agitators? Staged or transitional change often plays a negative role in this regard. Partial change now pushes substantial change into the future).

I would respectfully disagree. I think taking reasonably-sized steps forward is a great idea. No one in FWK is trying to keep revolutionaries at bay – on the contrary, we’re trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can.

Now, if we can just find a way to make the pursuit of highest ideals (open & collaboratively produced textbooks produced by communities/networks of vested participants in this case) as rewarding (or compelling) as the pursuit of ‘good enough’.

It’s unclear to me why a collaboratively produced textbook is more virtuous than one produced by one to four individuals. Also, the conversation quickly devolves into a Sorites paradox: how many individuals need to be involved in writing before the textbook becomes virtuous?

At one point in the article, George draws a distinction between “Convenient Change vs Principled Change.” Another way to frame the difference between the approaches he describes is “Immediately Actionable Change vs Boil the Ocean Change.” On the ground people recognize that the world needs ocean boilers; I hope that on-the-grounders can get some respect as well.