Monthly Archives: August 2009

Feeling Out of Place

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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”

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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.

What’s the Inverse of Remixing? Unmixing.

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Almost everyone has heard of “remixing” – taking existing cultural artifacts like songs, films, images, and texts, and combining these into new cultural artifacts. In the Wikipedia article about Lessig’s 2008 book Remix, we read:

(Youth) quote content from various sources to create something new. Thus, the remix provides a commentary on the sounds and images it utilizes the same way a critical essay provides commentary on the texts it quotes. One of Lessig’s favorite remix examples is the Bush and Blair Love Song which remixes images of President Bush and Tony Blair to make it appear as if they are lip-synching Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love”. “The message couldn’t be more powerful: an emasculated Britain,as captured in the puppy love of its leader for Bush. This remix in Lessig’s eyes is exemplary of the power this type of expression holds – to not tell but show. Using preexisting images is vital to the art form because the production of meaning draws heavily on cultural reference an image or sound brings with it.

Their meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the reference, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used. (p.74)

If it’s true that the accumulated meanings of source materials combine to generate the meaning of a remix, then one way to change the meaning of a cultural artifact is to change its references – or to create new references within an existing artifact where none existed before. I call this process “unmixing.”

The first and easiest example of unmixing I could imagine was taking a textual document and linking individual phrases in the document to other documents on the web where those phrases appear verbatim – in effect, attributing the author’s words to another source even though the author never relied on that source when creating the document. Depending on the context and meaning of the sources you choose, the addition of simple linked references can significantly alter the meaning of the original text without changing any of the words in the text itself.

As an example, I’ve published section one of the unmixed Preface to Lessig’s Remix. Using a script, I broke the first section of the Preface into three word phrases, asked Yahoo BOSS to find pages that contained those exact three word phrases, and then rewrote this section of the Preface with each and every word attributed by link to another source elsewhere online. Strictly speaking, I don’t think you need to re-reference every single word in a document to unmix it, but since I was doing this unmix programmatically it seemed appropriate. (Hint: You’ll need to mouse over the text to make the links light up. Too much visual noise otherwise.)

Now, you may argue that these phrase attributions – while exact and correct – are rather random, and therefore don’t do much to significantly change the meaning of the text. I think the simple act of unmixing this particular text speaks volumes. But in the coming weeks and months I’ll publish additional unmixes created with more thought and care to demonstrate the power of the genre. Or perhaps you’ll beat me to it?