I say hilarious, because the spoof really is funny. However, the spoof is also deeply disappointing because its subtext is a completely irrational, anti-sustainability mindset that is the single biggest threat to the success of the open education movement.

There are several people in our community (I don’t need to call them out by name) who see any involvement in our efforts by companies as inherently evil and wrong. Involvement by individuals who might attempt to generate income is also wrong.

Though it’s dangerous and often wrong to analogize open education with open source, this is one case in which we may safely do so. Try to imagine the current state of Linux if the GPL contained a noncommercial clause… That is, try to imagine a Linux without Ubuntu. Try to imagine Linux without Transmeta supporting Linus. Try to imagine Linux without RedHat supporting Alan Cox. Try to imagine universities or governments deploying Linux if technical support weren’t commercially available from RedHat. Try to imagine Linux without hardware vendor support from Penguin Computing, VA, IBM, or Dell.

If in your mind you’re already asking “who cares whether or not universities or governments deploy? We’re trying to empower the people, not multinational corporations. And who calls tech support?” then you can stop reading right here. You seem comfortable living in the elitist world where only the uber-geeks need the benefits of open source. And since they already have them, congratulations – mission accomplished!

If you’re having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out – just think about where open education is today.

I’ll just pause a moment while that last paragraph sinks in.

For me the ethics of software and content distribution has always been about the nonrivalrous nature of the data. Once I’ve created a piece of software or some (digital) educational materials, they exist. I’ve created them for my own purpose, whatever it was, and now here they are. Once they’re posted on YouTube, or Flickr, or SlideShare (oops! more evil companies!), or the campus server, there is practically no cost involved in making and distributing perfect copies. And since there is practically no cost involved in making and distributing these copies, why would I charge money to copy and distribute them? Here is a perfect opportunity for me to help my neighbor at no cost to myself. And if I won’t even help my neighbor when there is no real cost to me, where are my ethics (let alone my Christianity)?

Technical support, unlike software and unlike content, is a rivalrous good. If Jane is providing you support on the phone, she can’t be answering my question on another line. Not only that, but if Jane is providing you support on the phone she can’t be out engaging in some other activity by which she can generate the income necessary to support herself and possibly her family. Jane’s ethics may occasionally cause her to volunteer her time in giving free technical support to friends and family, but obviously such volunteerism is not a long-term sustainable activity for Jane or her family.

Since software and content are nonrivalrous they can be freely given at no incremental cost (i.e., there’s no additional cost to me every time someone downloads my course). Since technical support is rivalrous it can be given only when costs are incurred (opportunity costs in the case of the volunteer and real costs in the case of the employer of a tech support person).

The important question then becomes – well, let’s try a few versions of it:

• Do you believe education or learning depend exclusively on nonrivalrous goods and services?
• Do you believe there is no need to provide rivalrous services in supporting learning?

When a learner has the inevitable question that the software and content cannot answer, what are they to do? And if they are to ask someone, if the learner is to “call tech support” as it were, how is the provider of that support supposed to sustain that answering activity over the long term? You might answer that “they should just go online and ask their question in a forum and wait for some good-hearted person to volunteer an answer.” I mention only in passing the information literacy prerequisites to finding the right forum in which to ask, which will preclude many of the people we want to reach from engaging in this asking activity at all.

To greatly oversimplify, the “depend on volunteerism” model of providing support for learners only works as long as (the number of people with expertise in the network) x (the amount of time they’re willing to volunteer answering questions) > (the number of questions asked) x (the complexity of those questions). Obviously there are more factors, but this communicates the basic message – the “depend on volunteerism” model relies on a high ratio of asnwerers to questions. (To be slightly more cynical about it, perhaps we depend on the information literacy barrier keeping those pesky know-nothings from screwing up the model.) When a billion new people plug into the network, will they bring more answers than questions? How willing to volunteer answers will they be? Do we really want to rely on this as our sole mode of support provision? Wouldn’t it be slightly more responsible and ethical to provide a more reliable service since we can?

If you believe that rivalrous services are a critical part of learning and of education, then you have two choices: (1) either welcome those who are willing to create sustainable ways of providing these services into our community, or (2) continue to try to drive the evil companies away, simultaneously guaranteeing that a critical part of the support infrastructure never comes into being. (If you believe that a purely volunteer model can meet the exponentially growing need for education services you either never learned basic computation or just haven’t seen the projections, like India’s need to build and staff 1500 new universities in the next seven years. Oh wait, I’ll just find 15,000 qualified faculty to volunteer their services full-time for the next several decades.)

Now, obviously I’m a big believer in the benefits of online self-organizing social systems. We’ve even built software to enable their formation. What I’m not a fan of is the religious zeal (which comes nigh unto jihad) against all those who will not accept the purity of the “one true model” of learners-only, PLE-based, teachers-be-damned, peer-to-peer, NC-clause laden, what degree? learning. There is an important place for this model of learning. There’s even a place for it in formal education. But there’s no place for this kind of closed-mindedness anywhere.

Anyway… what was I saying? Oh yes, I got a good laugh from the spoof. If you haven’t signed the Cape Town Declaration yet, you really should.

If you haven’t signed the declaration yet please do so! You can encourage others with this banner:
<a href="http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/" title="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration"><img src="http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i291/opencontent/support-capetown.png" alt="Open Education - Cape Town Declaration" align="right" border="0" />

If the banner is too big for your taste you can also use this little button. <a href="http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/" title="Cape Town Declaration on Open Education Button"><img src="http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i291/opencontent/cape-town-button.png" alt="Cape Town Declaration on Open Education Button" align="right" border="0" /></a>

I’ve had someone (who isn’t a university student, and therefore doesn’t need or want credits) ask about receiving a certificate from the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning for successful completion of the experience. So here is what I’m going to do (sorry about the detail, but if you ever want to do this at your university the detail may come in handy):

1. If we call this a “non-credit workshop with a credit option,” then everything works well policy-wise / procedure-wise here at USU. And since the majority of the folks who are participating are not doing it for credit, this makes sense.

2. It turns out that the Center can charge as much or as little as it likes for “non-credit workshops” where credit is not being awarded.

3. Therefore, if you don’t need university credits but would like a certificate at the end of the experience saying that you “successfully completed” the workshop, I will invite you to make a $50 donation to the Center. If you do the specified work and successfully complete the course, you’ll then get an official certificate from the Center signed by me saying that you successfully completed the Introduction to Open Education workshop.

4. HOWEVER, if you would like the certificate but can’t afford the $50 donation, just email me to let me know you want to earn the certificate, and I’ll be happy to send you one at the end of the class for free (assuming you do all the work).

I’m really looking forward to the class! See you all next week!

What does this attitude mean for people working in open educational resources?

The main tenet of open education is to make educational assets freely
available to the public.

I think this statement is unnecessarily narrow. I believe the main
tenet of open education is to positively impact people’s lives through
the provision of educational opportunity. There is very much a
progression to this: first, there must be free and open educational
resources; second, there must be free and open tools and supports
(including real live human beings who will answer questions learners
have) for utilizing those resources; and third, for some learners
there will need to be free and open credentialing mechanisms (both
assessments and trusted assessors) to establish to third parties (like
employers) that learners really do know / really have the skills /
etc. that are taught by the resources. Positive impact on the lives of
real individuals is what open education is all about. I fear that any
statements of the main tenet that restrict themselves to enabling work
or subgoals may set us up for failure.

First, although the tools and resources are readily available,
transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy.
Indeed, this kind of pedagogical know-how is notoriously hard to make
visible and portable.

I believe the move from “learning object repositories” to “open
courseware” is a big step in this direction. Courses preserve more of
the context of use and tell more of the story of how resources can be
effectively utilized. As OCW resources move toward media that tell
more of the entire story – e.g., video or audio of the instructor
actually engaged in teaching and modeling the use of resources – we
will come closer and closer to solving this problem. *Surprisingly,*
setting up a camera in the back of the classroom or attaching a
podcast mic to an instructor can be much less expensive over the long
run than paying undergrads to take notes during lectures, digitizing
those notes, double checking them with the professor for accuracy,
etc.

Thus, a crucial task before us is to build intellectual and technical
capacity for transforming “tacit knowledge” into “commonly usable
knowledge.” Building this capacity is urgent, as the process of
creating and sharing quality educational knowledge needs to catch up
with the burgeoning availability of open educational goods.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement more. Not only is it key to
helping individuals reuse existing OERs – it is the key to empowering
more people to produce and share OERs.

Second, true success in open education requires a change in education
culture and policy. The education community values activities like
scholarly writing and pursuing new research questions and generally
counts these in the faculty reward system. But given higher
education’s penchant for originality above all else, adapting or
improving another’s educational materials is rarely understood to be a
creative, valuable contribution.

I’m glad to say that this is beginning… Now that some of the net
generation are getting tenure we’re pushing on this fairly hard. For
example, a co-author and I just had a paper accepted at a rather
prestigious conference, for which Erlbaum will be publishing the
proceeding. When we were asked to transfer copyright to the paper we
simply said no. We said we only were willing to give them a
non-exclusive right to publish and that we would keep the copyright.
Somewhat surprisingly, Erlbaum agreed. Now other faculty in my
department are saying they’ll never give away those rights again.

An initiative like the Sakai Project, for example, which is working to
design, build, and deploy a new online education platform that
includes course management, electronic portfolio, assessment,
collaboration, communication, and other tools actually coordinates
multi-institutional collaborative efforts and offers institutions the
chance to collectively advance teaching and learning. All
participants—core schools and institutions, vendors who provide
hosting and support, and faculty and students—contribute to the
project and, ultimately, to the open source collaboration and learning
environment. This is the kind of cooperation and knowledge sharing
that will catapult open education to a new level.

The Sakai Project is a great example of how open source-like
approaches can work. Moodle provides an example of a success in a
similar space with a much more traditional open source approach.