Open-Content

George has written a thoughtful post about issues with OCW 1.0 projects titled Utah State OpenCourseWare, lowriders, and system design. A few quotes and then some response: Utah State University has announced the closure of its OpenCourseWare initiative due to budget woes. I call nonsense (or BS). Apparently OCW needed $120,000 per year. Given the size of Utah State University, I’m going to guess they have an annual operating budget somewhere in the range of $300-400 million. This is not a budget shortfall – this is a commitment shortfall. 120K is a fraction of a fraction in light of the larger university budget. ...

Creative Commons may not have set out to authoritatively define Noncommercial Use with their recent study, whose results were announced today, but I wonder how people will to interpret their findings… There appears to be broad agreement among survey respondents in some areas (as I highlight below). Unfortunately, the report also reveals that its respondents have very little understanding of copyright law. So what the report provides us is, in effect, a surprisingly coherent statement by a large group of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Hundreds of thousands of people agree that it’s ok to download mp3s, but a single judge disagrees with them (authoritatively) all the time. Unfortunately, the consensus in this report is not particularly instructive. Rather, the consensus may be misleading if you allow it to convince you that it means something. Perhaps a more productive use of the study’s grant money would have been supporting the argument of cases that would establish real precedent. ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the “mothballing” of USU OCW in today’s story, Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes. I don’t know if the added attention will help Marion advance their cause on campus, but we can hope.

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. ...

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. ...

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Open Education News points to a Scientific American article covering the California Learning Resource Network’s reviews of 16 open science and math textbooks for coverage of CA state standards. These reviews support schools making adoption decisions about whether or not open textbooks are of sufficient breadth and quality to be formally adopted in place of commercial textbooks. Brendan Borrell, the SA article’s author, points out that “the front-runners [in the CLRN reviews] were typically written by just one or several authors, and the one major organization that has fully embraced a Wiki approach failed to impress CLRN reviewers.” This could have been, and in fact was, predicted long before. ...