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. ...
People love to analogize / equate open education to open source. There are huge problems with this way of thinking… The one that comes first to mind is that many changes to an open source program can be empirically tested to objectively determine whether or not they improve the program (by increasing its speed, decreasing its file size, etc.) at almost no cost (by recompiling the programs and running automated tests), but many changes to an open educational resource cannot be judged objectively (did changing these words really engage learners more? do these new examples communicate the educational content better?) and even when they can be meaningfully tested, this can only happen at rather high costs in time and resources (e.g., setting up and running usability tests or “horse race” research studies involving enough students to produce statistically meaningful results). Of course, this one difference in the community’s ability to judge whether adaptations should be kept or rejected makes a mountain of difference in our ability to collaboratively develop educational resources rationally and objectively. I could go on about the differences, but they aren’t actually the point of the post. ...
A great course for listening in on (or viewing!): InfoSys 296A-2 / Law276.8 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives | Fall 2006, from the Berkeley open educational resource collection.
Linking to my article for the October / November issue of Innovate on openness in education. Check out the rest of the articles too… interesting issue.
Here’s a great idea: reward people for the great work they’re doing on open source projects. From http://rit.mellon.org/awards/: The Program in Research in Information Technology of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation invites nominations for the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). In support of the Program’s mission to encourage collaborative, open source software development within traditional Mellon constituencies, these awards—to be given for the first time in 2006—will recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. ...