OpenEd-Week 9-Part 2

More on Larry Lessig’s book Code v2….this time on a couple ideas from the book that I have a hard time agreeing with.

I agree with many of Lessig’s points. In particular, he is a staunch defender of fair use and is concerned about the effect of technology in limiting fair use. He sometimes goes too far in my opinion, both in terms of what he considers fair use and in ideas for remedying the situation. (Many of these ideas involve extreme machinations, instead of just clarifying what fair use is and making sure such uses are legally protected.)

At one point in the book, Lessig makes the case for preserving what he calls “amateur culture.” This is the culture of those who do things not for money, but for the love of what they do. It includes all of us who write, make music, draw, paint, etc. just because we love to do it.

Lessig makes the case that it is important to preserve this culture and then jumps to the conclusion that such culture should be able to use copyrighted works to an extent that far exceeds anyone’s conception of fair use. Lessig seems to feel that such use is not “piracy.”

Lessig says that “this kind of cultural remix has historically been free of regulation,” and goes on to say that we have always been able to “tell a joke around [our] dinner table” that includes copyrighted material. Surely the difference between this and broadcasting copyright-infringing videos worldwide is evident though. Apparently, not to Lessig though. He says that such infringement has “just one real effect: to promote the the underlying artists’ work.” I would strongly maintain that this is a decision for the copyright holder to make.

Another issue I have with Lessig is his use of extreme language. I think the cases for most of what Lessig argues for — protection of fair use, protection of various liberties and privacies, etc. — are fairly straightforward and relatively easily to establish. But rather than making the case in a simple, logical way, Lessig often resorts to extreme language and emotional appeals. Language like “profiling,” “manipulation,” “segregation,” and “discrimination” is designed to evoke emotional responses. I think Lessig’s causes would be better served by less emotion, more direct arguments.

Open Ed-Week 8-Sustainability

QUESTIONS: How can you build a sustainable business around giving away educational materials? How can you build a sustainable business model around giving away credentialed degrees? Should governments fund open education? (Do they already?)

I’m going to take a different approach to the questions for this week, which is basically not to answer them. :) The various ways that sustainable OER models can be built are well outlined in the readings for this week. Rather than summarizing them, which will be of limited value to me or to other readers, I am going to spend my time on this assignment in reading and responding to others’ posts this week and in posing some additional questions for everyone’s consideration. This approach is in part in response to the dialog we’ve had this week about the dynamics of this course.

So…some things this week that made me think and a few questions for your consideration:

1. In Wiley’s On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, he defines sustainability in terms of a project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals (broken down into production, sharing, use, and reuse). He also points out that while many (most in higher ed?) projects are intended to be a resource for teachers, many (most?) are actually used primarily by learners. My question: Shouldn’t the goal of every OER project to be to facilitate learning by a maximum number of learners?

Many projects seem not to be not primarily focused on learners or maximizing learning.

2. In Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, Downes says “Rather than think of each of these five steps [discovery and research, designing the learning experience, teaching, learning, feedback/assessment/evaluation] as something that is done for learners, and supported through some sort of sustainable (or commercial) program, we need to think of each of these five steps as something that learners do for themselves, and indeed, that any act of learning consists in exactly these steps.” How does this perspective relate to OER (especially in the context of OERs used by informal lifelong learners) and sustainability?

3. In Koohang and Harman’s Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources, the authors ask “Does a constructivist paradigm make design a function of serendipity rather than an issue of value or perceived value?”

OpenEd-Week 9 (yes, I’m jumping around)

Two of the best things about the OpenEd course I’ve been blogging about are the conversations among the brilliant and diverse participants and the reading list for the course. In addition to supplemental readings on a variety of issues critical to OER, there is a reading assignment for a book of our choice from this list:

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Benkler)

Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (Benkler)

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Easterly)

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Easterly)

The World Is Flat (Updated and Expanded): A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Friedman)

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Lessig)

Free Culture (Lessig)

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Prahalad)

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Sachs)

Development as Freedom (Sen)

Other recommended books:

Wikinomics (Tapscott, Williams)

While I’ve already read a few of these books, there are several that I haven’t, and so I’ve gathered up copies of those to read over the next few months. On my list of been-planning-to-read are Larry Lessig’s books, so I’m reading them in order starting with Code.

The questions that have been posed for this assignment are:

QUESTIONS: What can the open education movement learn from the book you chose to read? Elaborate on at least three points. Which of the ideas presented in the book did you find hardest to believe or agree with? Why?

Rather than answer these questions in one long impossible-to-read post, I’m going to answer in parts as it comes to me.

The first big idea from Code that has struck me hard is Lessig’s model of four constraints that regulate behavior:

What things regulare

[Source: Larry Lessig, Code Version 2.0, page 123. CC-Attribution-ShareAlike.]

While we typically think of law as a major way that things are regulated, Lessig makes the case that the other three modalities can be equally, and in many cases more, effective. He gives very compelling examples of each in the “real” (non-cyber) world, and then goes on to expand them to the cyberworld. Much of the book is about architecture, which in the cyberworld is the “code” in the title of the book. Lessig makes the case that the way in which the net is coded allows, disallows, and steers behavior in very specific ways that are in many cases more effective and important than regulatory or economic constraints.

All four of these realms have very important implications for OER. Here are few thoughts.

Law

  • In this course and elsewhere, IP law has been discussed extensively, so I’ll just link to a few thoughts on this.
  • Legal issues regarding the accessibility of OER materials must be addressed if they are going to be used by mainstream educational communities.
  • The legislative environment surrounding the adoption and procurement of school textbooks is complex and in some places nearly impenetrable. In the United States, for example, it is very unlikely for OER to be successful in the K-12 environment due to legislative issues. This suggests that parts of the world with fewer legislative constraints will be more fruitful breeding grounds.

Market

  • OER needs to have more sustainable models.
  • Free is good, but to many, free implies a lack of quality and seriousness.
  • If there is sufficient critical mass, market forces will sort out quality issues as well as licensing issues. Better content and more open licenses will triumph, regardless of the legal environment or the infrastructure issues.

Norms

  • OER has to be socially accepted to be successful. We are a long way from this currently. To counter this, advocacy is necessary with policymakers, educational organizations, teachers, and learners.
  • Community norms may be a more efficient way to deal with “openness” issues than IP law or industry declarations.
  • If there is a critical mass, mass collaboration with open peer review can result in high quality content. (Wikipedia is a testament to that.)

Architecture

  • Non-accessible file formats (PDFs, streaming media, not-easily editable or sharable pages, etc.) limit openness.
  • Systems greatly affect true openness, regardless of how “open” a project claims to be. Systems that are producer-driven, that are difficult to access and use, and that don’t make it possible to remix content on the fly with the results open to others all make content less open. (There is a big divide in the OER community between the use of CMS systems and the use of Web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs. The decision of tool affects openness.)
  • The digital divide and the general lack of net access in the communities most in need of OER is the biggest issue to the future success of this movement. We must be creative in resolving this, looking to solutions that include print, mobile devices, and other non-traditional methods of content distribution. Most importantly though we need to acknowledge the issue and start working on a solution.