Archive for the ‘Open sharing’ Category

Here is David Wiley’s summary of early discussions in his Open Education class, which is just getting under way. As a review, David’s teaching this class completely on line and completely open to anyone. You can just participate at no cost, or if you are in school, you can sign sign up for credit through your university.

One of the questions under discussion early is “In your opinion, is the ‘right to education’ a basic human right? Why or why not?” I’m interested to see if anyone argues the negative here. It’s kind of like asking if a clean, safe environment is a basic human right. Well, yes, but that’s not what is going to stop us all from burning fossil fuels. Not only does failing to educate everyone leave a great many people disempowered, which itself can be dangerous, it deprives us all of a part of the human creativity we will need if we are to survive as a species. We need to educate everyone because everyone deserves an education of course, but we need to educated everyone because ultimately, it’s probably the only way we can all live togehter. I see Open Education as a green movement for the mind.

Educause Quarterly has come out with its top ten technology-related teaching and learning issues in higher education. Open education makes the list–barely–at number 7:

No. 7: Sharing Content, Applications, and Application Development

The issues facing academic technology units are increasingly complex and interdependent, requiring individuals and institutions to work together. Collaboration allows us to benchmark with our peers, develop affinity groups and consortia, and use resources more effectively.

Collaboration can be a fundamental strategy in higher education. Creating a culture of openness and sharing builds productive individual and institutional relationships that result in mutual benefit…

Two of the most compelling examples of successful collaboration are open source software and the open content movement…

Most of the discussion on this point is around open source technologies, only fair given Educause’s focus, but at least hopeful that open content was mentioned.

I’ve written before about Science Commons and the complexity of the issues they address. PopSci is carrying a great article where you can learn more strait from John Wilbank’s mouth, as it were. Here’s just a taste of the overall vision:

In five years, if everything comes out as I hope, you’ll have a system that looks like Amazon for the life sciences. You could click on one thing—a relevant cell line, for example—and get recommendations for related research or tools. You could one-click and order that cell line from a third party instead of having to ask another laboratory to stop doing research and manufacture it for you. There’d be management systems that would join data from around the world, and you could use Google Maps API to flag brain images with comments. Scholarly literature would be available for free because the peer-review charges would be paid as part of the cost of research instead of through subscription models, and the annotations or comments that had been made on any given paper would be readily available.

No lack of ambition here.

Often open sharing and traditional copyright are mistakenly thought of as being somehow at odds. I’ve heard the Creative Commons folks say more than once that CC depends on strong copyright law and isn’t effective where intellectual property law is weak. D’Arcy Norman has a nice post illustrating just exactly why ownership is so important–you can’t share what you don’t own.