Hi David, Great post. I commend your courage in this world of constructivism to profile the humble but decisive role of content in our educational infrastructure.

Education - as a discursive and social endeavour needs something trigger and carry our learning conversations. Education does not take place in a vacuum and in our digital world, our conversations - like this one, become the content for further discussion.

Viva (free) content - Viva

Hello, First, David, thank you. There are a lot of directions to take this. I have a quick question to start things off that I know is full of twists and turns. I am not sure how far we want to take the physical infrastructure analogy, but I will push it just a little further. Roads and other types of public physical infrastructure tend to be funded from public sources (general taxes, road taxes, gas taxes, etc), use-based sources (tolls), and volunteer sources (adopt a highway). I would assume that this combination of resources sort of represents the way we look at appropriate cost allocations. We see the roads as a public good so they should be supported by various governments (federal, state, local) through taxes, it is also recognized that some cost should be assigned differentially to who is using a specific roadway, while others see benefit in keeping the road clean in their community (by adopting a highway) and are willing to take care of that for a number of reasons.

Thanks!

Hi Ken, Good questions.

I’d like to add into the mix Elinor Ostrom’s 2X2 matrix classification between rivalrous versus non-rivalrous and excludable versus non excludable goods. (Frome Governing the Commons, 1990).

See for example:

Rivalrous versus non-rivalrous goods and

Excludable versus non-excludable goods.

The matrix then classifies for types of goods:

The point being that content can assume different forms and depending on how the content is stored (hard copy versus digital) and the licensing that is used (excludable versus non-excludable) will determine whether the same content is for example a private good or public good.

Consequently I think we need to think about different resourcing models and a range of value propositions depending on where the content sits in this 2X2 matrix.

Without going into too much detail - I think that there are things we can do to think differently about resourcing content in education. For example, the most significant cost driver in developing high quality asynchronous learning materials is the academic authoring time. By sharing development cost over many institutions, the development of free content (public good resources) can lower the current costs of production for individual institutions. Savings in cost of production is a mechanism to resource more free content development.

David – Seems to be a regular occurrence here at Camp One these days,

One – News comes in, get put on the Big Board

Two – ‘Work’ Stops, Discussion starts and begins to heat the floor up

Three – The Sound Pressure meter goes off, the alarm sounds and everyone disengages and goes to the Basket Ball court.

I first came in contact with Terra Incognita after Gavin Baker’s ‘Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource’ post . and first introduced Camp One with this response posting as well making on to the much coveted, even by those who don’t know it exists yet, 10/10++ rating on the Camp One Way Cool Scale (comment 3).

134 Words in and finally I will get to the point. There are constant discussion by people who are wondering why Camp One is so successful. The answer to this is a simple one and speaks to the ethos of this post. There is no program per say, no dictated vision, just a set of ground rule and an infrastructure built to support those rules. Simply put, the camp is the program, from which has grown the community of learners. It is the content of what goes on here which takes precedence over the infrastructure. To be sure, we have a crack team of Techno Humans, most of them ‘Recovering’ Hackers who have seen a beneficial use for their creativity. But we are a community first and foremost and while there are a few walking through the door, who don’t grasp the concept, the building sways them fairly quickly.

Accepting responsibility for a bit of ‘All about us’

Regards Martin

David– Great post and a very important topic here on our campus. There are lots of smart people doing great things with platforms all over the University — finding new ways to engage students with blogs, social networks, and all sorts of other great tools. What I see lacking is the innovative use of these tools as instructional design and delivery tools. Faculty who routinely use these environments use them in an activity form — not as the vehicle for delivering course content. They use them to engage students in and out of the classroom, but not to design and deliver courses … perhaps when they start to understand more fully how the environments work we’ll see a new breed of content exposed via the social web.

What frustrates me is the notion that our own eLearning spaces are both closed and built on old infrastructure. I have many conversations all over our University with people who say open is good, but when push comes to shove, they ask us to keep it closed. A perfect example is our use of iTunes U. This is an environment that begs to be open so anyone can come in and subscribe to a course podcast and learn. Our faculty produced over 2300 course podcasts last Spring, but there are exactly 12 of them that are open to people outside of a given class. That is no different than our LMS universe.

I agree that content is infrastructure, but there is a philosophical component that goes along with this — that learning designers and faculty alike must embrace the notion of openness in their design. I think we are on the verge of getting to a more open culture as it relates to content … a place where learning designers and faculty are trying to understand how to use new spaces to reinvent the delivery of content. I saw this about 10 years ago — as people were just climbing the Internet mindset. Will it lead to an environment that promotes the use of emerging spaces in the delivery of University content? I hope so. We just aren’t there yet, but given the right context it can become the norm.

Taking my lead from Wayne, Martin, and Cole, it seems to me the question:

Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education & education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?

is pretty reasonable. That is, there is a cultural mindset that that needs to develop on campuses that will enable and promote the development and distribution of free content. Eventually, one way or the next, the “cultural mindset” would pervade the organization, influencing not only the commitment of faculty and learning designers, but also technology managers, marketers, legal counselors, academic administrators, managers, etc.

The level to which the “cultural mind set” needs to pervade the organization (community) will of course vary from university to university depending on a lot of things. It seems to me that one cultural norm that could be pretty debilitating is the assumption of competition over community. I have noted a feeling in higher education (not limited to the US) that we are competing with each other at an institutional level. If this is an organizational orientation, there is an understandable impulse to treat internally generated learning resources as either private goods or toll goods (see Wayne’s comment above).

If my assumptions, assertions, or conclusions are spurious, please question or correct them. Until then I am left asking myself two questions:

As a final note, I have a feeling that organizations that engage in free and open educational resource development principally (or solely) to 1) gain some sort of competitive advantage, or 2) raise institutional profile, are starting on an unsteady foundation in the long-run.

So in light of these questions, are we prepared to ask ourselves (and ultimately our organizations) if open content is a strategic goal (on any level) for us? The “us” is not just the World Campus, but our Institution … there are pockets making a go at this right here on our campus — in the past the College of IST and the Online IST curriculum was mostly open, and currently the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences are making it happen Where do we stand and where do we want to be? Perhaps the most important question is how do we intend to get there?

Ken, great questions! Let’s see what I can make of them…

To help ensure that “content” infrastructure is of high quality, functioning to enable rather than constrain education and innovation, how might we think about resourcing “content infrastructure” in a sustainable manner?

I think your discussion of taxes, tolls, and volunteers is quite interesting! I’m not sure that tolls will be possible in the open content world, however. To implement a toll on a road, you generally either (a) forbid traffic unless they pay the toll (this amounts to commercial content) or you (b) levy a toll on certain kinds of traffic like big trucks (this amounts to discrimination against certain users or uses of content). While discrimination is prevalent today in the open content world (e.g., use of the CC-NC clause), we should be planning for a future in which this discrimination doesn’t occur. So perhaps our long-term sustainability strategy should focus mostly on taxes and volunteers.

In reality, taxes pay for the development and heavy maintenance of roads. Volunteers keep in-tact roads looking neat and tidy, but volunteers neither build new roads nor fix major structural problems (e.g., fill potholes). I think that for sufficient quality, quantity, and coverage of roads to exist, we will likely need to depend on a common recognition that educational infrastructure is just as critical as transportation infrastructure, and tax money being put to this purpose. Volunteers can be wiki-gardners who pull the inevitable weeds and keep things clean, and they will play an important role, but I don’t know if I believe that we can depend on volunteers to build out ~and maintain~ this critical infrastructure.

Here is another question. Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education & education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?

Yes! And the primary thing is thinking about content as infrastructure. Once we realize how critical this infrastructure is to enabling progress and competitiveness in our current world, we will be willing to invest in it.

David, Ken and All – I have introduced this notion in a couple of other venues and perhaps the time is right to do it here. Open Access is seen somewhat a a thorn in is side of the status quo except what we see as the said quo today is not as it always has been. There was a time when Science in all its iterations was practiced for the sake of Science, when people on the streets would hear the sound of ‘Eureka’ shouted from the window of a dingy cell in a musty pile and another discovery born. It has only been since the notion of profit was introduced to the whole area of the dissemination of knowledge has the issue of paying to read about the discoveries, in many cases the public has payed to create, has the issue of how it is paid for become an issue.

May I suggest a paradigm in which all information is made available freely online, and if a hard copy is require that a Print On Demand, pay per page regime be established. We are looking at just such a strategy at Camp One for use in our outreach. Our situation is unique in that access to printed copy will be funded to 100% internally, but we are looking at a system which can produce in colour at high speed with a net cost of $0.03/Page which if we were to double that figure would provide funding for a compensation pool.

I think the major issue for expanding this scenario is that it goes against the status quo which has yet to understand that technology is close to supplanting its perception of worth. The argument that Open Access will reduce the quality of material given the nature of Peer Review in conventional journals is a specious one. Both PloS and arXix have proven that.

We have a unique situation in that the whole focus of what we do is content oriented, which is derived to a high degree from Open Access. The infrastructure is simply the means, and when we encounter a goal that can’t be achieved with what we have in place, we get more. It would be my hope that we will one day return to a Science for the sake of Science model, without the mold of course.

Note to ‘colecamplese’ - I suggest that at Penn State as at many other institutions, the Arlo Guthrie, ‘Alices’ Restaurant’ ethic applies – If they discount your first proposition as the words of a crazy person, what will they do when the whole movement comes through the door? Lead, Follow, or Get out if the way.

Change It Comes

Hi all,

RedSevenOne, I agree with your sentiments of generating and sharing knowledge for the sake of science and society. Great to see that there are still a few of us around.

I concede that my context working to widen access to education in the developing world is very different to many folk reading this blog. I’m somewhat critical of a pay-per-page model if you want to get a hard copy. For the overwhelming majority of people in the developing world, Internet connectivity is an expensive luxury. If “knowledge” resources are free - this freedom should extend to being able to reuse, modify and redistribute the resource without restriction including the option of generating your own print version.

This is not to say that those of us supporting the freedom culture are against the freedom to earn a living from free content. In fact we should encourage this. In my view we should promote publishers and local business entrepreneurs to add value through services and expanding distribution channels using free content. (Not unlike the RedHat Linux model).

By way of example, WikiEducator is currently funding a project to develop an open source extension for MediaWiki software for users to generate their own basket of selected articles and by clicking on a button - the software will spit out a local pdf version on the desktop. This is pretty significant because any free content project using Mediawiki will be able to implement this technology. Depending on whether we can generate further funding from the international donor community, we aim to extend this functionality to export content in Open Office format which would enable faculty to customise free content without restriction. Think about it - the English Wikipedia has more than 2 million articles, and with this pdf feature we will widen access to the largest encyclopedia in the history of humankind in print format for those who don’t have access to the Internet - without the need to pay for a hard copy! So reluctant and conservative faculty are free to stick with closed proprietary content. Others will embrace the idea of working on the development of free content - that’s our mission at WikiEducator - to build a free curriculum by 2015 .

Ken - I think that you’re absolutely right, we need to think creatively about the barriers associated with shifting the “culture” of the academy regarding free content. Personally - I don’t think competition is a bad thing in higher education - it does contribute to quality. Turning to the business world - the co-opitition model has been pretty successful. The notion of collaborating in order to compete better is not an alien business concept - Why are we reluctant to embrace this in the education sector? There is a strong value proposition in the free content model to produce learning resources faster, better and cheaper when compared to the closed model. A free content license permits individual institutions to add there own unique services to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive education sector. In my view, this is healthy.

The free software movement is a very “competitive” endeavour. Anyone is free to fork a software development and if they succeed in building better code that serves the needs of users, the community will grow. Forks that don’t do things better will not survive. A natural eco-system with strong routes in competitive behaviour. Similarly - I suspect that this will evolve in the free content movement.

I’m very optimistic about the prospects of the free content movement. I already see early signs of the critical mass required to sustain this global endeavour. We have the leverage principle on our side - for example, we don’t need thousands of faculty to build a free curriculum for a freshman course in education or chemistry. Ten or fifteen dedicated educators around the world could do the job. My point is that a free curriculum is certainly plausible. The strategic question for most organisations should be - How will the free curriculum impact on our existing business models ?

Ken - thanks for keeping this initiative going - An engaging and compelling blog.

To David’s point about taxes and tolls. There are different types of taxes and I wonder if this is important. That is, there are general taxes that are levied that do not directly relate to where the government invests the taxes that they have collected. For example, some general income taxes are spent on maintaining roads, even if the person being taxed does not use roads. I suppose that there is the assumption/rationale is that everybody benefits from public roads. There are also taxes that act something like tolls. For example, there are road taxes that are levied because you own a car (sometimes based on the market value of your car) and gas taxes that are earmarked for investment in roads. Here I believe is the assumption that when drivers pull up to the gas pump, they will use their gas purchase to drive a vehicle on the road. These two taxes, although more indirect than a toll for road use, are more directly based on a direct cost and benefit rationale thank more general taxes.

I am not sure if this is important, I just thought that it might be worth noting.

So many directions this conversation could go. I am sorry to have dropped out for a day or two. Wayne, thanks also for your support it is of course the contributors to the Series that make it of any value.

It seems to me that we have an “economic” puzzle to solve here. Continuing with the physical infrastructure analogy and the questions about competition, our challenge is to create an environment in which there is more value to institutions and governments (folks who can levy taxes) to invest in a shared, open, and free content infrastructure than to invest in close infrastructure. That is, invest in public libraries rather than bookstores (sorry for mixing analogies). Perhaps the appropriate extension would be investing in public roads rather than private ones, or simply not investing at all. This could be done in a few ways, by either centrally funding the creation of content or creating incentives for distributed creation and contribution. Are there other options???

Simultaneously, the trick will be to encourage volunteerism by reducing barriers to contribute and creating non-financial incentives, perhaps through recognition of some sort. For example, I think that WikiEducator and the OpenOCW initiatives are great steps to reducing some barriers, but there are of course organizational barriers (refer to Cole’s comments above) which are both structural (unfriendly licensing requirements, unfriendly organizational policy, unfriendly work flows, use of a lot of 3rd party proprietary stuff, etc.) and cultural/attitudinal (“what is mine is mine and it is so good, you will have to pay for it”, fear, uncertainty, etc.) that exist in universities. Are there others?

In any event, here is the punch-line to this comment. Suppose that we get the “economics” right and we end up with a vibrant community of governments, institutions, NGOs, foundations, individuals, etc. contributing to an open and free content infrastructure, on which terms do we compete (see Wayne’s comment above about co-opitition) and how does this impact education? Perhaps the second part of this question is more interesting than the first.

Ken, First off, Here Here!! Well said.

To your question – After we get the economics right. . . how does this impact education?

You will know that you have had an impact, that positive change has occurred when you walk into the lunch room of an Inner City school and hear young people talking about ‘The guy who invented the Ipod got a Nobel Prize’, this happened to me yesterday. While the facts are a bit wonky and the context is a bit off, what it meant was the kids had being paying attention to a blog posting I had flagged during an outreach session that morning while discussing Nanotechnology.

Out of that exchange, the original seven I had been talking to in the morning, swelled to seventeen and we went further into discovering exactly what he real story was.

We researched the archives and found the original reporting, [1991-94] and the sound of ‘Wow’ could be heard around the room. Not only was the content relevant to the learners, had a context relating to something in their reality, the process of getting the information show them tools they could use for further exploration.

I have suggested before and, though reticently, will repeat it here. We need to get on with the job of opening up the access so everyone has a chance to learn, and worry about how it gets payed for later. Our ‘Pay per Page’ concept will likely work for us, even if it heavily subsidized, and it may even work on a broader institutional context, however, I believe that One Size Fits All will not work for Open Access, just as its efficacy has failed in the educational field as a whole.

Martin, Hello. I agree. I think that most of us want to enhance access and I suppose we all can do our parts individually. That is, if we individually have copyright to the work we create, we can license it and distribute it ways that meet our needs and help lower barriers so everybody has the chance to learn, as your rightfully iterate. It becomes more of a challenge when you are trying to create an environment in which a lot of productive capacity is being leveraged.

For example, those of us who manage organizations that produce a lot of digital resources used in online or hybrid courses are frequently managing and are trying to transform legacy systems in our institutions to reduce barriers to opening educational resources. Cole (see comment above) identified the behavioral manifestation of some cultural issues. Three artifacts that we have to work with that raise and lower barriers to leveraging productive capacity include:

There are a lot of other issues, some of which have been reference in previous posts, but the three identified above frequently reflect the organization’s cultural commitments as artifacts whose impact can be significant.

Cheers, Ken

A shout-out from the “peanut gallery”.

I can only assume there are others out there like me, who are following the discussion with interest, but have not yet chimed in. There’s a great deal to process here, and I dasn’t contribute till I’ve thought this through some more.

Just a note to acknowledge the interesting views shared here from–what I hope are–a silent majority (not that they should remain silent, but rather that I hope more are following the discussion than appear to be ;-) ). -JG

this basically assertions a proposition with which I am in basic agreement. “If we want to see education radically improved, we can’t architect it. None of us is that intelligent. We have to understand that content is infrastructure in order to start Linus’ massively parallel feedback cycle running.

Regards, Tanuj

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