brownelearning

The respectable David Wiley proposes that proponents of “Open Educational Resources” simplify their message. “Open” is too confusing, so we should use terms that policymakers already understand. We should just say that, “Educational materials created with public dollars should be placed in the public domain” (emph. added).

David’s heresy is in the exclusion of GPL-like conditions on reuse. “Public Domain” means the user can do anything with the work, whereas some people (e.g. ESR) only consider something “open” when its use includes what CC would call share-alike. I remember this (inconclusive) discussion from David’s OER course last year, and it’s just a content-level version of the endless BSD-GPL argument.

Given that using the term “Public Domain” as David advocates does not encompass what many feel to be the essence of “openness,” I would argue against its use.

I’ve explored the issues of neologisms in complex-yet-important emergent theories (specifically pertaining to validity in assessment), and I don’t think there is a magic bullet answer. Those trying to clarify complex issues (like OER) can…

1. Use an existing term in its original, accepted sense (“Public Domain”), but then they risk excluding the aspects of the concept that extend beyond that old term. Conversely, the old term may describe aspects that are not included in the new concept. There may be a reason for which the old term wasn’t used to describe the new concept.
2. Use an existing term, but redefine it (“open”). Theorists who use this method must explain the new meaning and overcome the established meaning. The resulting confusion is often paralyzing. I think this is David’s central point, and it is valid.
3. Invent a new term from scratch. The advantage is that there will be no confusion; the disadvantage is that there will be a lot of ignorance. You will still have to explain what the term means. See my neologism VIAR.
4. Invent a new term by adding modifiers to existing nouns. Proponents of the term “Unobstructed License” seem to have taken this approach. As David noted, this yields a term that is often more confusing that either the noun or the modifier. Oh, and the new term still need explanation.

The bottom line is that new and complex concepts have to be explained. There are effective and ineffective ways of explaining them, but, short of telepathy, we have to go through that explanatory process.

Some may argue that policymakers do not need to grok the OERs, they just need to know enough to vote for policy that supports and encourages their use. I would disagree: Cursory understandings will be easily swayed by disinformation. Having groked policymakers is the goal.

Given my complaints that TEDxNYED was an echo chamber, I hadn’t planned on reviewing the talk with which I most agreed. Plans change. I find myself struggling with policy that restricts my openness, and, worse, encouraged others to be less open. So, I pulled up David Wiley’s talk.

I won’t go over his premises. I admit that his definitions of “open” and “education” are debatable, but the parallels he draws between policy reaction to the printing press and policy reaction to new media is pitch-perfect. According to David’s account, when the printing press made information cheaper and easy to distribute…

Instead of obliging the demand that exists, [policymakers in the Church] ramp up production of indulgences…. and they push for stricter laws against access to vernacular copies of the scriptures.

Though their punishments were more severe and wielded with more authority, this reaction is very similar to how many institutions (including mine) are stumbling into online education.

In my experience that’s only half the problem. Policymakers eventually must allow – even encourage – faculty to explore the world of online education, but in a way that embodies the worst of colonialism and embrace-and-extend. Policymakers scaffold the transition to online learning with assumption-laden guidance that perpetuates the worst instructional paradigms. And there is always an expansion of control, which is the antithesis of openness.

Yes, I liked David’s TEDxNYED talk, but I would like to think that it wasn’t just because I agreed with it. (There were plenty of other talks with which I agreed, but still didn’t like.) I think it was because he brought something new to the discussion. I’m fairly plugged into the open ed world and I had never heard the collision of policy and technology so succinctly and appropriately presented.

David offers a parody of the future of education. Now, the hard part about responding to a parody is that you never know which components are meant to be serious. From what I know of David, I think I can figure it out, but I offer the caveat that I may be wrong.

He offers two good reasons for which the future of education will look a lot like its past:

1. Employers will continue to want a third-party validation of their potential employees’ qualifications (degrees from accredited institutions). [I think he believes this one.]

2. The societal-shifting advances of the past (academies, books, printing, etc.) failed to disrupt the traditional lecture format of education. [I think this one is facetious.]

I want to explore the second point a little deeper, even it wasn’t meant to be examined..

If lectures were as soul-destroying as many educational reformists would have us believe, then no one would use them. (Even TED would change its format.) But lectures give something that other formats of instruction do not: efficiency.

It’s akin to why so many tests – even those created by good teachers – continue to employ multiple-choice items.

But surely we can find instructional media that are more efficient than lectures. A text posted online, for example, has the potential to serve orders of magnitude more learners than the thrice-weekly professorial song-and-dance in the lecture hall. And its distribution cost would be infinitesimal relative to the cost of a live lecture. If efficiency is accomplishment over cost, then online texts are much more efficient than live lectures.

That’s where David’s first point comes into play. Live lectures preserve the gate-keeping status of the institution. The lecture hall has walls that limit participation; they only include those meeting the requirements of the institution. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you look at the truly innovative institutions (e.g. WGU), they have shifted the gate-keeping mechanism from credit-for-participation-in-information-distribution (the role of lecture and the lecture-hall walls) to credit-for-evidence-of-proficiency (assessments). This model affords greater efficiency in instruction without sacrificing the gate-keeping (read: profit-generating) responsibilities of the institution.

Contrary to David satirical vision, I believe that education will look different in the future. And institutions who shift from information-distribution to candidate-evaluation will own the future of education.

A few posts ago I noted that there is no Web 2.0. As Sir TB-L stated, user-to-user communication was the original intent of the web, and many us have been using it for that purpose since its inception. The only substantive difference between the web circa 1994 and Web 2.0 is that corporations have realized there is money to be made in providing a forum for user-created content. I see some strong parallels between Web 2.0 and the “universities will be irrelevant,” “they must adapt or die” chorus.

Those who insist that universities reform to embrace the Internet-age (iReformers?) assume that higher education is not already so doing. Many of us – especially, but not uniquely, in education – have long abandoned lecturing; we have shifted from memorizing facts to reasoning with them; and we have long embraced technology as learning tool. So forgive our confusion when someone says we must change to be exactly as we are, especially when we see fewer advantages and a multiplicity of disadvantages in institutionalizing our best practices.

PS – I’ll also restate this retort to those who think Higher Ed will become irrelevant: Universities existed long before they were relevant and were, in many ways, superior to what they are now. How is changing to maintain their new-found relevance a good thing?

I’m still not caught up in David’s class, but I did notice this piece from Cory Doctorow about the Kindle 2’s text-to-voice capabilities. It seems that Doctorow agrees that you can remix any content you own… you just can’t redistribute it.

1. It’s not an infringement for a Kindle owner to use technology privately to modify a copyrighted work. If you own a painting, you can take a photo of it to carry around in your wallet – without paying the painter any extra. You can rip your CDs at home without the musician’s permission.

And you can use a technology to convert an ebook to a text-to-speech audiobook in your home without paying the author or getting his or her permission. The question gets murkier if we’re talking about selling or giving away those photos, MP3s, and audio editions, but that’s not what the Guild objects to — they say that the conversion itself infringes copyright.

(Emphasis added.)

We should keep this in mind when we philosophize over nuances in license compatibility: The consumer is permitted to remix any legitimately-obtained content in any way they see fit (with rare exception); they just can’t redistribute the resulting remix.

But if a tree falls in the woods (someone remixes some content) and no one is there to hear it (and can’t redistribute it), does it make any sound (does it matter)?

I’ve slacked off on following David Wiley’s excellent course on open learning. I’m dedicating myself to catching up, but the start of the semester has taken its toll on my time. By the way, anyone from the course may want to point their RSS reader to this feed, because it only includes my Open Education posts.

Despite the time off, open ed is still on my mind, and it gets really frustrating when I see things like this: Last March, faculty in the Near Eastern studies department at Cal voted to quit hosting the open, free, and award-winning Arabic Without Walls online course. (I blogged about the work Margaret Merrill and I did on the course.)

Read the article at the risk of damaging your vision of sustainable open education. Hosting the course cost the department nothing, yet they voted to pull the plug because, “because it does not benefit UC Berkeley students.”

“It did take up quite a lot of our department manager’s time and efforts dealing with a variety of paperwork.”

Though this crisis was later averted and Berkeley continues to host AWW, the comments in the article are a stark reminder that many open ed arguments may hold little sway in the real world. “It costs you nothing to give it away,” doesn’t resonate with people whose first question is, “What’s in it for me?”

We’ve all seen the blue/white/red portrait of President Obama with “HOPE” emblazoned below. Whether that image puts a lump in your throat or reminds you of fascist propoganda, you know the poster. It turns out that the artist copied the President’s likeness from an Associated Press photo… without getting permission. Now the AP was a piece of the pie.

This quote by publisher Margo Baldwin speaks volumes to the state if copyright in America: “It’s a wonderful piece of art, but I wish [the artist] had been more careful about the licensing of it.”

Due to constraints on my time and my situation, as well as out of sensitivity for “leaders in the field of open education” who have better things to do than to answer my random questions about the state of the art, I’m modifying this quest a bit. I’ll spend a couple of posts reacting to some of what David has said in class, specifically concerning Open movements’ attitude towards copyright and why someone might choose the non-commercial Creative Commons elective.

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This started out as a response to another blog post, but it got too long, so I spun it off here.

I’ve often wondered about how well qualitative methods are generally applied in instructional design research. My specific training is in quantitative methods, so I’m not qualified to make that judgment, but I have observed a certain incongruence between the amount of rigor required by my colleagues in other fields, and the little effort many instructional design researchers exert.

For example, I came across the term autoethnographic in a study by Kupczynski et al (2008). The authors only cite one reference supporting the method, and it’s a textbook. I asked an anthropology friend of mine (a professor at American University) who specialized in qualitative methods about it and she about fell over. Her exact words were, “Good night, what is research coming too?!” She has warned me previously against data that is “too clean,” and shown how to include rigorous checks for trustworthiness (which I would call validity).

Compare this to a good friend of mine (and a great researcher) who passed his dissertation defense with a few revisions. One of those revisions caught my attention. To paraphrase his committee chair:

“In your methods section you described a negative case analysis [which is a method used to verify trustworthiness], but you didn’t actually do one. So, before we approve your dissertation, you’ll need to strike that section from your methods.”

I think it may be that instruction designers are practitioners first, and researchers second. During an open discussion at PIDT two years ago, a professor claimed that one of the things holding up instructional design as a field was the reluctance of journals to accept qualitative methods. He specifically mentioned that ETR&D had rejected several good submissions from him and his students. Cliff Mims from the University of Memphis spoke up because he is (was?) the editor over qualitative studies for that journal. He countered that he read a lot of submissions, but could usually tell within the first two pages that the “qualitative study” wasn’t rigorous enough to be published.

During the next break, I approached Cliff and asked him what his qualifications were to judge the quality of qualitative research. He responded with a litany of certificates he held and workshops he had attended on real qualitative methods. His comments jibed completely with what I’ve experienced working with sociologists and other qualitative experts at the Social Science Research Council and the National Academies.

It was there that I envisioned a project that has languished in its nascent stages for two.. almost three years: I want to construct a rubric based on qualitative practices from anthropology and sociology, and then score 200 randomly selected qualitative theses and dissertations in instruction design. Even if the great majority of them are aligned with the guidelines for rigor, this study would identify areas of relative weakness with the field.

Cliff loved the idea at PIDT, but I just haven’t had the time to follow through with it. So, if any graduates student reading this are looking for a good thesis or dissertation project, feel free to take this one. Just cite me.

David Wiley’s “remixability matrix” (in his fourth lecture)is a bit confusing, as evidenced by the comments that came during the lecture. I think we may simplify it a bit by adding an important dimension that he neglected.

His matrix attempted to summarize the compatibility issues of various licenses. This is an abridged version of his matrix:

What his matrix leaves out is the directionality of remix(1). Consider this revision:

It’s not that a Public Domain-All Rights Reserved relationship (PD-© in David’s matrix) is impossible, but that relationship is strictly unidimensional. In other words, content from a Public Domain work can be remixed into an All Rights Reserved derivative (e.g. almost every Disney movie), but content from an All Rights Reserved work cannot move into the Public Domain (see Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extentsion Act).

Besides being more nuanced, this revised matrix also exposes the degree to which each license is free. Notice that work in the Public Domain or released under the Creative Commons Attribution can be remixed into any of the three, while default copyright (All Rights Reserved) cannot be remixed into any of the three.

I’m not going to fill in all 36 cells of his original matrix. I’ll leave that for someone more familiar with each license.

——

(1) I’m releasing the phrase directionality of remix under a Creative Commons Attribution license.