Bard Quest 2: Wiley’s motivation, Tomaševski’s motivation, and the real reason people get into Open Education
One may consider two poles in the gamut of possible motivations for participating voluntarily in Open Education: moral and economic. Tomaševski (2001) declares available, accessible, even compulsory(1) education a prerequisite to meeting world citizens’ right to education. Wiley (2006) mongers the fear that American higher education, and the nation in general, would pass up a golden investment opportunity in forgoing Open Education. On one end is an instrumentalist businessman, on the other a clergyman preaching morality for morality’s sake. All other motivations may be understood to fall somewhere between these two position.
But these are not polar opposite in the least. Nay, they are one in the same; both serve as impositions of the motivated individual’s motivation on the unmotivated. Tomaševski would shame us morally while Wiley would do no less economically. If you don’t agree with them, you’re either an irresponsible investor or a criminal against humanity.
Besides sharing their final utility, these motivations are communally confused at their root. Tomaševski muddles rights with entitlements, justice with fairness, and accepts the oxymoron of extra-sovereign legality. Wiley makes the fallacious claim that “higher education has fallen out of step with business, science, and everyday life,” without presenting historical evidence that it was ever in-step(2).
May I suggest a motivation that is not a middle ground to these, but placed on an entirely different – though intersecting – plane? The success of Open Education need not lie in the projection of our ideals on others, but may be found in that universal human vice: pride(3). Both greed (on which Wiley’s motivation hangs) and altruism (Tomaševski’s appeal to ameliorate the human condition) rest on our pretension that we are capable and worthy to bring about our end-goals.
While shame may drive governments to intervene (read: fund Open Education) and the threat of irrelevancy may drive institutions into a panic (read: give us release time to develop OER), individuals won’t get involved unless they feel they can make some contribution. Pride is a prerequisite for producing Open Content, but it doesn’t stop there: Pride’s child, selfishness, is a great motivator for consuming Open Content.
Seriously, I borrowed a copy of RedHat Linux in 1999 not to cry “Power to the People!”(4), but to see what it could do for me. I posted my first Open Source code not in support of a movement or to make anyone else’s life easier, but to see if anyone could get my file crawler to function. I quietly replaced my dissertation’s copyright page with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license in an effort to keep my university from making any more money off my work than they already had. In short, I acted out of selfishness and pride.
While my stories are purely anecdotal, they are the honey to Wiley and Tomaševski’s vinegar. If we want people to swarm to Open Education, we should choose wisely our bait. If you read the history of OpenCourseWare, MIT had so much pride in their abilities, that they knew releasing their materials for free would only demonstrate their institution’s exceptional quality(5). Institutions who feared releasing their course content lacked pride: If people could get the milk for free, who would buy the cow?
Therefore, as we go forth and evangelize the world on the wonder that is Open Education, should we not build up our proselyte’s selfishness and pride more than their moral outrage (Tomaševski) or their desire to remain relevant (Wiley)?
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(1) One must wonder what mechanisms would be required to assure that compulsory education does not devolve into statist indoctrination.
(2) One could argue that higher education has been relatively constant since the Middle Ages, and that it is society, not the academy that has periodically approached and deviated from its model. Additionally, Wiley only addresses one of the four functions of higher education identified by Stevens, Armstrong, Arum (in progress): the factory.
(3) Just as free has dual meanings – free speech (in French, libre) and free beer (gratuit), pride can mean one of two things. There is a healthy satisfaction in one’s heritage, country, even family members (fierté); there is also a contemptuous arrogance (orgueil). I wish to draw on the latter.
(4) /me raises fist and spits in the direction of Redmond.
(5) Detractors claimed that OCW was merely a prod to get MIT faculty to update their syllabi. This argument tried to move the motivation from one of pride to one of instrumental value, similar to Wiley’s.