I’ve seen a lot of confusion on the interwebz lately about the meaning of the term open – like people linking to copyrighted videos posted illegally in YouTube as examples of OERs. Since I have a keen interest in people understanding the term “open content” the way I originally intended for them to, I will soon be adding a “definition” section to opencontent.org. (I think of the “open” in open educational resources the same way, though I neither have nor claim special authority to clarify its definition.) Here’s a first draft of what will appear there. Your feedback would be appreciated. (You may recognize some of this as material that has appeared on my blog in the past.)

What is the History of the Term “Open Content?”

The words “open” and “content” were first used together in the spring of 1998. “Open content” was and is an attempt to appropriately adapt the logic of “open source” software to the non-software world of cultural and scientific artifacts like music, literature, and images.

The term “open source software” and the corresponding movement were established earlier in 1998 in reaction to perceived problems with the term “free software” and its associated movement. While advocates of free software focus their message on the philosophical principle of freedom, advocates of open source software focus their message on the pragmatic benefits of being open. Consequently, arguments in favor of free software run primarily along the lines of “because you should,” while arguments in favor of open source software run primarily along the lines of “here’s how you’ll benefit if you do.”

I waited to make the decision between the terms “open content” and “free content” until discussing the choices with the leaders of both camps (Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman). I then made the decision very deliberately. I wanted the open content movement to be about demonstrating usefulness and value that people would hopefully find persuasive.

So there you have the history of the term – “open content.”

What Does the “Open” in Open Content Mean?

“Open” is a continuous, not binary, construct. A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term is overly simplified and has no nuance.

Alternately, a would-be definer might adopt an artificial definition, in which a door opened 20 cm or more is considered open while a door opened 19 cm is not considered open. But this type of arbitrary definition is unsatisfactory as well. For example, the “open” in “open source” has no nuance as it has been artificially binary-ized. The open source definition tells us very clearly what a license must and must not do in order to be permitted to describe itself with the trademarked term “open source.” In the eyes of the defenders of the “open source” brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.

Much as we might measure the openness of a door in centimeters, we measure the openness of content in terms of the rights a user of the content is granted. The 4Rs Framework describes the four most important rights:

1. Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form
2. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
3. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
4. Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

To the degree that a license provides users with no-cost (free) permission to exercise these rights with regard to content, that content is open. So, whether these rights are granted unconditionally, or permitted only if the user meets certain conditions (e.g., requiring attribution, requiring distribution of derivatives under a specified license, or prohibiting commercial redistribution), it is still appropriate to call this content open. But the more conditions placed on the user, the less open the content. The fewer restrictions a license places on a user’s ability to exercise 4R rights in the content, the more open the content is.

Haven’t Other’s Already Defined “Open” in this Context?

In the past, some people unaffiliated with opencontent.org have taken it upon themselves to “define the open in open content” and propose artificial definitions like those described above. The Open Knowledge Definition is one such attempt, which is an adaptation of the Open Source Definition, which is itself an adaptation of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

At the top of this article I wrote that “open content” was and is an attempt to appropriately adapt the logic of “open source” software to the non-software world of cultural and scientific artifacts like music, literature, and images. I don’t believe that changing the words of DFSG is an appropriate way to arrive at a definition of the open in open content. The context of content is quite different from the context of software. For example, the DFSG and its descendants fail to distinguish between revision and remixing. This may be fine for software, but failing to consider these activities separately in the context of content has lead to endless confusion among educators. After a decade of talking to educators and other academics about open content (and open educational resources) I feel that a new framework – specifically, the 4Rs Framework – is a more productive way to talk about openness than the DFSG or its adapted children.

How Open is Open Enough?

People make the choice to use an open license with their content for a variety of reasons. Starting with the Open Publication License and including the Creative Commons licenses, the open content licenses have been crafted in a way that recognizes that people choose the path of openness for different reasons. The licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. If another person or institution’s approach to openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, then look for help somewhere else – don’t criticize them.

A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/).

Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool.

However.

The kind of innovations these legends produce – technological innovations – are the easy kind of innovation. They are innovations that manipulate inanimate entities free of agency. During John Seely Brown’s visit to BYU last week, I heard him say that while the 20th century was a time of technological innovation, the 21st century must be a time of institutional innovation. This is the most insightful statement I’ve heard made in recent memory. It impacted me deeply, as it neatly summarized a frustration I’ve been feeling more and more keenly.

Anyone who has worked to reform an institution will readily admit that the more people are involved, and the more they are invested in maintaining the status quo, the harder it is to affect change. Even something as small as a stepwise incremental policy change can be a multi-year battle. I can hear you now thinking, “Just burn it down and plant a new institution in the ashes,” or “Just punch out and create a new institution to compete with the first.” Sometimes these are legitimate approaches to getting things done, but sometimes they aren’t. I seem to keep finding my interests lie in problems and institutions where these more radical methods simply don’t seem to apply. This seems to portend many difficult years ahead for me.

Imposing your will on bits and bytes is “easy.” Leading an established institution through the valley of the shadow of reform and up the opposite bank toward innovation is “hard.” But it is absolutely critical work, and precious few people are in positions that afford them opportunities to provide this kind of leadership.

The new, special issue of IRRODL on Openness and the Future of Higher Education is available now at http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/issue/view/38. Here’s the introduction John Hilton and I wrote for the special issue:

Once considered to be mostly hype, the idea of open education has spread to hundreds of universities across the globe – including many of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Open access to teaching and learning materials significantly empowers individuals who are not affiliated with formal educational programs and levels the playing field across competing institutions. These two occurrences – the empowering and leveling – portend significant changes in the structure and practice of higher education. The purpose of this special issue of IRRODL is to address various specific ways in which openness can affect the future of higher education.

In the opening article, Wiley and Hilton overview societal changes that decrease the alignment of higher education institutions with the supersystem in which they exist. Their paper argues that increasing institutional openness is a prerequisite to other critical changes required to keep higher education relevant in a quickly changing world.

The next two articles address potential barriers to the expanded use of OER and discuss how to address these barriers. Morgan and Carey explore how academic literacy in English can be a barrier to the use of many open educational resources. Their paper examines ways in which open courses can provide significant benefits to students of English as an Other Language. Lane identifies how technology and cultural barriers can impede the effective use of open educational resources. He proposes that the mediated use of open educational resources can help to reduce the diverse social and cultural digital divides within education.

Next, Baker, Thierstein, Fletcher, Kaur, and Emmons address how openness could impact the high prices of textbooks. They report how Rice University’s Connexions and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) have developed a proof-of-concept free and open textbook, and they identify lessons learned about open textbook use by students and faculty.

Two key issues relating to openness and higher education are credentialing and sustainability. Schmidt, Geith, Håklev, and Thierstein address the significant issue of the role higher education plays in providing credentials and certifications for learning. They discuss how social web technologies offer opportunities for learning, which build these skills and allow new ways to assess them. They make the case that a peer-based method of open assessment and recognition is a feasible option for accreditation purposes.

For openness to affect higher education, it needs to be sustainable. Friesen presents the results of an informal survey of active and inactive collections of online educational resources, emphasizing data related to collection longevity and the project attributes associated with it. He shows how OER initiatives are in danger of running aground of the same sustainability challenges that have claimed numerous learning object collection or repository projects in the past.

The last two articles address how learners interact with OER. Many OER are available, including open courses. Fini examines one such course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (2008), facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. He looks at the the technological dimensions of the course and its impact on the participants. Ultimately, for openness to impact higher education, learners need to be willing to use OER on a large-scale basis. How do everyday learners view open courses? In the final article, Arendt and Shelton examine how residents of the state of Utah (in the United States) view the incentives and disincentives for the use of open educational resources.

Overall, this special issue presents an excellent discussion of open education issues ranging from useful descriptions of successful projects to empirical data about user attitudes to thoughtful criticisms of present work. These criticisms are particularly valuable because so much of the extant literature about open education is almost uniformly positive in tone. We hope this special issue will help to begin a more balanced discourse about the benefits and very real challenges of open education.

I’ve written about this before, but here we go again…

In educational research there is a long and storied history of people conducting studies along the lines of “is video-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “is text-based instruction more effective than audio-based instruction?” or “”is video-based instruction more effective than text-based instruction?,” etc. This pointless family of research has a name, the “No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” and even has it’s own website: http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/. From the website:

This website has been designed to serve as a companion piece to Thomas L. Russell’s book, “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon” (2001, IDECC, fifth edition). Mr. Russell’s book is a fully indexed, comprehensive research bibliography of 355 research reports, summaries and papers that document no significant differences (NSD) in student outcomes between alternate modes of education delivery…. The primary purpose of the NSD website is to expand on the offerings from the book by providing access to appropriate studies published or discovered after the release of the book.

Hundreds of “horse race” studies comparing alternate modes of education delivery show us that nothing interesting happens in these studies. Indeed, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. And yet eager graduate students and younger faculty continue to conduct them.

Unfortunately, I’m hearing more and more people talk about a new generation of media comparison studies – “License Comparison Studies.” These absolutely pointless studies would ask questions like “do CC BY-NC-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than traditionally copyrighted and licensed materials?” or “do CC BY-SA licensed materials teach more effectively than CC By-NC-SA materials?” Again, careful forethought will demonstrate that we should expect to find nothing interesting in these kinds of studies. Please, if you’re in a position to discourage these kinds of studies, save all of us the trouble and embarrassment by steering your students and colleagues in another direction.

Earlier this year I blogged about what I thought should go into an open textbook bill (with clarifications the next day). I’m extremely pleased that Senator Durbin has introduced a bill which closely resembles these recommendations and therefore, to my mind, is on exactly the right track. You can read Durbin’s remarks as he introduced the bill, and then study the full text of S. 1714 on GovTrack (where you can also subscribe to a feed of all bill-related activity).

The bill creates a competitive grant program supporting the creation of open textbooks, and most importantly requires applicants to submit:

(C) a plan for distribution and adoption of the open textbook to ensure the widest possible adoption of the open textbook in postsecondary courses, including, where applicable, a marketing plan or a plan to partner with for-profit or nonprofit organizations to assist in marketing and distribution; and

(D) a plan for tracking and reporting formal adoptions of the open textbook within postsecondary institutions, including an estimate of the number of students impacted by the adoptions.

This is terrifically exciting to me, as it will bring a real sense of urgency of impact into the discourse, and provide the OER community with good data and metrics to talk with confidence about the amount of money students are saving thanks to open textbooks.

The most interesting part of the bill is Section 5. on LICENSING MATERIALS WITH A FEDERAL CONNECTION:

In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses shall be licensed under an open license.

This language provides nothing short of an NIH-style mandate on all publicly funded curriculum, and does not appear to be limited to the textbooks whose creation is funded by the bill. This is huge! It’s like FRPAA for educational materials!

Those of us who consulted on the drafts during the spring / summer were waiting to see how Durbin would choose to deal with the licensing issue, and the bill takes a middle road, requiring textbooks funded under the program to also use an “open license,” which the bill defines as “an irrevocable intellectual property license that grants the public the right to access, customize, and distribute a copyrighted material.” No specific license (or family of licenses) is mentioned or required.

This is a great day for the open education movement! If you have a representative on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, contact them to make sure they support this legislation!

I’ve always been impressed by the idea of the Large Hadron Collider. It’s an unthinkably expensive, large-scale experimental apparatus designed for the sole purpose of generating and collecting data. Why would countries spend so much money on data? Why would so many people dedicate the better part of their lives to a project like the LHC? Because the so-called “hard” sciences – fields like physics and astronomy – have made the remarkable progress they have in understanding the structure of matter and the nature of the universe because they really care about data. They care about data in a way that educators have a difficult time comprehending, let alone understanding.

The data that we, educators, gather and utilize is all but garbage. What passes for data for practicing educators? An aggregate score in a column in a gradebook. A massive, course-grained rolling up of dozens or hundreds of items into a single, collapsed, almost meaningless score. “Test 2: 87.” What teacher maintains item-level data for the exams they give? What teacher keeps this data semester to semester, year-to year? What teacher ever goes back and reviews this historical data? After a recent tweet on this topic, a number of colleagues accused me of having physics envy. Believe me, you don’t have to wish you were a physicist to be disappointed by the quality of data educators have access to.

I’m beginning to believe that we’ve got it completely backwards. For decades we’ve been trying to use technology to improve the effectiveness of education. How, specifically, have we tried to use technology? At a high level, we’ve tried to use it to deliver content to learners. The goal has been to “find something that works,” and then deliver that something (interactive content, etc.) to learners at high fidelity and low cost. In our attempts to deliver effective content at scale, I believe we have had a nationwide (if not worldwide) encounter with the reusability paradox, which I first wrote about at length in 2001. Briefly stated, the reusability paradox says that, due to context effects, the pedagogical effectiveness of content and its potential for reuse are orthogonal to another. This finding is too inconvenient to accept, as it would destroy or severely maim the prominent paradigm of educational technology research, and so it has been roundly ignored by the educational research community.

While using technology to deliver content seems to have had no noticeable impact (or even a slightly negative) on the effectiveness of education, using technology to deliver content has had a huge impact on the accessibility of education. Think of distance learning… Think of opencourseware and open educational resources… Think of the millions of people who now have access that never would have had access otherwise. The impact of using technology to deliver content on increasing access to education is completely unassailable and totally undeniable.

So, if using technology to deliver content is not improving the effectiveness of education, is there another way we might use technology that can? I believe there is. I believe it so strongly that for the first time in several years I am opening a new line of research. I believe (and I fully admit that it is only a belief at this point) that using technology to capture, manage, and visualize educational data in support of teacher decision making has the potential to vastly improve the effectiveness of education. Think of it as “educational data mining” or “educational analytics.” For example, think of all the data, algorithms, and resources that go into selecting ads to show in search engine results and other places around the web, and then think of using all that horsepower to make suggestions to teachers about appropriate opportunities to intervene with students.

The Open High School of Utah is the first context in which I’m studying this use of technology. Because it is an online high school, every interaction students have with content (the order in which they view resources, the time they spend viewing them, the things they skip, etc.) and every interaction they have with assessments (the time they spend answering them, their success in answering them, etc.) can all be captured and leveraged to support teachers. The OHSU teaching model, which we call “strategic tutoring,” involves using these data to prioritize which students need the most help and enabling brief tutoring sessions. A teacher’s typical day involves visiting the dashboard, viewing the first student in a prioritized list of students, seeing what s/he needs help on, and engaging him/her by Skype, phone, IM, or other means, for a very brief, very targeted individual tutoring session. Then the next student, then the next student, etc. Students who are on track or working ahead in the online curriculum don’t have to wait for an interaction with the teacher (they’re succeeding, after all), and those who need help get it – individualized, just in time, and sometimes before they even know they need it. From a caring human being – not a supposedly intelligent tutoring system.

Now, if the OHSU wasn’t delivering content online we couldn’t capture all this data. So in one sense, it’s key to deliver content online – if only to get the types of data we need to support teachers supporting students. But currently, we’re stopping short, confusing the means for the end.

Another realization that comes part way down this path is that our instructional design programs may teach people how to design instruction that is motivating and engaging, but we don’t even begin to teach people how to design materials and systems that capture the right kinds of data. We don’t even discuss what the “right” kinds of data might be.

Coming back to the LHC, I think meaningful progress in education will depend on educators becoming infected with a passion for data like the LHC embodies. Not rolled up percentile scores, coarse-grained data that obscure all the meaningful details we might care about. We need access to real-time data on every individual student every day of the year, we need tools and techniques for supporting teachers in interpreting the data, we need new teaching models that leverage the existence of these data and tools, etc. This is what I think technology-enhanced education is supposed to be.

The investment it would take to deploy such an infrastructure would rival the cost of the LHC, but would be almost impossible to make – because educators either don’t care about data or have a vision of data that is limited by their own experience recording things in a gradebook or spreadsheet. Using technology in creative ways could provide us with so much more data it would boggle the imagination… It could transform the teacher’s work from one based on hunches and intuitions to one actually based on data. And low and behold, we might actually move the needle a bit when we combine the best of hardcore empiricism with the best of caring, nurturing people.

We’ll certainly never meet Bloom’s 2 sigma challenge if we think the proper role of technology in education is simply delivering content (whether interactive, intelligent, or otherwise). However, if we get serious about capturing and using data to support teacher decision-making and improve student learning, we may have something.

Driving home from a meeting last week I heard a truly atrocious recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, one of my favorite pieces for orchestra. The conductor’s interpretation (or complete lack thereof) had me screaming at the radio and almost putting my head through the steering wheel on a couple of occasions.

The best recording of this fabulous piece of music is, in my not so humble opinion, John Mauceri leading the London Symphony Orchestra – (previews available from Amazon at Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade). How does this relate to OCW, you ask?

For a number of years there has been an opinion among some in the OCW community that we need (only) one really excellent open version of each of the high enrolling GE courses like English 101. My experience in the car reminded me why several different versions of open courses are necessary. Obviously, a rather talented conductor had led a rather competent orchestra in this recording, and NPR had liked it well enough to play it. But it was truly awful. Painfully so.

In education, as in music, matters of taste matter. No, you won’t learn more or remember longer when the teaching is adapted to your so-called “learning style,” but the experience will be much more pleasant when it is. And who hasn’t sat through a class that made you want to put your head through the desk? I never want to have that excruciating experience again, neither with music nor with learning.

The CBC has posted a great interview with Eric Frank of Flat World Knowledge about open textbooks. While an abbreviated version will run on the air, you can listen to (and download) the full, uncut interview online.

George has written a thoughtful post about issues with OCW 1.0 projects titled Utah State OpenCourseWare, lowriders, and system design.

A few quotes and then some response:

Utah State University has announced the closure of its OpenCourseWare initiative due to budget woes. I call nonsense (or BS). Apparently OCW needed $120,000 per year. Given the size of Utah State University, I’m going to guess they have an annual operating budget somewhere in the range of $300-400 million. This is not a budget shortfall – this is a commitment shortfall. 120K is a fraction of a fraction in light of the larger university budget.

This illustrates my concern about centrally organized open educational initiatives – they have a single point of failure: funding…

The OER and OCW movement(s) are fundamentally flawed in where they assign openness. Openness is being treated as separate from curriculum development and delivery. Openness is viewed as an after market feature. And most universities aren’t too eager to pay for the extras.

George makes a critical point, and one that everyone needs to understand. The model I call OCW 1.0 he calls the “aftermarket” model. No matter what you call it, it’s impossible to sustain a program that incurs large, ongoing costs that are exclusive to OCW – which is why I predicted in the spring that the list of universities engaged in active OCW projects three years from now will look very different than it did back in May 2009 (yes, all the big names will be gone if they don’t completely reinvent themselves).

George writes, “Openness should be built into the process of curriculum design – it should be systematized.” In places where the process of curriculum design is practiced, like the campus teaching and learning center, this is absolutely true. However, how many faculty actually use such services? Unfortunately, the vast majority of faculty members don’t engage in a thoughtful process of curriculum design – they just do what they do.

In order for open education to reach its varied potentials, openness must become a core cultural value for each and every faculty member. This is a decade-long project if we’re lucky, and requires significant investment in faculty training (the way we had pushes on our campuses a few years ago to help everyone understand the importance of diversity). While we work on that (and we are working on that), the critical question for me is, what do we do in the ten years between now and then? Should we do nothing until we’re capable of doing it “right” in 2020, or are partial solutions (like OCW 1.0 and even OCW 2.0) better than nothing as we make that long journey?

Creative Commons may not have set out to authoritatively define Noncommercial Use with their recent study, whose results were announced today, but I wonder how people will to interpret their findings… There appears to be broad agreement among survey respondents in some areas (as I highlight below). Unfortunately, the report also reveals that its respondents have very little understanding of copyright law. So what the report provides us is, in effect, a surprisingly coherent statement by a large group of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Hundreds of thousands of people agree that it’s ok to download mp3s, but a single judge disagrees with them (authoritatively) all the time. Unfortunately, the consensus in this report is not particularly instructive. Rather, the consensus may be misleading if you allow it to convince you that it means something. Perhaps a more productive use of the study’s grant money would have been supporting the argument of cases that would establish real precedent.

In the empirical portion of the study, content creators and content users were asked to judge a number of specific use cases (i.e., determine whether or not the uses they describe are commercial) in the following five categories:

• The user/you would make money from the use of the work
• The work would be used online and advertisements would appear around it
• The work would be used on behalf of an organization
• The work would be used for a charitable purpose/social good
• Your work would be used by/you would use the work as an individual

The CC report is 255 pages long. Allow me to summarize (realizing that others will summarize in different manners). Simplifying a bit (at some cost but with some value), when the majority (more than 50%) of respondents categorized a specific use case as “commercial,” I have categorized that use case as commercial in the chart below. This chart reformats data presented in Appendix 5.6 – 62 (page 198 of the pdf), which I would encourage you to view for yourself.

According to the majority of the community:

• All uses where money is made are commercial.
• All uses where advertisements are involved are commercial.
• The overwhelming majority of uses made by or on behalf of an organization are commercial (8/9).
• The majority of uses made for a charitable purpose or a social good are commercial (7/11).
• Less than half of uses made by an individual are commercial (3/8).

Clearly, the community defines commercial use by the nature of the use and not by the nature of the user. According to the community, non-profits, charitable organizations, and individuals are all capable of making commercial uses. At a high level, the community has sided with MIT OCW’s view of noncommercial and rejected the original CC draft definition (which was based on the nature of the user).

Definition by use rather than by user significantly complicates interpretation. For example, I have a friend who believes that all individual uses are noncommercial and all institutional uses are commercial. It would have been wonderfully simple if the community had agreed with him. Instead, we have the community telling us that the majority of these specific use cases involving charitable uses are commercial and almost half of individual use cases are commercial as well. We also have MIT OCW completely disagreeing with the community in the case of organizations, telling us it’s perfectly fine to use their NC material inside an organization, which is just another elephant-sized indicator of the complete mess we find ourselves in with regard to this license term.

Please keep in mind that this survey presents the legal opinions of people with very little understanding of the law. Granted, they are the people ostensibly following the law, but so are the mp3 downloaders, and video remixers, and others.

What are we supposed to gain from reading this survey? I really can’t say. So why did I spend all this time writing this blog post?

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes the “mothballing” of USU OCW in today’s story, Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes. I don’t know if the added attention will help Marion advance their cause on campus, but we can hope.

In response to an article about the death of instructional design, Stephen says… “there is not a (practical) sub-discipline that is (strictly) the design of instructional materials.” There are many parenthetical caveats in this statement, but it is still wrong. Stephen’s evidence for the argument that there is no discipline of instructional design?

The success of sites like Common Craft, designed with an apparent indifference to instructional design principles (”The Lefevre’s have no instructional design background at all,” writes Schlenker) seems to me to be evidence of that.

It’s like saying, “The success of the bridge Bob built over the irrigation ditch in front of his yard, with an apparent indifference to engineering principles (”Bob has no engineering background at all”), is evidence of the fact that there is no practical sub-discipline of structural engineering.”

Which is most likely: (1) that Bob and the Common Craft folk have learned important principles through life experience without having ever taken courses on these topics and applied them successfully, or (2) the fields of instructional design and structural engineering don’t exist?

It’s difficult for me to believe that Stephen would argue that the only disciplines that really exist are those that require formal training to gain proficiency in…

I have something much longer and comprehensive coming on this topic, but these few notes will have to do for now.

First, “open” is a continuous, not binary, construct. A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term has no nuance. Alternately, they may adopt an artificial definition, in which a door opened 20 cm or more is considered open, while a door opened 19 cm is not considered open. But this is unsatisfactory as well.

For example, the “open” in open source is not nuanced at all and has been artificially binary-ized. The open source definition tells us very clearly what a license must and must not do in order to be permitted to describe itself with the trademarked term “open source.” In the eyes of the defenders of the “open source” brand, if you’re not open enough you’re not open at all.

I made an explicit choice with open content not to go down the open source path of imposing my will on others. People make the choice to be open for a variety of reasons. They choose the path of openness in order to help them accomplish goals that are very personal. It is just as inappropriate for you to try to force your goals on others as it is for others to try to force their goals on you. Who am I to say how open is open “enough?” I didn’t 11 years ago and I’m not about to start now. Who are you to judge me for not being open “enough?” I didn’t choose openness as a path to accomplishing your goals, I chose it as a path to accomplishing my own goals. If the way I express my openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, ignore my openness – don’t criticize it.

Starting with the Open Publication License and including the Creative Commons licenses, the open content licenses have been crafted in a way that recognizes that people choose the path of openness for different reasons. The licenses have therefore provided people with license options to help them more effectively accomplish their personal goals. This tolerance for different goals and explicit support for people in achieving them is something we should cherish and extend beyond our licenses into our community discourse and behavior. Let me begin.

In a post earlier today I argued that our collective purpose should be “increasing access to educational opportunity.” That was a mistake on my part. Increasing access to educational opportunity is the reason I chose the path of openness and launched the idea of open content upon the world. But that goal is my own, and I shouldn’t and don’t expect others to accept it as their own. As I have tried to be open, I’ve discovered additional reasons one might choose to be open – like the way that openness facilitates the unintended. This is another, though secondary, reason I choose to continue to be open.

Without any special authority to do so, may I please give you a homework assignment? Would you please blog about why you choose to be open? What is the fundamental, underlying goal or goals you hope to accomplish by being open? What keeps you motivated? Why do you spend your precious little free time on my blog, reading this post and this question? If each of us put some thought and some public reflective writing into this question, the field would likely be greatly served. The more honest and open you are in your response, the more useful the exercise will be for you and for us.

George has responded to my response to his earlier post as a comment on my recent post. It’s a great bit of thinking and writing worthy of being its own post! I respond below:

My point is that openness is the virtue to be pursued (I feel silly making this statement to you – you’ve done more for this “movement” than almost anyone else has). Not sorta-openness. Or sorta-affordable openness. Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is the target. Settling for affordable quasi-openness may sell cheaper textbooks and may delay more foundational change.

I’m not sure how content licensed By-NC-SA can be considered sorta-open, unless we’re heading down the path toward an NC discussion (let’s please not go there). Full openness to download, edit, reuse, add media, etc. is what people have with FWK books because that’s what the license provides. What is the criticism here?

What are our organizational models missing when individuals are not capable of collaborating in writing complex resources (like textbooks)? Is it about incentives?

At least partly, if not primarily, yes.

Could we have networks of educators write textbooks?

With the proper incentives, of course we could. If we paid each faculty member $10,000 I bet we could get them to participate.

Let’s say a group of psychologist profs got together and decided to write a full text for first year students and posted resources in a wiki.

But – and I’m not trying to be thick-headed here – wouldn’t the size of the group of profs need to be rather large before this activity became interesting to you? When you say ‘a group of psychology profs’ I think of a group of 5 plus or minus a few. Is that a network? How is it different from five authors who develop a By-NC-SA textbook for FWK? In theory, one difference might be that anyone outside the core group could contribute to the text, but in practice we see that participation in “wikibook” projects from outside the core group is basically nonexistent.

If FWK is trying “trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can” why not experiment in serving as an infrastructure role in openness at this self-organizing level with profs?

(A) Because Wikieducator, Wikibooks, PBWorks, and a hundred other sites already provide the infrastructure necessary for the kind of experiments you’re talking about. (B) Because all the data to date confirm that those experiments fail to result in quality textbooks. In other words, the world doesn’t need FWK to enable these experiments – they’re already sufficiently enabled and they’re already failing to succeed.

Should we still be thinking in textbooks? What is it about textbooks that is so valuable that we transition the concept fully into the digital world? Maybe we should first abandon the textbook model.

We don’t get a clean slate when thinking about changing a system – we have to respond to the realities of the system. Some in the open education community seem to be arriving at a conclusion along the lines of, “the constraints of higher education are too confining, so let’s disconnect ourselves from HE completely and go innovate over there.” I wish them luck.

Does FWK permit one student in a class to download a book and then distribute copies to other classmates without fee? Can an educator download the book, copy and paste into a wiki and then edit it to customize the text?

Yes, full stop. The license FWK uses for all of its books, CC By-NC-SA, allows anyone and everyone to download, adapt, and redistribute the book, students and educators alike.

Collaboratively produced resources, in the wikieducator sense, are better suited for reuse because, in theory at least, no one has a motive – such as profit – other than to produce learning resources… Even the small reading window for reading a text online is an illustration of control exerted to influence purchasing the text. If a group/network collaborates on the text, then (again) in theory, they wouldn’t need to play “soft control” games of this nature.

There’s a lot of “in theory” in this line of thought. (As Firefly’s Jane once said, “I smell a lot of ‘if’ coming off of this plan.”) “In theory” is difficult for me to accept given the rather large amount of actual data and experience available to us to base our judgments on.

Pure openness would be the target.

I actually just finished blogging about this in Feeling Out of Place.

In my view, if it (research, course content) comes from the public purse it belongs to the public. If it’s privately funded, it’s a different matter. FWK is a private entity that is in business to make a profit. Nothing in the world wrong with that. But is it the best way for academics to approach opening up content/curricular resources?

It depends on their goal. To me, openness is a means not an end. So, to answer your question, we must ask what is the faculty member’s goal in being open? If “being open” has become the goal in and unto itself, I would propose that there is a problem.

David, whether you lay claim to the title or not, you are the (or at least “an”) ideological leader of openness in education. Which is why I was a bit surprised to see you accept the FWK model. I’m sure there are considerations I’m not aware of, or philosophical views that are perhaps not as strident as might be expected from a leading figure. To me, it seems to be trying to balance openness with economics… and the economic model has precedence (i.e. charges for downloads of digital versions).

One of the greatest heartbreaks of my life came when I left USU to come to BYU. For a complexity of reasons, some of which were my own fault, when I left USU the grant funding for many of the “open” projects at USU ended. Within 30 days of my coming to BYU, much of what I had worked to build over a 5 year period was gone. It was personally devastating. I committed to myself then that I would never again waste my effort on projects that can disappear overnight when grant money dries up. This has led me to adopt a keen focus on the sustainability of open education projects (see, for example, the study on making OCW pay for itself we’re conducting at BYU). If open education is to have a long-term impact we have to insure that it will survive over time. So, when you think you see an emphasis on economics in my work you are quite perceptive and absoultely right. However, I’m only interested in the sustainability of open projects – I have no interest in the sustainability of pseudo-open projects.

When Jeff and Eric first approached me about being involved in FWK (I’m not a founder, but am hire number one), my very first thoughts were “Are these guys going to do it right? Are they going to (1) get the openness right and (2) be sustainable enough to make a large-scale, long-lasting difference? Or are they going to take some half-open approach and/or botch the business part of it and be gone three years from now?” I was convinced FWK was going to get the business part of it right, and could sense that they wanted to get the openness part right. That’s why I joined as Chief Openness Officer – my core function is to make sure we get the openness part right. And because FWK produces Creative Commons licensed textbooks that are just as open as any content you will find anywhere, and because we have 40,000 students lined up for fall, I think the openness and the sustainability aspects of our work are going awesomely.

Your work around advancing openness, by nature of this role, will be subject to scrutiny. If you have a view on copyright or commercial reuse, it will be criticized. If you have a view on how to increase the impact of openness at the school or university level, it will be scrutinized. Is it fair? No. But that’s a burden that comes with the role.

No, the increased scrutiny is not fair at all – it is a great blessing that very few people have access to. It is a manifestation of the classic problem of the “rich getting richer” – I think I have some reasonable ideas on the topic of openness and education. These draw scrutiny, which I weigh seriously. Then my reasonable ideas get a little better, which gets them pushed out further, which draws further scrutiny, etc. Its a virtuous cycle that I am deeply grateful for; I actually feel guilty sometimes that other people’s ideas don’t get the “airtime” and the scrutiny that mine do.

And I’m enjoying this specific conversation that we’re having quite a bit.

I had an odd sensation at the recent conference Open Education 2009. As you know, I founded the conference and have been deeply involved in its planning and execution each year. This year was really, truly excellent in that I was surrounded by so many smart, thoughtful, genuinely goodhearted friends both old and new. But the more conversations I had, the more out of place I felt. Something is changing in our field.

While I think everyone in the field of “open education” is dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity, there is an increasingly radical element within the field – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. At the conference I heard a number of people say that things would be greatly improved if we could just get rid of all the institutions of formal education. I once heard a follow up comment, “and governments, too.” I turned to laugh at his joke, but saw that he was serious. This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.

I am concerned that open education is on the path to becoming as radicalized as the free software movement had in the late 1990s.

After a few years of Richard Stallman telling people that they had to unconditionally support free software and completely reject proprietary software – unless they were vile, unworthy, valueless, evil human beings – people got sick of being insulted. Additionally, the messaging of “free software” was wrong, which was problematic as well. Even today, the FSF website says, “We call this free software, because the user is free.” Huh? Because an agent capable of action (a user) has been granted certain rights you’re going to anthropomorphize 1s and 0s (software)? How does that follow? Everyone knows that software is incapable of experiencing or exercising freedom, so when they hear the term “free software” they are left to conclude that “free software” can only mean software that doesn’t cost anything. But I digress…

Anyway, telling people they are immoral wretches if they disagree with you turns out to be a poor strategy for motivating most people. So in early 1998, a group split off from the free software movement and became the “open source” movement. They were very careful to be pragmatic (rather than dogmatic) in their approach, and they tried hard to craft a message that was easier to understand. But the field was split (philosophically and methodologically) forever. This is unfortunate because energies are divided, efforts are duplicated, and worst of all, time is wasted on perhaps THE most pointless arguments ever known to mankind.

Now, don’t get me wrong – open education is not at this crossroads yet. We don’t really have a Richard in our field yet that people are rallying around and strapping bombs to their chests for. However, we need to get this conversation going before we reach a real crisis.

What is our collective purpose? I believe it is to increase access to educational opportunity.

As I recently tweeted, openness is a means, not the end. Increasing access should be the “end” of our efforts. Making everything open is not our goal. (Stephen has previously outlined a number of possible scenarios in which things are made open but there is no net increase in access.) Making things open is only one means to then end of increasing access. However, we can look around the community and see individuals who seem to have confused the means with the ends, and have made their ultimate goal the opening of all educational content. Problematically, when the means become the end, new means that might better achieve the original end are overlooked and frowned upon.

So, am I misunderstanding something? Or missing the boat? Perhaps I’m just not sufficiently radical to be involved in this field anymore?

George Siemens has written a very thoughtful analysis of Flat World Knowledge (and the change process generally) titled Change that prevents real change. I want to respond to a few of his thoughts.

FWK will succeed for the wrong reasons. It will succeed because it tweaks the existing model of textbooks just enough to disrupt publishers, but not enough to disrupt the industry as a whole. FWK is integrated into the system of education: authors, bookstores, faculty, and students. It uses existing reward metrics (recognition and a little bit of revenue for the author) and addresses the biggest complaint students have about textbooks: costs. Essentially, the existing system is used as the infrastructure for FWK model. And that’s the problem.

I would argue that using the existing system as infrastructure is the most brilliant part of the FWK strategy (disclosure: I am the Chief Openness Officer of FWK). Because FWK recognizes and works within the existing context, it is actually able to affect real change. Over 400 faculty and 40,000 students will use openly licensed, DRM-free FWK textbooks this fall – enabling extensive, legal faculty localization of materials and saving students and their parents over $3 million. No matter how you measure it, FWK will have a larger direct impact on higher education affordability this fall than all of the previous open educational resources projects have had combined.

With regard to educational reform, our thinking should be future-focused. What is the impact of FWK? Is there a better way? Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model? What could that possibly look like?

There is undoubtedly a better way – no right thinking person or organization will claim that they have discovered the universal best way to do anything that can never be improved upon throughout all eternity. In answer to the question “Can we reduce costs and promote openness in an anti-textbook model?” the answer is also yes. However, there is a very small number of situations in which an anti-textbook model exists. Textbooks are a critical piece of higher education, whether we like it or not. The question is like asking, “Can we improve the speed of race cars in an anti-tire model.” Cars today have tires – they just do. In a future world they may not. And in a future world, where higher education doesn’t rely heavily and extensively on textbooks, there may be an opportunity to affect a large-scale change in affordability of content without working with textbooks. But that future world is not here today. There is a critical need for people like George who are willing to dedicate their energy and resources to decade or multi-decade reforms. And I can confidently say that creating an broad culture of rejecting textbooks in higher education is at least a ten year project, if not a longer one.

Perhaps we should pursue a more visionary approach – one that is tied to high ideals and provides the greatest number of future options.

As I said above, long-term work creating viable future options is something important that desperately needs doing. However, improving affordability and accessibility for students taking courses fall 2009 is important as well. At this point in my career I want to help as many people as I can here and now. When the future scenario becomes the current scenario, I’ll adapt my work for that context to help as many people as I can. This is FWK’s approach as well. You certainly can’t build a sustainable business that makes a large-scale impact on affordability and accessibility if your assumptions about the market won’t be true for another 10 years.

George reviews arguments from Scientific American, myself, and Yochai Benkler, all of which argue empirically (instead of theoretically) based on existing books (and not potential future books), that collaboratively written textbooks fare poorly in comparison with textbooks written by one or a few authors.

Simply stating that collaborative projects have to date not produced the quality of resources that has been produced under the traditional authorship model is not satisfactory… It’s too early to convincingly declare select-authorship models of textbooks to be superior to wiki-created textbooks. Or, if we do make the declaration (as Wiley, Benkler and others have done), we need to focus on understanding why. It seems wrong to declare that connected intelligence is not capable of achieving the same level of quality as individual intelligence.

I don’t think anyone is making a blanket judgment or general statement about what “connected intelligence” is or is not capable of doing. I think we’re saying something very specific about textbooks. We’re saying that all the empirical data indicate that “select-authorship models of textbooks [are] superior to wiki-created textbooks.” Neither George nor anyone else who is unhappy with this conclusion has pointed to counter-examples in their arguments; as far as I know there’s not even a single exception to this rule. The argument is always one of potential, an argument about what could be. I would love to be proven wrong on this point, because the implications for the scalable provisioning of high-quality initial content would be earth-shattering. However, without a single positive example, and with several less than positive examples, I won’t allow myself to be caught up in the hype.

Books on the [FWK] site are primarily confined to business and finance – another drawback: mediators seek areas of highest return first.

This is a simple misunderstanding. FWK started with business textbooks because the company’s two founders both came out of the business textbook division of a major publisher, and this is the world they know best. We’re expanding very quickly into general education areas now that we’re up and running.

The concept is open enough to keep many revolutionaries at bay (isn’t that often the main intent of partial change? provide enough change to satisfy the slightly less peripheral agitators? Staged or transitional change often plays a negative role in this regard. Partial change now pushes substantial change into the future).

I would respectfully disagree. I think taking reasonably-sized steps forward is a great idea. No one in FWK is trying to keep revolutionaries at bay – on the contrary, we’re trying to disrupt the status quo as much as we can as quickly as we can.

Now, if we can just find a way to make the pursuit of highest ideals (open & collaboratively produced textbooks produced by communities/networks of vested participants in this case) as rewarding (or compelling) as the pursuit of ‘good enough’.

It’s unclear to me why a collaboratively produced textbook is more virtuous than one produced by one to four individuals. Also, the conversation quickly devolves into a Sorites paradox: how many individuals need to be involved in writing before the textbook becomes virtuous?

At one point in the article, George draws a distinction between “Convenient Change vs Principled Change.” Another way to frame the difference between the approaches he describes is “Immediately Actionable Change vs Boil the Ocean Change.” On the ground people recognize that the world needs ocean boilers; I hope that on-the-grounders can get some respect as well.

Almost everyone has heard of “remixing” – taking existing cultural artifacts like songs, films, images, and texts, and combining these into new cultural artifacts. In the Wikipedia article about Lessig’s 2008 book Remix, we read:

(Youth) quote content from various sources to create something new. Thus, the remix provides a commentary on the sounds and images it utilizes the same way a critical essay provides commentary on the texts it quotes. One of Lessig’s favorite remix examples is the Bush and Blair Love Song which remixes images of President Bush and Tony Blair to make it appear as if they are lip-synching Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love”. “The message couldn’t be more powerful: an emasculated Britain,as captured in the puppy love of its leader for Bush. This remix in Lessig’s eyes is exemplary of the power this type of expression holds – to not tell but show. Using preexisting images is vital to the art form because the production of meaning draws heavily on cultural reference an image or sound brings with it.

Their meaning comes not from the content of what they say; it comes from the reference, which is expressible only if it is the original that gets used. (p.74)

If it’s true that the accumulated meanings of source materials combine to generate the meaning of a remix, then one way to change the meaning of a cultural artifact is to change its references – or to create new references within an existing artifact where none existed before. I call this process “unmixing.”

The first and easiest example of unmixing I could imagine was taking a textual document and linking individual phrases in the document to other documents on the web where those phrases appear verbatim – in effect, attributing the author’s words to another source even though the author never relied on that source when creating the document. Depending on the context and meaning of the sources you choose, the addition of simple linked references can significantly alter the meaning of the original text without changing any of the words in the text itself.

As an example, I’ve published section one of the unmixed Preface to Lessig’s Remix. Using a script, I broke the first section of the Preface into three word phrases, asked Yahoo BOSS to find pages that contained those exact three word phrases, and then rewrote this section of the Preface with each and every word attributed by link to another source elsewhere online. Strictly speaking, I don’t think you need to re-reference every single word in a document to unmix it, but since I was doing this unmix programmatically it seemed appropriate. (Hint: You’ll need to mouse over the text to make the links light up. Too much visual noise otherwise.)

Now, you may argue that these phrase attributions – while exact and correct – are rather random, and therefore don’t do much to significantly change the meaning of the text. I think the simple act of unmixing this particular text speaks volumes. But in the coming weeks and months I’ll publish additional unmixes created with more thought and care to demonstrate the power of the genre. Or perhaps you’ll beat me to it?

Open Education News points to a Scientific American article covering the California Learning Resource Network’s reviews of 16 open science and math textbooks for coverage of CA state standards. These reviews support schools making adoption decisions about whether or not open textbooks are of sufficient breadth and quality to be formally adopted in place of commercial textbooks.

Brendan Borrell, the SA article’s author, points out that “the front-runners [in the CLRN reviews] were typically written by just one or several authors, and the one major organization that has fully embraced a Wiki approach failed to impress CLRN reviewers.” This could have been, and in fact was, predicted long before.

A number of years ago, the USU Center for Open and Sustainable Learning commissioned noted open source expert Yochai Benkler to write a monograph applying his “comons-based peer production” model to educational resources. The result was Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials. In this 28 page monograph, Benkler argues that the distributed, “Wikipedia model” of content production does not work for textbooks:

Textbooks that look and feel like textbooks, and, more importantly, that comply with education department requirements, are not quite as susceptible to modularization as an encyclopedia or a newsletter like Slashdot. The most successful book on Wikibooks, for example, is the cookbook. But the cookbook had 1301 “chapters” as of July of 2005. In other words, each module was effectively a single recipe. In this, it is much more like Wikipedia, with discrete, small contributions as the minimal module. Real textbooks appear to reside somewhere between a novel and an encyclopedia in the degree to which they can be modularized, or at least in the degree of effort required to integrate the modules into a coherent whole recognizable as a textbook…

At the moment, however, no working project has in fact implemented a platform that modularizes the work in sufficiently fine-grained chunks to allow a large pool of contributors. As I have elsewhere discussed in great detail, the size of the potential pool of contributors – and therefore the probability that the right person with the right skills, motivation, and time will be available for the job – is inversely related to the granularity of the modules. The larger the granules the more is required of each contributor, the smaller the set of agents who will be willing and able to take a crack at the work. On the other hand, the granularity is determined by the cost of integration—you cannot use modules that are so fine that the cost of integrating them is higher than the value of including the module. The case of textbooks seems to be, at present, precisely at the stage where the minimal granularity of the modules in some projects – like FHSST – is too large to capture the number of contributions necessary to make the project move along quickly and gain momentum, whereas the cost of integration in others, like WikiBooks, is so high that most of the projects languish with a module here, and module there, and no integration.

Yochai’s argument is part of the reason Flat World Knowledge uses the “a few expert authors model” for its open source textbooks, as opposed to a come-one-come-all volunteer-based approach. CA’s initial review of the open high school textbooks available today seems to bear Yochai’s arguments out.

I’ve newly met a number of people at the annual family reunion that is Open Education 2009 (#opened09). And while you’re never supposed to single people out (esp. because doing so means you’re passing over many others), I must admit that meeting Dave Cormier has been one of the highlights of this year’s conference for me.

After the film screening tonight we got to talking… Warning: poor summary of Dave’s thinking coming up here:

Dave finds himself in a quandry – in order to share things with others he first has to claim ownership in order to assert his legal right to share (via an open license). Most of the things we “make” are really amalgams of so much that’s come before, can we even rightly claim ownership? The current system forces us to if we want to share. The fact that so many of us use an open license so readily just shows how subservient we are to the copyright overlords, and perpetuates and strengthens the very system we believe is so horribly broken.

Leigh made some related comments, but didn’t join us for our evening saunter across Van City.

Dave’s quandry got me to thinking… When your country is a signatory to Berne, everything you create is automatically copyrighted to the full extent of the law whether you desire that “protection” or not. That’s the law. Creative Commons acknowledges and accepts the law, and promotes a way of thinking that says, “Ok, you’ve copyrighted my work without my asking, and now I’m going to have to go to the trouble of formally licensing it so I can share it with others.” One person might see CC as a brilliant hack of the copyright / licensing system against itself; I can also appreciate the perspective that says our use of CC simply perpetuates the brokenness without making progress toward an improvement in the system.

But this whole problem is due to Berne. If the government didn’t automatically copyright my works for me – whether I wanted them to or not – I wouldn’t need a CC license. I could just share with people.

Now, in the US CC offers a public domain dedication (which is NOT a license). The dedication is a mechanism for undoing what Berne has done and placing your work back in an uncopyrighted state so that you can share it without the need for licensing agreements, etc. So it occurred to me tonight walking through Vancouver with Dave… if a person can undo Berne on a case by case basis using the CC domain dedication or a similar legal mechanism… couldn’t you do it with respect to all works you create from a certain point in time forward, indefinitely?

In other words, can’t an individual opt out of Berne?

What would a legal instrument that accomplished this opting out look like? Perhaps rejecting the (c) paradigm one work at a time (by CC licensing individual works) isn’t sending a strong enough message to the people who make policy. Perhaps if people rejected the entire paradigm by completely and permanently opting out of Berne someone would notice that we’re highly dissatisfied.

(Note: What would the unintended consequences be of opting out of Berne? Could the instrument that accomplished the opting out be written in such a way that, if a person occasionally decided they wanted copyright protection, they could still choose to receive it (e.g., by registering their work with the Copyright Office)?)

Stephen links to some responses to the day-long pre-conference “event” we held in Vancouver. I was always befuddled that people wanted to come sit in on the conversation, but 50 or so did. Many more apparently watched the stream from a distance.

David Porter seems writes, with surprise and disappointment:

Watched the screencast this morning of the Wiley Downes Dialogue from OpenEd09. Couldn’t help thinking phase change when the discussion crisscrossed terrain that has been traveled many times before at various conferences, forums and meetings since about 2000. “It’s deja vu all over again,” as Yogi Berra said when describing repeated back-to-back home runs by Mantle and Maris in the early 60s. But it was more like veja du for me – I know I’ve been a party to these conversations countless times before. The discussions/arguments continue to hover around definitions, clarifications of terms, and wishful thinking about an education system that is what it is….

Feels like the theory, innovation and advocacy phase of the open educational resource (OER) movement is fast approaching its “best before date.”

I’m not sure what he was expecting. Stephen and I have been disagreeing – exclusively in writing – about things for almost a decade, and this conversation was billed as nothing more than “let’s get together in a room where we can actually talk to each other in real-time and see how much of this we really disagree about and how much of it is failure to communicate.” So of course we rehashed our old arguments. Rehashing old arguments face-to-face was the only plan for the day from the very outset. Why is anyone surprised we didn’t break lots of new ground in our conversation?

(And it turns out that yes, we apparently do communicate fairly effectively in writing and yes, we really do disagree about wide range of things.)