St8ED.

I think the highlight of GLS 6.0 was the closing keynote by David Wiley. His talk, Openness and the Future of Education, was enlightening, amusing, and educational, everything a closing keynote should be. As luck should have it, I am also reading some other texts on open-sourcing this week, so I now have a few examples to share on the topic. Wiley talked about a professor in the US who, in 2008, claimed copyright on all of his lectures and declared student notes derivative works. The irony is that professors are meant to spread their knowledge, yet this professor is attempting to prevent the spread of his own knowledge. I have included Wiley’s entire slideshow at the end of this post, but two of the slides really stuck out to me. This is the idea that we are moving from a closed, isolated society to a connected, open one. In the second image, he simply changed the words then and now to education and everyday. Truly, it is clear to see that the thinking about openness of academic works is stuck in the yesterday of publishing.

While it is easy to see the value in sharing knowledge, there is a number of fears associated with openness that Wiley didn’t acknowledge. First and foremost there are issues of economics. This is something Steven Weber sort of takes on in his working paper, but at a much grander scale than most academics are concerned about. Putting aside concerns about tenure, there is still something authentic about a published book that a student or peer can hold in his or her hand. Weber talks about gift economies, but I’m not sure academics are lining up to gain social status for giving away intellectual work. We are comfortable giving enough to talk about our work at conferences, but even that is usually in the wake of a recently published or soon to be published article that solidifies our intellectual ownership and the value of the work. I suppose one could argue that open source does not infringe upon that intellectual ownership, but I think there are questions of value associated with open source. Many vocal proponents of open source are those who have already received tenure and/or established themselves as authorities on a given topic. While there is certainly value to the world in opening work to the public, I think we are still negotiating the value to the researcher in these academic situations.

In other situations, such as the open-source software situations Weber talks about, I think open source makes a lot of sense for many reasons. For one, open-source creates competition in the marketplace and likely causes proprietary companies to develop better products. It also gives programmers the opportunity to hone their skills and perhaps qualify for better jobs. Finally, it gives users who cannot afford or do not want proprietary products similar tools that they can then customize for their own needs. I do think that we are moving toward an open marketplace, but that doesn’t mean the transition will be easy! Check out Wiley’s TedTalk and slides below: