OpenEd: Week 14
Once again, this submission is egregiously late, and I apologize. I came back from the Open Translation Tools conference, which was absolutely excellent, and provided me with lots of new ideas and great projects, many relevant to open learning/open education. I will blog more about this soon.
I think one of the reasons for taking so long, apart from time-crunch, was that we are headed towards the end. Indeed, tonight I will try to write my “final” entry. I write final in quotation marks, because although the artificial 15 week structure for this course has come to an end, (I say artificial not in a negative sense, I think these kind of goals, deadlines, etc are essential to keep us working hard together) our collective processes of learning, teaching, advocacy and creation are only just beginning. I hope that this community will continue to stay in touch (it’s wonderful and inspiring to see the very strong Italian community, btw, of people who did not previously know each other. Spero che una notte d’inverno possa condividere una conversazione intensa e una bottiglia di vino con voi tutti :)) Being headed to the end, there is so much I want to say, and when I am in that situation, I tend to put off saying it - I still find letters from my high school years that I started, but never finished.
So instead of trying to cover everything, let me comment on some of what I saw from last week’s submissions. Rob Barton hopes that in ten-years time we will see CC and GFDL licenses become compatible, however this week it was announced that the FSF will change the GFDL in a way that will make this possible. There is still work to be done, but I think this is wonderful news. I am not sure that everything else in Wiley’s article will come to pass quite that easily, but things move in fits and starts, sometimes we might be surprised how fast things happen when they reach a critical threshold (true, in a negative sense, of global warming too, unfortunately).
Megan comments that if we get away from credentials and start evaluating people on a portfolio of their work, young people without work experience would be caught in a Catch-22 of not being able to get a job to collect experience. Partly I think that is already the case today, most jobs are not content with just seeing a university certificate, but another point is that by “portfolio of work” I in no way meant “paid, full-time work”, but rather “things I have achieved and contributed”. There are lots of communities doing valuable things that have low barriers to entry - many programmers who never even finished university have landed top jobs because of their contributions to the open source community. And in fact, ideally university would also be restructured so that more of our work would be useful to others than our Teaching Assistants - at the conference on Open Translation we discussed ways of having language learners work on translation, giving them more meaningful homework, and at the same time producing a lot of free material.
She also discussed Acidscorpio mentioning of the casual learner, and asks if there is any further research on this. I am also interested, since almost all I have learnt in my life, and certainly most of what I have learnt that has been useful in this course, has been done outside of my formal classes - reading books, following blogs, real life discussions, experiences. Finally, she comes with a heartfelt sigh that I can recognize: “One final comment: I really like the idea of having Open Ed, and all kinds of resources online - and am so happy that opportunities are arising. But does anyone else just get absolutely SICK OF BEING ON THE COMPUTER???” I know exactly the feeling - sometimes I feel like I am spending my life in front of the computer, and I remind myself that the computer has come to stand in for so many older technologies. If ten years ago I spent a day reading the newspaper casually over cereal, talking to a distant friend for an hour of the phone, catching up on the latest academic papers, looking up something in the encyclopaedia, hammering out my latest manifesto on my typewriter, enjoying some leisurely reading, and ending the night with an episode of my favorite Chinese soap opera — that would today translate to a solid 8 hours in front of the computer.
This is partly why I am so excited about hybrid ways of learning - I tried to get a local study group for the course going (and Megan and I did meet up once for Ethiopian dinner) because I still value human face2face interaction incredibly highly. I am also very excited about all kinds of mobile media that will allow me to truly sit under a tree in garden reading Cory Doctorow’s latest online novel (fan-translated into Portuguese), or to talk to my friend over Skype on my wifi-enabled handphone on campus. I always try to fight the idea that online and distance learning just means that all of us will spend the rest of our lives locked in our study chambers with high speed internet and no human contact. (Indeed some of my favorite websites are those that connect people in real life, like the wonderful Hospitality Club and Couchsurfing!)
I must respectfully disagree with McGhie Allen, who says that “we must disentangle OER from the commercial world and the pirates who would continually fight to keep barriers to education blocked for their own commercial gain. Education is one area that should be kept separate from profit.” This is exactly what Downes argued about the Cape Town Declaration, and with Wiley I disagree. The key here is CC SA, not NC. In the open source world, there has never been talk about adding an NC clause to the GPL, and right now probably more than half of all open source development is done by big companies and paid programmers. This has benefitted everyone immensly! The SA means that anything that they add will be given back to the community. Of course there will always be hiccups, like discussions on the Tivo-clause in GPL3, but we have been good at addressing these so far.
I say this even coming from a country where university education is completely free (even to foreigners, hint hint). However, even Norway is full of commercial course providers, whether they do in-house training for companies, or give Spanish courses to retired people. I cannot see that prohibiting companies that teach Spanish evening courses from using, adding to and enhancing Spanish OERs for the benefit of all, will help anyone. Indeed, I’d love to see huge training companies get involved, using, modifying and adding to the resources. After all, we will always (hopefully) need people as part of the equation, and they need to get paid somehow, whether by tax money or by user fees. (Incidentally the CC NC is hopelessly problematic, and because of the lack of definition, it also excludes a lot of usage that you might think should be included). Luckily we are seeing a slow migration of content from CC-SA-NC-ND to CC SA or even just CC BY as people learn more about the licenses, and get more comfortable. Indeed this blog was originally CC-SA-NC, and I now changed it a CC-BY.
Catia Harriman comments that the OpenCourseWars story is too US-centric, and indeed it is. But I suppose we shouldn’t fault Wiley for that, he writes about what he know. Rather, we should provide our own perspectives. I am constantly amazed at the amount of distance education in developing countries for example, just recently came across a number of articles about Anadolu university in Turkey which I think has around one million students (interestingly including quite a few students abroad of Turkish decent, like in Germany. This is an interesting aspect of cross-border delivery, will Chinese in Toronto start doing courses at Chinese universities online, instead of at Uni of Toronto?). I am personally very interested in how this will play out in developing countries, and hope to research that in great detail. Perhaps in a few years, I will write the 开放教育战争的故事 (history of open education wars), but I’d much prefer for Chinese learners and educators to write it themselves.
I will save the two last reflection for the next post, and finish here.
Stian
