The conference was awesome. Lots of people have already recapped the conference itself – I’m not going to even try to add to that. I’m also not going to write a post about how fracking awesome everyone is, listing them all by name. I had a blast talking to everyone. They all rock. I am honoured to have had the chance to meet so many great new people, and to hang out with so many old friends. Blah blah blah…

What I was struck by was the ways I found the conference changing how I was thinking about education, openness, and inclusion. I felt a similar shift at the first Open Education conference I attended back in 2007, but this was a much deeper, more pervasive feeling.

Open Education is not about Resources

Although many of the sessions touched on Open Education Resources (OER, Learning Objects, content, etc…) there was a strong consensus that education is about so much more than content, and is also so much more than the tools and technologies used to present the content and connect the learners. This was a refreshing stance, as we seem to be highly content- and technology-centric when thinking about education (and Open Education, specifically). How do we shift the focus from content to interaction? From publishing and/or consuming to interaction and engagement? There were some interesting conversations about this, and although I don’t think there can be any solid answers, the fact that we’re looking at this stuff as more than just content, at education as more than just broadcast/receive, is a good sign.

Openness

Scott Leslie talks about “planning to share” vs. “just going ahead and sharing” – and the most interesting projects (and non-projects) all shared this theme. There were no RFPs, no committees, no Advisory Boards. People just started sharing. And that’s the only part of Openness that matters. It’s not about licenses, copyright, or anything other than just sharing what you’re doing.

And, there is also some hypocrisy in “open” projects – for example, the showing of a very short clip of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, at an education conference, in an art gallery, apparently cost over $100. And the distributors wanted over $300 to let us watch the entire movie. A movie that ends by saying “Download this movie” – and is not legally downloadable within Canada, even though it was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Openness is not about licensing, it’s about sharing. And locking a movie that is inherently about sharing behind a paywall is breaking the spirit of openness. Hypocrisy.

Tribalism

At an evening session on copyright, Sonny Assu presented some of his work – where he appropriated many of the commercial symbols that have been pushed on us and have become part of our cultural heritage. He talked about how we now use these symbols as parts of our selected tribal identities. The tribe of the $5 coffee cup. The tribe of the white earbuds. This got me thinking about everything I saw in terms of tribalism and identity – which tribes or shared cultural groups do I broadcast membership in? What does that mean, for how other people perceive me? Do they see the symbols of the group identity? How does my perception of others’ group identities affect my interactions with them? How does this affect the relationships that are crucial in education? Lots of stuff to think about, and no answers to come.

Inclusion

Following on the thoughts of inclusion, and on the strong sense of male dominance at the conference (which was a veritable sausage party), I started thinking much more about inclusion. If the open education conference was so strongly over-represented by white males who shared similar backgrounds, why is that? If it’s not through active exclusion (there is no club to join, no registry to sign, no approval process), it may be through a sense of inclusion or non-inclusion. Why are women, people of colour, people of various other backgrounds, not as strongly represented here? Are they missing because they don’t feel welcome? Do they perceive a risk in joining the community? Do they see a barrier to entry? The middle-aged white dudes may not see barriers and risks, but are they tangible for others?

If so, what can be done to encourage others to actively participate in the community? Is that even something that is desirable for everyone? Does everyone’s participation need to be visible to be valid?

But… I said at the top of this post that the participants were extremely diverse. WTF? well, they were, compared to some other edu- and tech- conference. But were hardly diverse, when put into a global perspective. Yes, people were there from a long list of countries, and from a long list of institutions, but almost all shared a similar privileged western background.

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Photo by Diego Leal

I think I’m definitely falling down on the academic rigour of my responses – I should be providing a much deeper response, rather than just barfing out some thoughts and questions. I’ll try to pick it up for week 3.

There is a very strong overlap between “Open Educational Resources” and “Learning Objects” – so, what is the difference? Why should anyone care about OER, when LO failed? LO had a strong focus on metadata, on machine-mediated interoperability. OER is focused more on the content and the license. There are no technical standards to define an OER, merely the fact that someone created an educational resource (however that is defined) and decided to release it under an open license (typically, CreativeCommons). Because interoperability is not the primary goal, the content creators are primarily solving their immediate needs for content, and secondarily offering the content for reuse. Learning Objects began and ended with metadata, and as a result never really got much traction.

In my personal experience, I share my content freely under a simple CreativeCommons Attribution license, not out of some sense of altruism, but because it doesn’t cost me anything to do so – either in time or resources. I create and publish content primarily for my own use, applying the CC By: license, and if someone else can benefit, then so be it. But sharing is not the primary goal of the activities of creating and publishing content. As a result, I’ve had photographs on magazine covers, published in books, used in board games, and in more websites and reports than I can track. All of that reuse was secondary to my initial purpose for creating and publishing the content – even if it has become more important than the original use. An argument could be made that I have lost potential revenue by releasing content for free use (even in a commercial context such as a book or magazine) but if I had locked the content down, that reuse would not have happened anyway. At the very least, sharing costs me nothing (either financially or in time) because the production of this content would have occurred even if the content was not shared. Further, I have had direct requests for separate commercial licensing of materials outside the bounds of CC By: (specifically for projects that couldn’t provide proper attribution) and have granted these licenses as needed – the CreativeCommons license is non-exclusive, providing much flexibility.

From an institutional perspective, I encourage open sharing of academic content wherever I can, for two reasons. First, it’s the right thing to do in order to disseminate the academic content as widely as possible. Second, from an economic point of view, in many cases the development of content has already been paid for by members of the general public – either through taxes which provide governmental financial support for the institution, or by contributions from other governmental sources. As a result, the content is indirectly paid for by the taxpayers, meaning they have a right to benefit from the process.

With this in mind, I think it is important to find processes of producing content whereby it is easier and more efficient to create “open” content than locked or proprietary content. The OpenContentDIY project with Jim is an example of this – using a hosted weblog/CMS application to produce content in a way that makes it easier to do it in the “Open” than not.

OERs and digital content in general is important because of the low cost of distribution – not free, but about as close as possible. There is also a strong environmental incentive – no forests are pulped to generate .PDF documents, and no oil is pumped to transport TCP/IP packets through the fiber optic backbone of the Internet. Also, by selecting an open content format such as HTML, XHTML, XML, or even just a well documented and available file format such as PDF, JPG, PNG or RTF, content is available for use on a wide variety of platforms, and portions of the content is available for reuse in other applications.

One trend that I find very impressive and promising is the growing acceptance of professors to have their students to “go public” (as John Willinsky advocates). I have talked with a professor at a high enrollment course at my university, who plans on having over 1000 undergraduate students collaborate to create open online resources to describe and discuss various topics. This is a strategy that would be impossible without digital content distribution, and would be difficult without open content licenses such as CreativeCommons. At the least, future cohorts of students will have a body of work to use as a starting point for their own projects. Ideally, future cohorts of students will be able to refine and extend the existing body of content, working to evolve the materials over time.

I am unconvinced in the need for repositories and referatories. As long as an OER has been produced using a suitable file format, and has a machine-readable license deed applied to it, tools such as the CreativeCommons Search utility should suffice. Individuals and organizations would be free to publish their content in any location visible to the open Web, and allow the existing infrastructure of Google, Yahoo, and the like to spider and index their resources for all to find and use. There is no need for creating walled gardens or silos of open educational content in the form of repositories or referatories.

I was surprised to see in the assay of OER projects, that they all seem to originate in “have” countries. The first world countries and institutions, releasing content as OER. That is likely to be expected, since these institutions will be more active in content production in general.

Question: Are third world countries seen purely as “consumers” of OER shared by benevolent first world nations?

I would hope to see significant OER production projects originating in third world nations, to foster culturally relevant materials and counter the “cultural imperialism” concerns.

One problem with a rise in available OER materials is the lack of “certification” in the content. There is no content review board, or process to verify accuracy and validity of the content. Conventional content distribution through printed books placed a burden on the publishers and editors, whose names appeared on the book. An OER could be created and published by an individual, without any accreditation or attribution.

Question: How best to determine accuracy and validity? Perhaps this is an opportunity for the repositories and referatories? Services like Merlot provide some of this functionality already, and there are opportunities for other localized services to review and “approve” available OER materials for use in various contexts.

General shift toward individual-centric, collaborative and connective styles of communication. Reminds me a bit of this blog article titled “we are living in good times”.I’m unsure of the need to have a concerted need to force these shifts to be reflected in higher education – appropriate communication strategies will emerge in pockets and spread as needed. Did Gutenberg and his colleagues need to push the printing press as an agent of change in higher education, or did it become adopted because it was a valuable shift in communication technology? Or did modern higher education emerge because of the development of technology…I would argue that a good classroom has never been truly tethered to a place, forcing students to act as consumers to the teachers knowledge producer. Yes, that has been a common pattern, but effective classrooms have always been different.

As students adopt technologies in their personal lives, they apply it to their academic lives as well. It is the job of educators to adapt to the needs and abilities of their students, including technologies and paradigms that are in the students’ repertoires.

I agree that the importance of degrees and credentials is changing, but universities are more than simply job training programs. The goal is not to come out of university after 4 years with a piece of paper to get a job – the goal of a university education, at least a successful one, is to gain experience and understanding that is difficult or impossible to attain outside the context of an academic campus.

On distance learning as a non-solution, Wiley makes a good point – typical online classes are merely digital and mobile versions of dysfunctional traditional classrooms. Sage-on-stage, but online, without the social supports of face-to-face classrooms. Not the way to go.

Open courseware will become more important and relevant if teachers and students are able to separate content from teaching. MIT’s OCW project doesn’t devalue an MIT education by making many of the MIT course materials freely available online. It does extend the reach and relevance of MIT’s instructors. But, the natural extension of this is not having every school release their own versions of course materials in hopes of reproducing this effect, it is in instructors from different schools collaborating to develop a shared set of resources. The power of open courseware is in the potential to bring classes together to build a common library of domain specific content, which can be taught in various ways by individual instructors (or utilized by individuals without an institutional context or teacher).

It can’t really be argued that higher education has “fallen out of step with business, science and everyday life” – but that might not be a bad thing.

Question: Would education as a human right require the creation of a United Nations Department of Education? (an extended or reformulated UNESCO?) Other human rights are relatively straightforward, but education is extremely culturally based – what might be considered education in one culture might be considered propaganda in another (beyond some universal definition of “the basics” – reading/writing a language, basic math, etc… )

Thought: If compulsory education is an artifact of the industrial revolution in the first world, it may be an artifact of the global information economy in the remaining nations.

Universal access to education goes well beyond having available textbooks, or even open courseware resources. There may be political, economic, and social factors that must be addressed before education can be possible. It’s as simple as just fixing the entire world in order to ensure access to education. Not sure why that hasn’t been done yet.

Thought: The concept of universal basic education is attractive, but I worry that it sets up just another arena for imperialism and cultural domination. Countries without resources will have to adopt freely available materials or face potential sanctions. This essentially hands control over global education to the countries that can afford to create and distribute free educational resources – the same countries that would be imposing sanctions if these resources were not effectively adopted. There’s a dangerous potential for conflict of interest and sociocultural imperialism there.

Thought: if implementation in local countries is left to the respective local governments, there will be too many individuals left out through the use of exceptions and caveats (either to protect economic hegemony, or through corruption). The alternative is an externally controlled and implemented education system, which would be universally rejected.Thought: if a human right can be diminished through reservations, exceptions or caveats, it’s not truly a human right. Human rights are non-negotiable. If education is a human right, there can be no exceptions.

“Education should be compulsory until children reach the minimum age for employment” – I find this more than a little depressing. Education is about so much more than just job-training. I’m not sure how to describe that in the form of a requirement, but it’s important that education is seen as more than just preparation for employment. Children need to know that they are more valuable than just as future wage slaves.

I’m realizing that I’m a little squeemish with the idea of mandated universal education. The idea of education-as-right is a great one, but I worry about the implementation. Who gets to define “acceptable basic education” and who gets to provide the curriculum and supporting materials? How will countries and states be convinced to play along? Education is often a state or provincial domain – how to convince everyone that it’s a global/UN concern (even if it is)?

Given that the main obstacle to globally universal access to education isn’t education, but rather political, social, economic and cultural pressures, I am not sure what the initial impact of open education will have. The problem largely isn’t access to content, it’s the role of basic education. If education isn’t valued in a country or region, all the free educational resources in the world aren’t going to make a difference.Having “open access” to materials may also be complicated, as access may be defined differently. If we assume everyone has a computer with internet access (or can reasonably access such a computer) that implies one type of access. The vast majority of the global population doesn’t have access by that definition. Is “access” more along the lines of Google Book, where a truck travels through a region with a satellite dish to download and print books on demand for individuals without internet access? Do we wait for OLPC to hit critical mass? If education is a human right, we can’t wait to fulfill it.

I still need to figure out the logistics – there aren’t any direct flights from Calgary to Logan, so I guess I’ll fly to Salt Lake City and hitchhike the rest of the way.

Unfortunately, I need to leave on the last day of the conference because of family obligations. I’m hoping I can find a flight that means I won’t miss much of the conference.

Of course, this means that I need to buckle down and do some actual writing and work on the material and presentation…

I was given the choice between 2007 Open Content and EDUCAUSE in Seattle. It was a hard choice. Maybe I’ll go to EDUCAUSE 2008? I’ve never been to one of those, either.