Open Content Is So, Like, Yesterday
This is a fascinating article, one that deserves more attention than I can give it in this short item. Chris Lott defends (what he perceives to be) the OER movement against (what he perceives to be) its critics - people like Brian Lamb and Leigh Blackall. These two veterans of open content and open access can defend themselves, and certainly don't need my help. But they are right and Lott is wrong - the point of the OER movement continues largely to be, as the OECD report states, Giving Knowledge For Free, while the real open content movement is about (in my view), "volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control." That doesn't mean people like Mike Caulfield do not work hard and do not deserve our support - they do. But, of course, all of us do. And that doesn't mean that the OCWC isn't one of the good guys - they mean well, but you know, it's about sharing control, and I see no evidence that the big universities, their professors, sponsors and advertisers are about to do anything like that any time soon. P.S. Tony Hirst on this is worth a read, too. Chris Lott, Ruminate, November 25, 2008. [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Open Content, Canada, Gaming, Learning Object Repositories, Project Based Learning, OpenCourseWare, Tuition and Student Fees, Open Access, Web Logs, Online Learning, Marketing] [Previous][Next]Comments
Re: Open Content Is So
The most wrong thing here is your interpretation of my article as being about something much more than it is. There are only two narrow "defenses" involved: the importance of continuing to share content and the help that the OCWC has been in facilitating that activity. I don't work for a big university, we don't have a sponsor, sharing through the OCWC is just one aspect of our engagement, and as I made clear-- if you'd read the article(s) and what it says rather than reading what you want to be there-- I agree with you that the open education movement is about much more than just sharing content. My post was a reaction to a very narrow set of circumstances, primarily not wanting the importance of useful sharing to get lost in the rhetoric being volleyed about to promote those further aspects of open edication, such as sharing process, context, and activities. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]
Re: Open Content Is So
"And that doesn't mean that the OCWC isn't one of the good guys - they mean well, but you know, it's about sharing control, and I see no evidence that the big universities, their professors, sponsors and advertisers are about to do anything like that any time soon."
MIT OCW is already using a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Not fully open in my book (it uses the NC clause) but pretty impressive for a major, established institution.
And, of course, creation of open content doesn't depend on major institutions opening up - Wikipedia's success hasn't been dependent on Britannica using an open license.
Chriswaterguy, Appropedia.org [Comment]
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