I want to respond to a few comments and questions inspired by my last post on Open Content:

Jared Stein brings up two persistent concerns:

Engaging in openness diminishes potential profitability for faculty/author or institution/supporter [source]
It’s funny that Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift has just come up on Twitter this morning, because I think it provides one of many answers. I truly believe that the grounds of the entire educational enterprise is shifting (or fracturing, with part moving) toward a what Hyde calls “erotic commerce” in the sense that affinities, social bonds and binding attraction become a/an important coin of the realm. As you heard my boss say– if the value of the institution or faculty member is content, then they are doomed. They need to sell something else– as in selling services and selling themselves. The artificial scarcity that educational institutions created and thrived upon is simply washing away under the weight of the internet, the participatory web, social networks, personal publishing platforms, etc. In practical terms I suspect that those who would buy the content alone are a largely disparate set than those who consume it when it’s free.

Engaging in remixable openness alters/diminishes the original (or founding) author’s reputation or identity [source]
Diminishment is just one of many kinds of potential alteration and not the most likely (in my experience). Engaging in the realm of open content will alter the reputation and identity of the participant. In one way, the act of giving provides an enhancement of one’s reputation and identity (or even an instantiation of the same in a whole new realm), but the knife certainly can cut both ways. For the teacher, like the learner, there is risk and vulnerability in this kind of authentic engagement. Frankly, if an educator is unwilling to engage openly for fear of their reputation then they probably shouldn’t be teaching. The related issues of attribution, licensing, and principled use are likewise complicated. For the most part I don’t consider the pieces, parts and artifacts of education to be artistic objects in quite the same way that I do traditional art or projects that might derive from– and draw on– teaching. I’m not a copyright radical of the “abolish all copyright” school either.

Scott Leslie writes:

re: “open content initiatives are producing lightweight, shallow, shovelware” While sometimes it is true that the complaint here is about the quality of the content, it’s also about the sustainability of it. On the former you are likely right, on the later – heed the warning at your own peril. I understand things have to start somewhere, but when they start with such a linear, static publishing model, it’s no big surprise at the related pricetags per course, nor that they find it difficult to keep running. That’s how I often read this complaint.

There’s a paradox regarding all that lightweight content. If a truly open posture is adopted as an ordinary part of teaching, moving beyond discrete content-based initiatives to the “next” or “higher” phase of open education– which everyone appears to agree is desirable– then we are going to see a lot more “shovelware” not less. Which is why I think that the value of that kind of product– which is very different in an open environment than one which is siloed– needs to be re-examined and re-understood.

If posting complete courses and our relationship with the OCWC were the only thing we were doing to promote openness and if, as a distance education provider, we weren’t as a matter of course (har) creating curriculum that can feed with relatively little effort into that part of our engagement, sustainability would be a larger concern. I’m also not convinced that– as Mike Caulfield notes– that the (only) answer to sustainability is to move open activities outside the institution. I think that’s one of many correct answers that should work in tandem with creating a capitalized (sorry) institutional position w/r/t contributing to open education activities. There’s a surprising amount of binary thinking going on in the whole area right now, implying many mutual exclusions– which is ironic given that we are seeing, at the same time, a recognition that we must base our educational engagement on such zero-sum notions.

The reality is, creating some of the other kinds of material that I believe is needed– in particular, completely developed courses enriched from end-to-end, designed for sustained engagement by independent learners– is unlikely to ever be created outside of purposeful, funded initiatives. The overhead and demands are just too great for such an audience to be properly addressed without specific adaptations and effort. But that’s just one part of our fiendish plan! Beyond and in addition to that, I agree with the spirit here (and with Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield and Brian Lamb and etc among others), that there is more and further work to be done.

Scott continues:

OER existed long before OCW (though maybe the fancy moniker ‘OER’ hadn’t been applied to them yet) and can and does easily exist without it. You are right, they are not the “bad guys,” not at all, and clearly have had a big role in promoting the open education “movement.” We should be grateful. I am glad if being associated with OCW is helping your institution open up some content. That’s great. But they do, unabashedly, work at the “institutional” level. I do not think there is anything *inherent* in OCWC that prohibits institutions from adopting openness models that would encourage *individuals* to share in ways that harness their *own* motivations and networks, but it does seem to have promoted practices in which the sharing always occurs under the institution’s own brand in a top down fashion. So again, I’d just suggest that in moving ahead on your own, take on some of the real lessons about catalysts and inhibitors to sharing that I think people with years of experience in OER projects have been trying to reflect on, and maybe see if there is a way to innovate so that UAF gets both the benefits of the OCW association/brand, but doesn’t necessarily recreate another institution-centric (under-motivated, chronically seeking funds, etc) effort.

Why is “movement” in quotes?

I’m not sure what part of “OCW membership is just one part of our activities” you don’t believe. I’m not sure why the fact that the web presence for our project(s) in this area is explicitly OER not OCW and my very public shout-out to your free learning site, noting that what we seek is to create a zeitgeist of openness in which the OCW (as valuable as I continue to think they are) and even discrete “courses” only play one part, is unbelievable. I keep reiterating these things and yet these issues about the history of open resources and institutional liabilities keeps coming back. It’s frustrating because this whole back and forth seems like one in which I am talking about X as a matter of practical focus of this particular discussion, but some are taking that focus on X as some kind of slight against– or ignorance of– Y and Z. Taking this comment by point:

I don’t think branding must intrinsically mean that individual attribution and effort is discarded. For those things that end up “on” the institutional site, the presence of the University banner at the top of the page doesn’t diminish the content. That being said, that kind of content is just one of our efforts to promote open sharing. All of our faculty development and our whole philosophy of educator and student needs is based on pushing much of the educational process out into the open. Nothing in our push for Information Fluency, our development framework, our focus on developing the PLE has the slightest mandate towards sharing through the institution… if anything it is just the opposite. Sharing material through use of our OER site is, in fact, intended to be an atypical part of the big picture.

As for paying attention to “people with years of experience”– well, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. That’s what these blog entries and discussion are all about. I’m not wandering around reading nothing but my own words. But what I am getting from that sentence is an implication that I must agree with those people based on that experience. I reserve my right to disagree. In fact, since you mention innovation, I’ll note that typically the last people and places you turn to when trying to innovate are the incumbent organizations and the people operating in the area already as innovation almost never happens from within. Which may in the end doom all institutional activities, but until I leave the institution I’ll just have to keep trying.

[Addendum: Scott has just posted another comment I'm not going to delve into because I agree with pretty much everything he says with the caveat that-- as I think he is saying toward the end of his comment-- I don't believe the two different directions he accurately sees have to be mutually exclusive. If I had to pick one, I'd surely pick the same one. But not only do I not believe I have to choose just one, but it looks like Scott makes the case for me in his last paragraph. Despite that, I have my own reservations about what institutions are capable of, which could ultimately result in necessitating that I leave my own. It wouldn't be the first time I've considered it!]