Opinions On Open

Recently George Siemens posted some thoughts on the topic of openness as an ideology, and a dialogue began to take shape around whether the open education movement is best served by pragmatists or ideologues. In true blogger fashion, I want to ignore a lot of the context and put my own spin on the topic of openness in education as an ideology, mostly in response to George’s original post.

I believe we shouldn’t bring ideology into what I believe is best formulated as a pragmatic argument. That is to say, I think that the strongest advocacy for openness (in a general sense) is achieved through demonstrating the utility it creates, not the imperative it satisfies. Let me try and spell out why I think that’s true for openness in education. Just to preface (similar to David Wiley’s all-caps disclaimer here), unless otherwise stated when I’m talking about openness I’m speaking in the context of educational content.

George (responding to David Wiley) writes:

Wiley suggests that: “If another person or institution’s approach to openness doesn’t help you meet your goals, then look for help somewhere else – don’t criticize them”.

I disagree. We should criticize. We should debate. By not criticizing gradient views of openness, by failing to establish a solid foundation on which to discuss openness, we are providing an ideology for our generation, not one that serves as a future-focused movement. Openness is a hard topic to discuss ideologically because it’s important. Yes, pragmatics are easier. But pragmatics have a short life span.

I agree with the takeaway from George’s argument, that we should criticize institutions and projects that “get it wrong” in some way and that we should debate and establish foundational principles of terms like “open”, but I disagree with the reasons; that commitment to openness should be at its core an ideological commitment and that we should be providing a timeless ideology for a movement when we define openness.

First let me say that having a set of principles that define a term like “open” is extremely important, not only for community guidance and development but for institutional and government policy. Part of my job at CC Learn is to think and write about how these principles should be formulated. And although I think that there are times where there is a compelling need for ideology, I disagree that formulating the principles of openness should be an ideological activity.

The function of criticizing and debating principles of openness should be a method for advocates to converge on best practices and recommendations on how to extract the most utility from a policy of openness. Foundational principles of “openness” should be aimed at defining the ways in which specific implementations of “open” will extract the most utility rather than to define which behaviors should or should not be be considered “open”.

But why? Why is it that principles of openness based on ideology wouldn’t create the most utility? I think there are a few reasons. George mentions some of the challenges to ideologies, one being that

Reality has a way of eroding the ideologies at implementation.

This is absolutely true. The semantics of an ideology can become contextualized, filtered, altered, watered down, reinterpreted, hijacked, or however you want to describe it (there are many examples, consider the labels “green” or “organic”). George takes this fact to show that we need more ideologues pushing for a strong ideology around open.

But it is for this very weakness that the open education movement should not rely on unhinged ideological forces. Instead, we should encourage decisions made at implementation to be made with full knowledge of the reasons behind the principles of openness, rather than encourage a reliance on the imperative. This way there will be no ideology to subvert, but rather a system of interlocking goals, desires, and shared utility that we want to eventually define certain practices like teaching or publishing a textbook. Teachers should be encouraged to use and create OER because OER have the desirable qualities X and Y, not because the act of using OER is ideologically sound. It’s difficult to convince a state or a district to change their practices because you care a lot about openness. They must be sympathetic (at some level) to why you care about it.

So the semantics of pragmatic advocacy are hard to hijack and rarely mislead. But as George argues, don’t pragmatic formulations of openness needlessly complicate an otherwise powerful meme?

Why spend days, even months, debating seemingly insignificant details of openness? Why not just produce something and share it in any manner you wish? Why not just let openness evolve as it is?

Let’s consider one of these seemingly insignificant details of openness and see how they become important.

There is a practical argument against creating custom and non-standardized “open” licenses for educational content. You could easily fully identify with an ideology of openness, write your own “open” license that meets what you think are all of the ideological principles of open, and feel your job as an advocate and practitioner is complete. You would “produce something and share it in [the] manner you wish”.

But the somewhat unintuitive reality is that custom licenses decrease legal interoperability and increase barriers to reuse. It is a sub-optimal practice, but one that would be much more obvious to a pragmatist than an ideologue. The ideologue tends to be interested only in the uniform adherence to certain general ideas, regardless of practical realities. In this example, the real world reality is that certain licenses have emerged as a global standard for open content and that deviation from these public licenses is a far from optimal decision given a desire for a high level of content interoperability. The pragmatist attempts to accommodate the realities of the world in the formulation of principles of openness in the interest of directing these incremental advances towards a better future, while the ideologue begins with a general expression of the situation in which the maximal utility will have been obtained and expects the course of action to be obvious. The ideologue’s end result is a set of principles that set a finish line instead of defining a path. And because of that, seemingly small details such as license interoperability can be overlooked leading to a suboptimal situation of decreased interoperability.

It’s worth pausing to reiterate (in case it isn’t clear) that I’m not arguing that an ideology is a priori incapable of accommodating the challenges of license interoperability and other related challenges in open education. Rather, I want to argue that ideologically conceived principles of “openness” will tend to result in implementations of openness that have lower utility than implementations following pragmatically conceived principles.

As George writes:

Openness should mean something. It should be driven by ideology, rather than convenience. As a foundational principle in education, openness should be discussed, critiqued, encouraged, and aggressively preserved.

It is absolutely true that we need to discuss, critique, encourage, and preserve openness in education. But I think there are two mistaken assumptions in the above excerpt. One is that openness only means something if it is driven by ideology. Does healthcare reform advocacy only mean something if it’s driven by moral rather than economic arguments (ideological rather than pragmatic)? Just as the principles of healthcare reform could be legitimately grounded in utilitarian considerations, so too could openness in education. The moral arguments can hold weight as well, but it would be a mistake to say that one or the other is the only meaningful foundation for reform.

The other mistaken assumption is that pragmatic definitions of openness are driven by convenience. For better or for worse, we live in a world where the gears in the machine of progress and innovation are institutional. Yes, the functional unit of the gear (the cogs) are the individual actors, and there is a place for ideology within those actors. But on the world stage, the most basic units are institutions, and the torque needed to move the machine must be applied to the gear, not the cog.

It is simply a fact that many institutions targeted for reform by the open education movement can’t effectively make or act on an ideological principle of openness- and because of this reality, that emerges from the very nature of institution, pragmatic formulations of openness are necessary to reorient the gears in the machine towards more effective institutional policies and practices. That is to say, just as cogs can’t help but be connected to the motion of the gear, actors within institutions can’t help but be subject to the operational principles of the institution. And since this is where advocacy for openness must be targeted, this is what must inform the formulation of any principles of openness.

There’s nothing convenient or easy in taking a pragmatic approach to advocating reform. If anything, pragmatism requires more effort through the constant reinterpretation of your position, analyzing where you want to go and what is feasible, where the low hanging fruit are, which principles are more immediately vital, and so on, while the ideologue gets to raise the same banner and start the same chant at every opportunity. And while that ideological chant is important in many ways, including in building community and maintaining a shared vision for the future, advocacy for openness at the institutional level is most effective (that is, results in the most utility) without banners and chants.

In short, my argument is that pragmatic advocacy for openness is more effective than ideological advocacy (when directed at institutions) and leads to increased utility resulting from the implementation of “open” principles.

If you agree (or think I’m completely wrong), I’ll be monitoring the comments. You can also send me an email at akozak at creativecommons dot org or (sometimes) find me on twitter at @alexkozak.