Opinions On Open

I joined CC two years ago this January, and since then my views about CC’s role in culture and education have evolved. Back then, I was pretty much a novice to this space, though sharing in education sounded like a no brainer to me. But I’ve had time to grow with my program (CC Learn), and develop my own views. That said, what follows is an exploration into how I personally draw parallels between the arts and education, two areas in which I take a vested interest. I am in no way representing any entity other than myself.

Basically, I started out thinking CC was cool—that on the whole, it made sense. But I never thought it could change the world or anything. I thought it gave creators more choices, especially ‘cause this crazy copyright system of ours was so confusing to the average person. It seemed to make especial sense in education, since that’s what people do—they share to teach and they share to learn. Duh. But that was the whole of it really. I didn’t think much further than that two years ago. I thought promoting the CC licenses to people who wanted to use them and people who probably should use them was what I was in the business of doing.

But as I work further in this space, I talk to a lot more people and I observe a lot more people. I observe the different effects that Creative Commons, as the legal and technical infrastructure of open education and open culture generally, has had on a generation. I also see potential for future generations, not just mine. And I have come to realize that CC can do more than facilitate a culture of sharing in the arts and education. CC can really change the social landscape of things, and it has already effected this social change in the arts. I think it can do the same in education. But what do I mean by social change?

Imagine the world of OER without CC. The term “open educational resource” would be a vacuous or redundant term at best. “Open” would simply mean freely accessible. Without CC, individuals or organizations would continue to offer their resources under custom terms (aka a custom license*) or under no terms at all. Custom licenses would give certain people/entities permission to freely access and maybe to freely do other things with the content, depending on who they were and what they wanted to do. But these types of custom permissions have always existed in education, even before the internet came into being. In nonvirtual life, there are always special exceptions for education—such as student discounts, libraries, professors and teachers who rely on fair use to make copies of publications for use in their classrooms. Custom licenses with exceptions for education would merely migrate these types of activities online.

Custom licenses currently exist*, all over the internet in fact. But as we have seen with the arts, the internet enables so much more than that. Relying only on existing copyright laws to continue regulating educational activities is to continue with a status quo that does a huge disservice to what is possible. Because it doesn’t take you long to realize that the status quo in education is mediocre. The old systems are comfortable, but they are also inefficient, and hugely debilitating when educators and learners want to share and collaborate outside of their institutions. Freely available educational resources under standard copyright law are either all-rights-reserved or custom licensed. The ability to sort out copyright law and the various custom licenses is no easy task, even for lawyers. Teams of lawyers often take years to work out details in policy that will allow individuals from separate institutions to collaborate, and there is similar red tape even between departments within the same institution. I don’t even want to go into what it’s like for different countries. What user/educator/learner is going to go through the trouble of reading all the different terms everything is under to synthesizing and concluding what can be used with what? Not many. And even if they did, their attempt would be an interpretation.

Granted, there are many working towards copyright reform, and pushing reliance on copyright exceptions and limitations, such as fair use. This side of things is important too. But CC is more than just a temporary fix to the copyright problem.

What is so revolutionary about CC licenses in the arts is not that they made possible or somehow engendered a sharing culture that never before existed. The sharing culture already existed, just as amateur creators—creators who love making art for the sake of art—already existed. Certainly, CC made legal that sharing culture, gave them a way to move their activities online and across timezones, but that is only one of CC’s contributions. Other obvious contributions were making that sharing easy with human-readable deeds, and making that sharing discoverable with RDFa. CC licenses continue to cultivate and help sustain the sharing culture in the arts, but it did not originate that sharing culture.

You know that saying, the world is your oyster? Well, what is so revolutionary about CC licenses in the arts is that it transformed artists’ level of engagement with each other over the internet. The internet was useful for many things before CC, but now the internet has become a veritable farm for oysters, with each artist contributing to find, grow, or cultivate art. And the most amazing thing is that many of them do it for free. Which brings us to the second revolutionary outcome of CC licenses—it has made the world realize that there is this community of artists who love to create for the sake of creating. It has brought to the surface a community that used to be underground and guerrilla-organized, and it has provided that community with an open space in which to work, collaborate, and create. Now that community is very much a movement, connected not only by their passion for making art but by their passion for sharing it. For the first time, artists have the upper hand over institutions, galleries and recording companies. Artists no longer have to go through a middleman to support and sustain themselves. Artists can freely leverage the internet to continue doing what they have always loved doing, and as with anything where the scope becomes bigger than it once was, artists have discovered many, many more possibilities for creativity and collaboration in art-making than ever before. These are the social changes that CC licenses enabled in the arts. And these are the social changes that CC licenses can enable in education.

Because we can do better than the status quo. OER without CC is not OER; it is old educational practices migrated online under the guise of “open.” Access to free materials is not revolutionary; you had libraries and public schools before the internet. What is revolutionary: transforming educators’ and learners’ level of engagement with each other over the internet—in a sense making the internet their oyster. What is revolutionary: bringing to the surface the community of educators and learners who already share and collaborate in guerrilla fashion and providing them with an open space to continue that collaboration and innovation. What is revolutionary: giving educators and learners the upper hand over institutions, academic journals, and textbook companies. What is revolutionary: changing the social landscape of education through copyright.

I think we have to stop viewing education itself as a silo, giving it a special status or exception because it’s “education.” The world of education is the world of culture and creativity. What people often don’t realize or recognize is that teaching and learning are creative processes. What is a creative process in the arts (remix) is also very much present in education. Educators and learners remix all the time; that is the nature of teaching and learning. (Good) teaching is to synthesize concepts with materials and to relay that synthesis in scholarship or living form with learners. Learning is to pull apart and put together the same concepts and materials to produce something “original” that is the result of this remix. But most importantly, the creative process occurs in the interaction between both groups when the lines between the roles are blurred.

It’s not just about sharing for free. I can share for free without CC, that’s plain enough. All I have to do is slap on a notice that says “free to take”, much like when people leave their stuff behind in boxes on the sidewalk. But that doesn’t really do much more than shift ownership of crap you don’t want to someone who wants it. There’s no interaction there, no exchange that results in more than what I started with. What CC facilitates is that interaction and exchange that results in more than “free to take.” Innovation results. Creativity results. Change, the social kind, results. People start sharing differently, purposefully. We start rethinking old systems, old ways of seeing education. And that’s when we start using CC to help us achieve ends beyond “free to take.” Like in the arts—for some, CC became a tool to make money, bring fame, create awareness. In education, similar and greater outcomes can be achieved by leveraging open standards.

Because in the end, CC’s role in education is different from its role in the arts. In the arts, CC gives creators (namely, artists, musicians) a choice–it’s an opt-in system. In education, the system does not depend on commercial values so much to keep it alive. A lot of artists make their living being artists, and yet they freely share and collaborate regardless. But in education, most people don’t make a living selling their lesson plans and writing papers. People make a living sharing their expertise with others, building on their work with others, thereby building their reputation and improving their teaching and learning outcomes. So you start thinking about all the stuff that’s possible when you change the system from “opt-in to open”, to “opt-out of open”. You start rethinking the default of all-rights-reserved and how that would look if it was some-rights reserved, or even no-rights-reserved. What, after all, do we value in the field of education more than in the field of the arts? And how can we reflect those values in new and better ways of doing things?

The open education community today is only a small subsection of those involved in education worldwide, but some great initiatives and projects have already come out of it. An initiative like Peer 2 Peer University is a prime example of the social change that can happen in education when you start building on the concepts of open. P2PU is teaching and learning by peers for peers, and it is organized learning that is taking place outside of any institution. It’s what can happen when the default changes, when open educational resources scale. CC helps make that scale possible, which is what will ultimately transform the social landscape of education.

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*Of course there are caveats, ie. CC BY-NC-SA is not compatible with CC BY-SA, nor is CC BY-NC compatible with CC BY-SA, etc. (See Remixing OER: A Guide to License Compatibility.) This is why CC Learn recommends CC BY for OER (Why CC BY?), the only license that requires only attribution to reuse, redistribute, and remix a work.

*Custom licenses contain text that declares “free for ____ and ____”; the blanks are usually filled with a type of use and type of group or entity, ie. for “educational” / “noncommercial” / “personal” use by “individuals” / “schools” / “nonprofits”.

*See “What status for “open”? An examination of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects”