So what does health care have to do with “open”? Much more than you might at first think. Let me illustrate a few of the ways…

• Innovation requires risk. Intellectual risk, for sure, but perhaps more importantly, risk to your finances, to your family, to your future. To do something new and innovative, and especially to go against the grain, as so much of open science, open education, and other similarly motivated ideas run, is to take on significant personal and professional risk. In America, that risk to individuals is unacceptably high, given that it often includes foregoing such basic guarantees as health care. Health care reform means that we have lowered the threshold for action by the innovators of tomorrow. Don’t be afraid to take a chance, we’ve got your back.

• The grand challenges we face as a society – climate change, public health, energy security, to name a few – these problems are big. They are burly. They resist simple reduction into a controlled study here, an opinion poll there. To get a handle on these issues, we need data – lots of data. And we need collaboration – massive, distributed collaboration. And we need cooperation, even among competing interests, where the system positively reinforces activities the reduce the risks to society even as it improves the bottom lines of the businesses involved. Health care reform holds the potential to shift the focus from profit to care, from rendering tests to preventing disease, all of which requires greater openness, and greater sharing. Look for a revolution in public health research and outcomes in the years to come.

• Health education is desperately needed around the globe. Many institutions are trying to share their medical education materials more broadly, but the costs are high, and there are thorny thickets of laws regarding health records, medical images, and other patient-oriented data which impede sharing. People are rightly reluctant to provide personal health information publicly for fear that the insurance companies can use it against them. Health care reform eliminates this fear, thereby opening the floodgates for public health data and associated educational materials to be shared, adapted, and localized the world over. The era of educational opportunities, personal genomics, and patient empowerment is here, and openness is a big part of the picture.

There will be people who will try to stop all progress. There will be those who will try to exploit the complexities in the system and throw obstacles in our way. But we have to seize this chance to catalyze a more open and effective society, in education, in science, in everything. Our health care “system” is so broken, it’s hard to believe there any defenders left. But as with our education “system,” which is similarly dysfunctional, change has proven more difficult to implement than it is to talk about. How refreshing to see action in Congress instead of so many words. Yes, there is still room for vast improvement, but enough dithering. The future awaits, and it looks more open than ever.

Imagine that! Now, I’m all for people being able to pursue abstract, theoretical constructs and even to pursue careers along those lines. But the educational burden on people trying to do innovative work is unsustainable – the article mentions that the average age for first-time recipients of federal (NIH) funding is 42. Such funding is essentially a requirement for people trying to achieve tenure in the sciences, meaning that many smart people will train until they are nearly 50 years old before they either find out that they can make a career of their specialized knowledge and skills, or need to start over doing something new.

I suspect we will start to see more and more institutions like BGI. Indeed, I suspect that this trend towards more relevant and practical education will be accelerated by open education, which will eventually come to encompass not just the resources (OER) but also the support structures, mentors, and pathways to competency and accreditation. And I believe that these changes will save the liberal arts institutions, despite their best efforts to destroy themselves. Perhaps I will even see the day when our academic institutions return to their roots: encouraging education for education’s sake, supporting basic research and humanist inquiry, and catalyzing innovation and change not to support institutional aims, but to support the betterment of humanity.

1. Define “educational use” for me. Does it include education taking place outside of formal educational situations? Do you have to be a “qualified educator” (or an “enrolled student” or an “accredited institution”) in order to enjoy this right? I have never seen a non-discriminatory definition for “education.” In a world of rapidly evolving educational practices and in desperate need for alternative pathways to educational attainment, it seems quite foolish to define education in any narrow sense.

2. Define an “educational resource” for me. In my experience, anything can be an educational resource, properly contextualized and presented. Even the most crassly commercial product can be easily converted to “educational material” if the subject at hand is mass merchandizing, popular culture, or any number of other relevant disciplines of inquiry. Given this context-dependence, we should reject out of hand any attempt to lock “educational” resources into a specific, and almost certainly highly restrictive and archaic, form and function.

3. A fair use determination, even if we somehow capitalize on that capacity within some “educational” safe-harbor, is necessarily subjective and always carries some risk. It is highly doubtful that most risk-averse institutions will support such uses as a matter of course.

4. Even if we enjoyed broader fair use considerations, fair use is not a free ticket to do whatever you want with a resource, nor is it available to everyone on the globe. At best, fair use gives you some limited capacity for copying and sharing, and even more limited capacity for re-use, and then only in the select few countries that permit such uses What makes open educational resources (OER) interesting and powerful is the explicit permission to adapt, translate, and otherwise customize and improve the works. Creative Commons licenses are the only globally standardized tools that enable these uses to be made easily and transparently by anyone, anywhere.

I suspect that many people who espouse this desire for universal “educational fair-use rights” are basing this desire on a feeling that education is different, somehow. In education, people like to share. In education, the value of a resource is enhanced by increased use, adaptation, and customization to local needs. I agree. And this is why Creative Commons is the perfect solution to overcoming the copyright barriers that prevent these activities. As an opt-in system, we don’t need to argue with people who find all-rights-reserved copyright to be necessary for their work, such as many artists, musicians, and others in the creativity business. As a system that builds on top of copyright, we provide a mechanism for people to build a global education commons while respecting the rights of others. And as a global standard, Creative Commons transcends the diversity and incompatibilities inherent in the laws of the many different countries around the world.

The Internet, which obviously facilitates the sharing and adaptation that we desire, is a global medium – we need a global legal infrastructure to make it work. Creative Commons provides that infrastructure. Anything else is just so much hot air.

However, one of the classic divides has bucked this trend. In a recent contribution to the Open Forum of the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanford University neurology professor Robert M. Sapolsky tells us that the data have come in, and it turns out that “Girls are good at math too.” In short, he cites several longitudinal studies, often backed up with impressively large sample sizes, which have shown that the historical gap in math performance between the sexes has now disappeared. The lack of differentiation on this metric is closely associated with cultural gender equity, as you might expect.

This is a fantastic endorsement of conscious and widespread application of gender-neutral policies, pedagogies, and learning paths, at least where the historical differences have no obvious biological basis. People have come up with myriad pseudo-biological explanations for so many stereotypical differences among the sexes – it can be quite a challenge to separate the fluff from the substance. In some things, such as weight-lifting potential, the differences are real and really well understood. But when it comes to mental processes and capacity, there is simply no good biological basis for believing that sexes differ in any meaningful way. As developed societies slowly adapt and reorganize themselves around these simple principles of fairness, we will see more and more evidence of how similarly gifted, or not, the sexes are in most intellectual domains.

What does all of this have to do with “open.” One of the core principles for open education and associated materials is the inherent capacity for “differentiated instruction,” or basically the ability of learners and their mentors to adapt materials and learning processes to suit their individual needs and interests. There is every reason to think that OER will accelerate the trend of eliminating artificial capacity divides among the sexes, much of which is intentionally and unintentionally embedded in the instructional materials and pedagogies in use all over this country and the world.

We should all be striving to reach a point where every student is encouraged and evaluated as an individual, according to his or her needs, interests, abilities, and aspirations. Certainly embracing OER won’t be enough, but it’s a good start.