A subset of that movement has been focused on getting openly licensed textbooks into classrooms. Flat World Knowledge is often cited as being a leader in the commercial distribution of open content, relying on supplemental materials for sustainability. But until just recently, the concept of open (not just “free” or “digital”) textbooks hadn’t begun to creep into education policy discussions. But now it has, and as usual those organizations in a position to embrace and benefit from change make it their business to oppose it. Just as the music and movie trade associations went after innovative technology, textbook publishers are fighting innovation and change in their industry.

The Association of American Publishers (and its School Division in particular) are quickly becoming one of the main barriers to the adoption of open educational content in K12 and higher education. When the U.S. Dept. of Education wanted to require that any educational materials developed with Race to the Top funding (a $4.35 billion dollar state education grant competition) be made “freely available”, the School Division submitted comments opposing the requirements saying it would “compromise the intellectual property rights of third-party providers.” Basically, the AAP didn’t like that public money would fund public, rather than proprietary, content. And at least according to the AAP, the rule has been changed to allow for Race to the Top funding to go towards proprietary content.

But the AAP doesn’t limit itself to influencing policy at a high-level. They’re movings towards co-opting a desire for textbook reform at the grassroots level.

Take a look at this flier for an upcoming AAP briefing at Southern Illinois University on “New Textbook Technologies”. From the flier:

The goal for the Cost Effective Solutions for Student Success program is to begin a broader and more informed discussion between members of the academy, policy makers and publishers about course materials and the benefits they offer for:

• Improving students’ grades, pass rates and retention;
• Lowering students’ costs for course materials;
• Providing flexibility and efficiencies for instructors; and
• Lowering the postsecondary institutions’ cost per pupil for instruction.

The AAP frames their briefing at Southern Illinois University as an attempt to begin a “broader and more informed discussion” about textbooks. Apparently members of the academy, policy makers, and publishers (students notably absent) had been having a less than optimally informed discussion about course materials. But what we don’t know based on this flier is what kinds of information they will be providing.

Luckily for us, on the AAP-operated site TextBookFacts.org, they have a handy FAQ which hopefully will start this more informed dialogue. From the FAQ:

The cost of developing a new textbook and the accompanying materials can exceed $1 million. Most of this cost is attributable to paying for the work and original ideas of authors, experts, editors, researchers, reviewers and designers. Many other factors also contribute to the final retail price of textbooks, such as:

• Inflation, which accounts for the lion’s share of most years’ annual increases in textbook prices.
• Freight and transportation, which are driven by rising fuel costs
• Bookstore mark-ups, which are determined by bookstores and affected by a number of factors – such as staff and operational costs – that vary from store to store
• Paper, which is driven by the cost of raw materials
• Layout, typesetting and printing, which are driven by time-intensive labor costs
• Taxes by federal, state and local governments

The AAP falsely claims that inflation is a main factor in the rise of textbook costs. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office, the costs of textbooks have increased by twice the rate of inflation.

They also misrepresent the costs associated with textbook development. According to a 2007 University of Wisconsin budget review (citing a 2006 College Store Industry Financial Report by the National Association of College Stores), 77.8% of the cost of a textbook goes to the publisher. Of that 77.8%, the break down is roughly:

Only 33.5% of the cost is due to the physical production and shipment of the book. The rest is marketing, profit, overhead, and unnecessary expenses avoidable through different models of knowledge production and dissemination (but more on that in a bit).

They continue:

Student Monitor, an independent student research service, found that the average four-year undergraduate spends approximately $650 a year on textbooks. That’s less than five percent of an average student’s total direct higher education expenses.

Not true. Even back in 2007 the Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance found that “Annual per student expenditures on textbooks can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today.” (Source: Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable, A Report of the Advisory Committee On Student Financial Assistance, 2007) Today the cost is likely to be higher.

And even $700-1000 a year seems inexpensive to you, “affordability cannot be assessed by examining the absolute level of total expenses alone. It depends on how much expenses have risen over time, what share of family income they represent, and whether they are typically covered by grant aid for students from low- and moderate income families.” (Same source as above) That is, it isn’t the number that’s important in evaluating costs, it’s the percentage of overall budget and income, taking financial and sociological contexts into account. And the AAP doesn’t really take into account the financial contexts of students… or at least not in the way you might expect. Continue reading their FAQ:

What do college students buy? LOTS! But only a small percentage of these expenditures go towards important learning tools such as textbooks. [...]

This semester (Spring 2009) the average student bought 5.3 textbooks (2.2 new and 3.1 used) spending an average of $333 for both new and used textbooks. (Source: Student Monitor 2009)

Retail spending on new college textbooks last year was about $4.7 billion — significantly less than what college students spend on clothes and accessories and less than half of what they spend on electronic products such as iPods, laptops, video games, stereos and televisions. (Source: Association of American Publishers and the National Retail Federation)

Yes, you read the AAP right! Students are too busy buying iPods, shoes, and concert tickets to notice the high cost of textbooks. Just another drop in the bucket, right?

The AAP implies that college students spend so much on electronics, clothes, and accessories that their textbooks should be considered cheap. So what exactly are students and faculty getting for that low low price of $1,000 a year (roughly the equivalent of buying a high-end laptop a year)?

What is the role publishers play with students and faculty? Publishers serve the needs of students and faculty

Publishers’ primary focus is on meeting the needs of students. Today, a wider range of instructional supplements enable faculty to teach more students and empower students to achieve better results.

Colleges are being asked to serve students with diverse learning styles and a wider range of preparedness and skills. At least 50 percent of students who enter 2- and 4-year colleges drop out in their first year and never return

Only 54 percent of students who remain in college graduate in 4 – 6 years, increasing costs and debts for students and straining campus assets.

So publishers serve needs, help schools to pack diverse groups of students into classrooms, annnnd… not sure what those last two mean. Publishers cause students to drop out and increase cost and debt and strain campus assets?

Maybe the AAP is struggling with this question because they have no good answer. Of course publishers should be responding to the needs of students and teachers. But when it comes to spelling out the details of what those needs are, big publishers in the AAP fail on all counts:

What are the demands that students and faculty place on textbooks?

Today’s students and faculty demand choices

Students and faculty have become smarter, more demanding consumers, who value options.

In today’s challenging environment publishers are offering a broader range of textbooks and instructional materials at a wide range of prices.

Options available today include low-cost editions, one- or two-color editions, loose-leaf editions, split editions, black-and-white editions, custom books, books by the chapter, abbreviated editions, and electronic books.

College instructors adopt the textbooks and supplemental instructional materials that they believe best meet their students’ needs. They want their students to succeed by having the latest information and the most up-to-date learning tools.

Students and faculty want choice, customizibility, low cost, up-to-date, and optionally digital textbooks. Sounds exactly like what OER provide! Not only do you have the legal right to modify and redistribute OER, they are usually digitally provided free of charge. And given the completely public availability of Creative Commons licenses, there is little barrier to any individual, academic, or organization developing and distributing their own textbook at a small fraction of the cost that the AAP claims is required to develop a textbook.

The high-level message the AAP tries to convey is “we spend a lot of money on producing textbooks, but they’re actually cheap and students buy so much crap anyways they can afford it”. And to top it all off, they argue for innovative digital solutions that their own IP-centric business models discourage.

In the end, the AAP gets its numbers wrong, implies students are materialistic spend-heavies who care more about iPods and concert tickets than education, and makes a compelling argument against their own product.

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.

The availability of open data, open publishing tools, and open licenses combined with the a low barrier for information access allows anyone with the time and motivation to transform into an investigative reporter, publisher, advertising, and marketing department, all at once. And more and more people are able to share, remix, and adapt any resulting content. This is new competition to an old media, and challenges top-down control of what news people read. This new competition is open journalism.

Before the web, media companies had based the business model of journalism on the physical constraints of media distribution. Here are two examples:

Locality: Newspapers, radio, and TV were only able to be directed at limited local audiences. As a result, there was a high level of competition between media at a local level (newspaper “turf wars”), each competing for their share of attention from a passive consumer base.

The medium: There are only so many radio frequencies to broadcast on, you can only print and distribute so much paper, there are only so many channels on TV, and so on. Editorial control was important in creating a concise, deliverable product, but left little room for a direct consumer voice.

On the web, there is no physical barrier to information. Location is almost irrelevant. No matter where you are, anyone can access your publications, blogs, tweets, articles, and opinions. There is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can distribute. And because of this, open journalism transcends the physical restraints on media that media companies had, to some degree, relied on to make their money.

Those in the business of journalism are struggling to re-conceive what their product is in the new paradigm of boundless information availability. There had always been some physical component to journalism that they could look at as their product. For the newspaper, it was the actual paper on which the news was printed. And as a result of this model, newspaper readers were seen as passive consumers of the news, only subscribing to receive filtered information about the world around them. Newspapers were delivered, not accessed.

But with the development of the web, different interactions with media have become feasible. The public doesn’t want to just be passive receptors of news. Instead, they want to share, remix, and create the news themselves. They want to be part of the media-creation process. But this forces the hard questions about where the value is in distributing news and media as a product.

Old media must re-conceive their product-based news model when confronted with open journalism.

While media companies are being forced to re-conceptualize the value they provide, journalists could preempt the failures of their supporting organizations by encouraging new interactions with their content. But what are these new kinds of media interaction, and how can a media company or journalist encourage these new behaviors?

In Part 2, I will start examining these new media interactions and discuss how an empowered journalist could use tools like Semantic MediaWiki, social media platforms, and Creative Commons licenses to encourage them.