The process by which Montgomery County has partnered with Pearson is unsettling–it seems to have come as a relative surprise to teachers and parents. According to the Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County Maryland blog, the Pearson contract was a done deal even before it was debated by the school board, and apparetly MCPS has already hired staff with taxpayer dollars to begin working on the curriculum for Pearson.

The downstream effects of the deal are detrimental to teaching and learning in Montgomery County, and potentially to other school districts if Pearson’s marketing efforts are successful. Pearson will be the sole and exclusive owner of all the rights to the curriculum and teacher professional development materials. According to a response penned by the Post’s Valerie Strauss, “[i]f Montgomery County decides it wants to use any of the materials that Pearson issues in its national versions, MCPS will have to pay, albeit at a 60 percent discount.” In order to fill a short term budget crisis, Montgomery County has traded teachers’ creativity and the good name of MCPS.

By transferring the copyright to Pearson, MCPS is throwing away a huge opportunity to engage with teachers, students and content providers in supporting open educational resources. Open education efforts have been blossoming in entrepreneurial schools, state education technology offices, and federal departments. Instead of exploring the benefits to adoption of innovative OER–teaching and learning materials in the public domain or released under an open license that allows for collaboration, customization, and updating of content–Pearson will hold materials under its lock and key, and relicense materials paid for by Maryland taxpayers to other schools around the country.

OER and open education has been discussed in the National Educational Technology Plan, the National Broadband Plan, in proposed federal legislation, and within grant priorities via the U.S. Department of Education. But, with the Pearson deal, we still see the old publishing institutions gobbling up copyrights and replicating the old model akin to those perpetuated by the vilified scholarly publishing industry. Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the Pearson deal is that policymakers and government staff at places like the Department of Education working to support OER have remained generally empathetic to the concerns of the publishing industry. They recognize that there is a a role for experienced publishers in providing quality content and supplemental resources for teaching and learning to schools throughout the U.S. Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, reiterated this point in a March 3 speech to the Association of American Publishers:

To support technological innovation in online learning, the president has proposed investing $500 million over ten years in an Online Skills Initiative designed to produce open and free high-quality courses that contribute to post-secondary access and success. These courses can and will be used by students, institutions and self-learners and will also be freely available to commercial firms.

Duncan realizes that innovative teachers, motivated students, and traditional publishers will have a role in helping craft quality educational content, and leaves open the opportunity for publishers to add value (and make money too) with openly licensed materials. However, the Pearson deal gives the publisher complete control of the content–probably not what Duncan had in mind. It now seems that in Montgomery County, public funded education content will be privately owned and controlled by a massive publishing giant.

This spring I am taking a course entitled, “From Theory to Practice: Persuasion, Narrative & the Portfolio.”… In my class we are developing an online e-portfolio that is meant to clearly communicate to future potential employers the skills and experience that we’ve developed in our time at the CCT program. We are interviewing people in fields and organizations that we are interested in working in to learn a little more about some of the career choices they’ve made to get where they are now, as well as to become more informed on the organizations themselves.

1. Can you briefly describe some of the main elements of your duties as a communication coordinator at Creative Commons?

As the Communications Coordinator for Creative Commons, I help creators, companies, and institutions leverage Creative Commons licenses and CC-licensed content. A huge element in my day-to-day and ongoing communications with others are education around our licenses—this includes education about how CC licenses came into being, how the licenses work, and what CC licenses or CC licensed content may have to offer to different kinds of users. A lot of it is also clearing up misconceptions about what CC licenses mean and what they enable. Another main element is identifying opportunities for CC license integration, and connecting the right people and projects so that CC licenses are used appropriately and effectively. This can mean anything from having informal conversations to officially highlighting or interviewing projects that are innovating in the arts and education. Basically, I help to craft the message of CC and what it does so that it reaches different audiences, fulfilling diverse needs of the community.

2. Have you known for a long time that you were interested in working in the field of intellectual property reform and collaboration facilitation with Creative Commons, or was it something that you stumbled upon more recently? Can you think of any specific moments in your academic or professional career that pushed you into this field?

To put it simply, no. I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago when I was completely new to this space. It helps a lot though that I was in the other person’s shoes—what I call the average person who doesn’t know that much about copyright or copyright law. I can’t think of any specific moments other than the fact that I applied for this job, originally as a Research Assistant and specifically for the education piece of things (CC licensing for educational resources), but maybe my work with high school students had something to do with it. I used to work with first generation college bound youth, and I always thought the traditional education system was failing a lot of students. CC was doing something new in this field, that I could have possibly seen as an effort towards reform at the time, so I applied to become a part of it. For what it’s worth, I was also a Philosophy major as an undergrad, so I have always been interested in the big questions, and conceptually IP is very interesting.

3. How important for your job is it to keep up date with the issues that Creative Commons addresses?

Very important, if not essential. CC’s existence depends on the internet, and the internet is dynamic and always growing. So is IP law, as many lobby for tighter restrictions around the world. It’s important that I keep up with the latest issues so that CC stays relevant and continues to carry out its core mission.

4. It seems that CC has a very diverse staff, with people coming from a lot of different backgrounds. Do you think this makes for a more effective workplace?

I think so, as the entities who use our licenses come from diverse backgrounds. We need to be able to communicate with people in different contexts and also from different cultures where CC might be seen as too radical or too conservative. Diversity keeps us tolerant and neutral, and that’s the organization we are and aim to continue to be.

5. Has the proliferation of the Internet and digital technologies created more problems (i.e. illegal file sharing, remixing, copying and dissemination of copyrighted works) or opportunities overall for content creators?

I don’t know that it’s created more problems than what might have already existed in different and physically underground forms. I think it just brought it out into the open because the internet is accessible by everyone, whereas a bootlegging factory might not be. Certainly, these activities might be proliferated by digital technologies, but at the same time, opportunities for creators have arisen that never before existed. For the first time, creators don’t have to go through a middleman or distribution company anymore—they can connect directly with their audience and with each other. They can also explore new models of creating and sharing content. The possibilities have really become almost endless… and that is really exciting. At the same time, new possiblities exist for companies and institutions, too, to leverage the internet and open licenses to engage with their communities. So I think overall, new opportunities have arisen that haven’t been there before, and I think opportunities that were in the past only available to some are now available to all, whereas the problems that have arisen are ones that have kind of always existed in some form or another.

6. Do you find that the Internet is an increasingly important element of communicating with constituents and developing support networks? If so, do you think it has passed traditional forms of communicating in importance?

In answer to the first question–basically, yes. I think it’s unavoidably the primary medium of communication now for a lot of people, especially the younger generations, and that it will only become more so. In answer to the second, it depends on what you mean by importance—because of course there is a texture to face-to-face communication that cannot (at least currently) be replaced by technologies, no matter how advanced. I think it is a valuable alternative, however, especially in fields such as education where not everyone can afford to attend an institution due to money or time. I think it has surpassed traditional forms in the sense that it has brought another layer to the way we communicate. If you take social media–Twitter, for instance, one of the reasons it is so successful is because it allows for more different layers of interaction than Facebook. Facebook interaction is one-to-one, you can only be friends with someone if they are friends with you. On Twitter, however, you can follow someone without them following you, they can follow you without you following them, or you can both follow each other. I kind of see the internet as the Twitter of the communication medium in general… what used to be limited to one-to-one (the phone) or one-to-many (broadcast media) now allows for many-to-many, many-to-one, etc. I don’t know if the analogy itself perfectly aligns, but you get the picture.

7. Is social networking media an important part of CC’s communication and networking strategies? If so, do you see it having an even more important role in the future and the country becomes increasingly connected?

We use what’s out there currently, yes. We have accounts on FB, microblogging services, internal microblogging services (status.net), etc. I think it’s definitely how we reach most of our users, and we will continue to evolve in how we communicate to our users as social media evolves.

8. Creative Commons’ partnering with Nike and other companies to release the online intellectual property marketplace GreenXchange recently is really interesting to me. Do you think that they are forecasting a new, more efficient development of sustainability business models for the future? The collaborative nature of GX is questioned by some who subscribe to the traditional business models of trade secrets and proprietary trademarks, but do you think that they can set an example for future collaborators and change the paradigm model?

So I am not familiar with the in’s and out’s of the GreenXchange as Science Commons—the science program at CC—have been the ones working with them. The big picture is that Science Commons is exploring patent licenses, as CC licenses only apply to copyrighted works and patents are a whole other story. The GreenXchange is a prototype of this first exploration into patent licensing, and Creative Commons (through SC) is serving as a sort of consultant to the project.

Personally, I think there might be a future in the open innovation models that are sprouting up within companies or collaborations between companies, as limited patent licenses may allow exchange and innovation since they are similar in concept to the “some-rights-reserved” model for content. I don’t know of the collaborative nature of GX being questioned, but I do know that it’s about trying to find sustainability that works, and innovation that leads to helping the environment or society is a good thing in my book. If they are successful, then I think it would be evidence that open innovation can work. I don’t know about changing the “paradigm” model–I think it is the default model right now because it’s what we are used to. But we were used to broadcast media and that has changed, too. I really don’t know too much about all this however, so you should check out http://sciencecommons.org/projects/patent-licenses/.

9. Is there any advice that you would give to someone who was looking to work in the field of intellectual property reform and advocacy?

I would say come up with a plan for what you are specifically interested in that field, such as a problem you’d like to see solved and possible ways for solving it—or at least what people/projects you think would need to be involved to solve it. I would talk to people in the space, attend some conferences, read up a lot. See what it requires for you to really dive into that problem. Are you more interested in the legal side of things? Then maybe law school is necessary, but at a place where things in IP are happening. I mean essentially the question is, why is this field compelling to you and what will you specifically do to make it better? You can contribute from many different angles—whether legal, technical, scientific, educational, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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”

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.

A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to this infamous YouTube video of the Sasquatch music festival where, if you haven’t seen it, one lone naked dude starts an awesome dance party. I have to say, that after our inaugural workshop last week in Berlin, I think we’re past the point of three people falling over themselves. We were probably (definitely) in that phase during the pilot, where we stumbled through our courses, attempting to cohere and make sense of things, but without the glue to pull it all together. Even after the pilot and before the workshop, we sort of looked back and saw the different pieces and couldn’t quite put it together in our heads. For one thing, we didn’t know each other. Instead of a face without a name, it was more like an email without a face, anonymous @ placeholders populating our inboxes. Secondly, we knew we were scattered around the globe, which somehow deepened the mental disconnect. And finally, though we all had different reasons for volunteering, I suspect most of us had joined thinking it would simply be a fun experiment. Sure, why not organize a course online? It’s only six weeks of my time. An online book club? Sounds fun, and most importantly, noncommittal. If the pilot tanks (or even if it doesn’t), we can always pull out. We’re only volunteers after all. At least, that’s how I felt.

Then the P2PU workshop transpired. But before I dive into that, let me give newbies some background into what P2PU is, and what it’s all about (or at least, has become). I think Larry hit the nail on the head when he said that, “P2PU is the social learning wrapper around OER.” More elaborately stated, “The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.” It’s an idea that was dreamed up and shaped by five founders a year or so ago, that materialized into an initiative called Peer 2 Peer University, manifesting itself in both virtual (p2pu.org) and physical (p2pu.org/Team) forms. We launched the pilot with seven courses (seven+ volunteer course organizers, plus volunteers around tech and admin issues) on 09.09.09. The pilot ran for six weeks, during which time we saw a good number of participants drop off like flies. The majority of our participants had full time jobs, were full time moms or dads, or were otherwise engaged with non-virtual life. There was also the issue of multiple tech platforms (blogs, wikis, etc.) which not all of us or our participants were fully familiar or comfortable with. Basically, it was a true pilot, from start to finish.

So we learned a lot about what didn’t work, but how to transform that knowledge into progress?

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

Well, with one awesome facilitator to keep us on target and another one to keep us moving forward, we put our heads together and brainstormed our way through four intense days of workshop. We set the agenda on the first day in post-its–the Wall of Ideas–and then proceeded to take the wall apart piece by piece in break-out sessions in the days ensuing. Personally leery of group work, I was at first skeptical about these group sessions, where we were split off into three groups of four–how much could we really accomplish with three disparate group resolutions? How much consensus could we really reach? And wouldn’t we end up hating each other in the end having to work, live, and play with each other? (Especially me with my penchant for disliking most people upon first meeting?)

First impressions, even if they are unpleasant (which they weren’t), don’t last long when you have a group of truly genuine, intelligent, and like-minded people together in one space for four days. Maybe it was Berlin, or the uber hip design space we were working in, or the fact that we all cared about the basic innovative idea of P2PU (peers learning from peers outside the ivy walls of tradition)–whatever it was, and as cheesy as it may sound, we truly connected. There was not one person who came out of that workshop who was skeptical of what we had accomplished or where we were headed. Some of us may have started out that way, myself included, but by the end we were ready to change the world, or at least the unbounded universe of education.

Photo by John Britton CC BY-SA

It was amazing how much consensus we reached after the hours of discussion in groups and report-backs to the group at large, how much concrete progress we made in terms of objectives and volunteered tasks to achieve those objectives. I think the moment when I knew I was part of one of the most functional groups of people I have ever worked with was near the end on Saturday during the tech session. John got up after our report-backs for what we’d like to see created (because the idea of casual changes to an existing platform did not even cross our minds) and laid out a schedule of deadlines and feedback dates where this was all going to be implemented. My jaw dropped–really? Since when did developers ever set deadlines like this, and since when did those deadlines ever come to mean anything? Especially volunteer developers? I was floored. I think we all were, not to mention incredibly humbled by this collective vision that had somehow coalesced from our individual ambitions and presented itself to us unawares.

I may sound like a giant cheese ball, but I really, truly appreciated the presence of every single person I met in Berlin. Throughout the group discussions and individual conversations I had with people, not to forget the dinners and yes, not entirely sober dance sessions, I really got to know each and every P2PU volunteer as more than just an @ placeholder, and as someone who was contributing to some larger effort just like me, on an entirely voluntary basis. I think in the end that is the crux of P2PU, that it’s made up of and run by volunteers–people who are willing to risk their time and effort to realize a vision that may not be realizable.

There are various theories as to why this happens in groups, one of which we discussed over our last dinner–that a part of a person’s brain shuts off when she or he feels part of a larger group effort, essentially positing that some part of her nature is satisfied that was previously working to be satisfied (maybe?)–but theorizing aside, P2PU is a lot more concrete and unidirectional than it once was. We have a real agenda and a community vision, and we’re headed towards it. I’d say that makes us more than three people falling over themselves. We’re somewhere in between three people and the awesome dance party that erupts at the end. We’re in the growing stages, and I’m willing to stick around ’til the end, if there is such a thing.

Photo by kiyanwang CC BY-NC-SA

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.

Do textbooks enhance the quality of education?

Evidence strongly suggests that the average textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource. Several studies, beginning in the 1980’s, have elaborated on this evidence, concluding that the textbook is a hopelessly low quality educational resource. Low quality because of the way textbooks are written and processed; hopelessly low quality because the existing process of textbook creation is enforced by state policies. This process is known as the state textbook adoption process.

K-12 textbooks are not generally written by experts or even teachers; rather, they are written by teams of anonymous writers from development houses. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, textbooks are “hurriedly put together by teams of hack writers from ‘development houses,’ known as ‘chop shops’.”  The identities of the writers remain largely undisclosed, and they are not the university professors often cited as contributors. In fact, several professors who have been cited as contributors to popular textbooks deny ever having read or seen the textbooks.   Experts are also not involved in reviewing the quality of textbooks, such as checking for accuracy of facts. This is because there is no review process for quality.

Instead, the review process is grounded in the textbook adoption process that is mandated in twenty-one plus states. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute defines it as, “The process, in place in twenty-one states, of reviewing textbooks according to state guidelines and then mandating specific books that schools must use, or lists of approved textbooks that schools must choose from.” Due to conflicting political and ideological views, state guidelines are fashioned to please a wide spectrum of demands regarding inclusion and exclusion of content. These demands result in a second set of guidelines from textbook publishing companies, who preempt the adoption process with their own checklists to speed things along. These checklists are not checking for quality; they are checking for politically correct representation of content and groups of people, in addition to checking for “morally questionable” facts, regardless of whether such inclusions or exclusions are accurate portrayals of the subject matter. Furthermore, California and Texas, as the most populous states, are the two major players in textbook adoption, which means their guidelines affect the majority of textbooks in America, as the market depends on their approval. Four publishing companies constitute 70% of this market, having built long-standing partnerships with the states. This makes it incredibly difficult for alternative textbook companies with a focus on quality to break in to the market.

The U.S. History textbook is a prime example and outcome of the textbook adoption process. The U.S. History textbook is subject to two major problems. In a testimony to the Senate in 2003, the American Textbook Council  summed up these problems as “dumbing down” and “increasing content bias and distortion.” According to the council, current history textbooks are more concerned with capturing and sustaining short attention spans than with relaying accurate and compelling history. They have become “picture and activity books instead”, with the actual text as the supplemental component. The language of the text itself is grossly simplistic, catering to all reading levels, rather than relaying events in compelling narrative. Instead, “states often apply “readability” formulas to ensure that textbooks use simpler words and phrases, resulting in a lowest-common-denominator approach.” The second problem is that history textbooks are censored with “increasing content bias and distortion.” Content bias and distortion refers to the differing political ideologies competing for inclusion and exclusion of facts. Since different people and groups have different ideas about what should or shouldn’t be included as relevant to U.S. or world history, the contents of history textbooks are screened and then screened again to appease all parties. This process not only produces mediocre results, but a politically crafted history of the United States, which often glosses over or even entirely omits relevant facts while elaborating on inoffensive details. However, since “one person’s distortion is another’s correction,” the details actually included in history textbooks are either highly insignificant or so generalized that they fail to deliver the meanings of those details in context.

None of this is evidence that textbooks enhance the quality of education. On the contrary, all evidence affirms that the majority of textbooks are low to mediocre quality resources. Such resources run the risk of decreasing, rather than increasing, the quality of education. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math and reading were found to be generally lower in textbook adoption states.

Do teachers and students know how to use the textbook?

If we believe that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, we are also assuming that teachers and students know to use textbooks. In other words, we are assuming that teachers know how to effectively leverage textbooks as teaching resources and students know how to learn from them as learning resources. For teachers, effectively leveraging textbooks requires more than simply assigning reading and lecturing on that reading during class–it means using the textbooks as a starting point for other perspectives and educational resources. For students, learning from textbooks requires more than just reading the textbooks–it means understanding and retaining what they have read. The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning reports that,

“For centuries educators asumed that student learning consisted of rote memorization of new knowledge–students listened to lectures and read books, their progress measured by their ability to recite what they had heard and read. But research in the past 20 years demonstrates that another form of learning is also important–the learning that occurs when instruction is inquiry-oriented, encouraging learners to actively think about and try out new ideas in light of their prior knowledge, to personally transform the knowledge for their own use, and to apply it in other situations.”

Teachers effectively leverage textbooks when they use them as starting points, subsequently utilizing other educational resources (which include materials, tools, media, and techniques) that instigate inquiry, activity, and creativity. “Mere regurgitation of facts and figures… is not sufficient for in-depth understanding” (How Teachers Learn to Engage Students in Active Learning). On the other hand, actively engaging students while exposing them to other perspectives helps them to fully grasp and retain what they have read.

Unfortunately, most teachers and students do not know how to use textbooks in this manner. Most teachers do little more than assign reading, only to lecture later on the same reading, and as a result, most students do not retain what they have read, if they have read at all. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, “Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered. History and social studies teachers, for example, often rely almost exclusively on textbooks, instead of requiring students to review primary sources and read trade books by top historians.”

Further evidence suggests that this misuse of textbooks is affecting students’ performance. In a study on the impact of curriculum on achievement in twenty-five countries, Professor William Schmidt found that “textbook content in different nations correlated closely to what their children learned–and how they fared on tests.” Even though U.S. textbooks were hundreds of pages longer than other countries, U.S. students were still learning less. In History, especially, one of the most “textbook-heavy” subjects, “half of high school seniors scored “below basic”–the lowest outcome possible–on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History.” (Too Little Too Late: American High Schools in an International Context)

But isn’t the California Digital Textbooks Initiative improving textbooks?

Among the plethora of new initiatives surrounding textbooks, the Free Digital Textbook Initiative in California is the most notable because of its ties to both state policy and alternative textbook publishing models. It is a plan heralded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in response to the state’s economic crisis. The initiative provides for free digital textbooks for high school math and science, and lays out a set of state standards for those subjects. Content developers submit digital textbooks that are reviewed by teachers and experts in math and science to align to those standards.

The initiative’s appeal is that it purports to use a process different from traditional textbook adoption. Its initial phase boasts of alternative content developers, consisting of non-profits, such as the CK-12 Foundation, Connexions, Curriki, and individual authors. Content review to meet state standards is facilitated by the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN). In California’s press release on August 11, 2009, ten of the sixteen textbooks submitted were found to be acceptable, meeting 90% of the state’s standards.

The intent behind the initiative is a positive one, and the process thus described seems headed in the right direction. However, as it stands the initiative puts no real dent in California’s textbook adoption policy, as it becomes clear that none of these textbooks are required for districts to purchase and use. In order for materials to become a required text, they must meet every standard, including California’s social content standards, which none have been reviewed for.  For this review to occur, creators of the textbooks must go through the social content standard review process, which is not only costly and time consuming, but runs the risk of dumbing down their textbooks to the same level as currently required textbooks.

Even if we assume that somehow these textbooks will survive the reviews unscathed and maintain their existing levels of quality, nothing ensures their proper use in the classroom. With cut funding in the state, districts may be expected to access the texts only online, even when they don’t have computers for every student or the teacher/student training necessary to help them work with texts in digital formats. The initiative does not call for additional funding for hardware, training, or supplemental resources. Additionally, only textbooks go through the review process, which means that only textbooks can be required for use in districts. Other educational resources, such as digital materials and software, are never required statewide. Requiring only the digital textbooks and not the means to leverage them leaves teachers and students in pretty much the same boat as before, only this time without funding for the hard copies. Though the quality of textbooks may improve via this initiative, there is no guarantee that they will be used, or used properly. After all, the quality of instruction depends on more than just the textbook.

“Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors. Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students.” –Eric Frank, Flatworld Knowledge

Conclusion

In conclusion, efforts are better spent building upon what we have learned about textbooks in the past few decades, instead of trying to save a dying resource. Textbooks may not need saving. Textbooks, as they currently stand, do not enhance the quality of education. They are outdated resources that have been enforced by outdated policies. Most teachers and students use the textbook as a crutch rather than a tool, and as studies show, this linear way of teaching has resulted in less learning and lower student performance. Though some current textbook initiatives may alleviate symptoms temporarily, they are essentially flogging the same tired mule. The future of education does not hold textbooks, at least in the traditional sense of textbooks; it holds the plethora of other resources that better serve it. We should focus on prioritizing the creation and adoption of these resources so that they are accessible, adaptable, and don’t fall into the same mediocre traps of the textbook.

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.

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

[...]

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.

With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Among the article’s interviewees is Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the non-profit group CK-12 Foundation, which develops “flexbooks” that can be adapted to state educational standards. Khosla explains the virtues of the flexbooks:

You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.

The article uses terms like “digital textbooks,” “free courseware,” “open source,” and “open-content,” but what exactly do these terms mean? While there is reference to the adaptability and customization digital texts, the article does not explicitly mention copyright. Even if digital delivery of educational materials may solve some of the cost barriers of education, without an explicit understanding of terms like “open” and “free,” legal and social barriers to learning remain.

The fact that textbooks are simply “digital” or “available on the Internet” alone is not enough.  While there are various terms being used right now such as “digital textbooks” and “free courseware,” they do not necessarily refer to the same thing.  Digital and online learning materials are only truly open educational resources when they are licensed under an open license, such as the least restrictive Creative Commons license, CC BY, or released into the public domain. Only then will they be truly available for sharing, collaboration and reuse.

The road to a digital future for education is not without its bumps. Lewin brings up the issue of a the digital divide: “Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.”

The real issue at stake is not just about lowering the economic costs of schooling, but instead the need to focus on increasing the accessibility of knowledge. In order for learning resources to be truly accessible, the issue is not just online vs. offline, digital vs. print. To reach their maximum social and educational potential, learning materials in the digital future will need to free from excessive copyright constraints in order to allow teachers and students the maximum freedom to legally share, modify, and improve upon them.

We need to think of Open Educational Resources as more than just textbooks in digital form. More than just delivery mechanisms for one-way knowledge transfer. How can the OER of the future be designed and licensed to maximize participation and collaboration? Open licensing of education resources is part of the solution. What do you envision for the future of open educational resources?

See also: Jane Park’s post from last September, “Back to School: Open Textbooks Gaining in Popularity.”

The conference itself was teeming with a variety of a different sort; the make-up of the audience (or perhaps the auditorium itself) strangely reminded me of a theater I attended back in Orange County. The crowd was a tad older, and certainly more formally dressed than the usual canvas sneaker and jean combo I am used to. And not entirely opposed to free culture folk, but certainly unlike, they were the paradigm of decorum.

WhippleHill services high schools in their online communication needs, and mainly because its founder, Travis Warren, went to one, it specifically targets private schools. WhippleHill is a for-profit, but like a lot of for-profits who offer services around next generation web technologies, pushing out open content and tools to their community only helps them. WhippleHill is a great example of the service model that is growing around open content and open tools, and I think it’s a model others should be taking note of, especially in this belly-up economy.

If anyone can work up a crowd, I should have guessed it would be Clay Shirky (or someone like him). Shirky elicited much laughter, and I definitely recognized anecdotes from his book whereupon I had LOL-ed. The one that got the crowd in particular was involving high school students’ myspace or blog postings, which usually revolved around such “banal” subjects (Shirky’s words not mine) like the thumb fishing app for the iPhone (personally, I did not know such an app existed and so found this post rather interesting). The title of the one student’s blog post was “Gone fishin’ ” and displayed an image of the iPhone with the app in the background. Underneath, it read, “I have been spending way too much time on this” or something akin to it. Now why would she (it was a she, and a fashion student in this case with a (not-so-curious to me anyway) fascination with Hello Kitty phone covers) post something so banal? Shirky asked. It’s simple; she’s not talking to you.

This, he continued, is what high school students discuss at the food court in the mall. If you’ve ever listened in on one of their conversations, it is filled with banal subjects like Hello Kitty phones. But you are obviously the weird one in this case, for what are you doing at the mall listening in?

Funny, and hilarious by some standards, but I had read it before. So what piqued my interest was his pizza-by-the-slice analogy (if it was in his book, I missed it). Maybe I’m just a foodie, but I found it a very apt example of what can happen when you get large groups of people together. Basically, Shirky grew up in the Midwest, where he worked at a pizza joint that only sold whole pies. (Myself having worked at a pizza chain in the OC recognized and sympathized with this situation.) Upon a visit when he was 16 to New York City, he was astonished that their pizza places not only sold pizza by the pie, but by the slice, and he wondered how this was sustainable. Well it turns out that NYC pizza joints have the pizza baked ahead of time, a novel concept, and simply reheat each slice when sold. From this he gleaned that the city has enough people willing to purchase pizza by the slice, which is what makes this type of marketing strategy sustainable. “When you get really large amounts of people involved, improbable events become certainties,” he concluded. “You can’t predict in advance how things will happen, so you have to provide tools to allow things to happen.” Baking the pizza prior to purchase was this sort of tool for pizza joints; it not only saved time but gave people more options. In turn, it allowed a kind of business (pizza-by-the-slice) to flourish that would not have otherwise done so.

Shirky is the master at anecdotes, and dropped a few more gems into the bucket before retiring to answer questions from the audience. I won’t go into detail about them here, for risk of running too long like my last post, but I would urge any and everyone to read his book, Here Comes Everybody. It puts the world into enlightening anecdotal perspective, and you are bound to catch yourself uttering a lot of “Mmmhmms” throughout. Anyway, now that I’ve done my part in promoting book sales, I wonder how long it will take before he decides to make it available online under a Creative Commons license…

“Loss of control is already in the past.”

This was the response Shirky gave to an audience member who asked how he should deal with parental and faculty concerns about the use of new media tools. It was also, coincidentally, the meme I went with for my own presentation, where I emphasized that it is up to us to educate our youth with a different approach to copyright law, because kids are going to keep doing what they are doing anyway—namely, what the Recording Industry Association of America calls “piracy”. The world is changing has already changed and we need to do our part in dealing with it rather than flogging a dead horse.

I presented to a full room, and even spied people lingering in the doorway while I was giving my talk. I thought my voice would give (I did croak a few times, and friends have told me I have an “adorable” little lisp…), or that my Macbook would suddenly shut down (as punishment for using proprietary software), but other than a little projector-laptop miscommunication in the beginning, things went pretty smoothly. Surprisingly, I ended with fifteen minutes to spare for questions, which were not all filled up. It’s always hard to gauge an audience who doesn’t respond with wild exclamations of support, so I wasn’t sure if they “got it” or not. But after the session, I had quite a few people come up to me, and there were general smiles and thank you’s all around. Jen, who deals with the WH communications end of things, told me it was all the rage on Twitter, and that one fellow had even mentioned how he was going to integrate Creative Commons education at his school. This made me happy. Teaching kids about CC is probably one of the best ideas in terms of copyright education. I only wish I was the one who came up with it. But as the sentiment goes, what does it matter, if you can build upon that idea and make it better. My favorite session member was one woman who sat smiling with attention at the very front. After I had finished packing up my things, she thanked me and remarked, “I have so much to learn!” I wanted to tell her—so do I!

In retrospect, I think Travis’ suggestion over a phone call some months prior is what helped with preparing for this crowd. By this crowd, I mean members of the majority of the education population who know almost nothing about copyright law, much less Creative Commons. He told me to “start at the beginning”, and I really took that advice to heart. Having started in the middle of things myself, when the open movement was already in full swing, I was really grasping at straws for a while. A lot of talks on CC will gloss over its origins and the history of copyright law—but WHUC 09 made me realize how important it is to linger on these details. Showing people the history behind Creative Commons, namely what led to its necessity, is pretty much identical to showing them the importance of “open”.

I’m not sure whether it was this unexpected turn of events that imbibed the conference with an infectious vitality, or if it was just another Saturday, but by the end of the day I had more than enough energy to keep on going until dawn (which, by the way, I did). The unexpected was the running theme in my experience of OVC; from my surprise at the diversity of conference attendees (there were independent film makers to corporate representatives) to the majority of non-techie talks and perspectives, I found my disparate worldviews converging and the bigger picture of OPEN jigsawing them into place. I think that’s ultimately what I came away with: openness and transparency as the jigsaw glue for the multifarious endeavors out there, all of them uniquely inspiring but collectively crucial. Rather than elaborating on humanity’s progress (or shortcomings) on this front, I’m going to get a little more specific.

Beginning with the universal disclaimer (for me), it is so easy to get lost or caught up in the details of what we do for this collective movement termed as “open”. As a hired advocate specifically for open education (a movement concerning the centralization of open educational resources in education), I often find myself struggling to see how it all fits into the bigger scheme of things known as life. In the past, I’ve always contributed this struggle to my penchant for philosophy, or for sweeping schema that aim to somehow make sense of a nonsensical world, and consequently dismissed this struggle because of this, assuming that because there are so many people in the world much smarter than I, it all somehow does fit and I just don’t see it yet. Well, I think I was right and wrong: there are a lot of smart people in the world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they see any better. The people who see anything are those who recognize that there is more to every story, and the ones who see more are those who realize that openness and transparency is what’s going to drive that home to everybody else.

The Open Video Conference was a hit because it extended its scope from the technical platforms enabling open video to the people who make open video happen. By getting at why they are making it happen in the first place (because video is one powerful medium for openness, because it’s what we’ve got to counter the nonsense that runs nonstop on cable television), the conference was able to impact a wider range of people—people like me who aren’t part of your typical choir.

All of the OVC is open video online and probably going viral as I type. But since most people don’t have the time or patience to view every single session, I’m going to do a brief download on some of my noteworthies here (keeping in mind that I had to miss some great sessions for others). In chronological order:

Yochai Benkler: Keynote

Yochai Benkler, probably best known to the world as the author of The Wealth of Networks, kicked things off on Friday by emphasizing that “ownership is [no longer] authority”, as evidenced by Wikipedia. He aptly observes that no one company has all the smart, capable people in the world, and that the Internet, in having radically decentralized the industrial information economy, has enabled these smart, capable people to work together on their own. This he dubbed as “distributed learning and innovation”: “Distributed learning and innovation means that the right person with the right skills can come up with the right solution.” He ended with this statement: “Distributed innovation is [now] in the service of distributed democracy.”

Fair Use Battles: What’s at Stake?

Anthony Falzone (good cop, Stanford’s Fair Use Project) and Corynne McSherry (bad cop, EFF) really illuminated for me how much you can do with copyrighted works. I, like many (especially teachers), have been afraid of infringing copyright when in reality we can do so much with copyrighted works via fair use. Anthony focused on specific cases where fair use has been upheld in the courts, finding that transformative use, such as social commentary, is largely considered fair use. He states that “the point of copyright is not to reward authors—the point is to reward authors so they create stuff.” It’s an incentive to encourage, not discourage, creativity. “The supreme court has said this again, and again, and again. Fair use = Free speech.”

However, Corynne also showed us the dangers facing fair use, such as DMCA take-downs, which make it incredibly easy for anyone to have your work blitzed out of existence without so much as a warning, even if what you posted was a fair use! She made me feel better, though, by telling me that there were things I could do, such as counter-noticing, or contacting the EFF.

Lizz Winstead: Featured Talk on Satire and Commentary

The co-creator of the Daily Show is a “firm believer in the satiric landscape” and focuses “mainly on the media because [she] feels like if the public gets it—that they can’t trust the mainstream media—then they will start looking elsewhere” instead of on “these dipsh*ts that get it wrong.” It’s the topical commentaries—responses to issues—that people really pay attention to. Bottom line: “Politics is personal.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Mobile Journalism Collective

The Mobile Journalism Collective focuses on citizen journalism, asking who is the citizen 2.0? Their answer: “Citizen 2.0 shares social information for a better life.” Part and parcel of the collective is training youth producers of digital media in the “one-shot” method, short glimpses into life that tell a story in one camera shot. “Impactful storytelling is a human responsibility” and “everyone can be a storyteller given cheap and portable modes of telling.” However, instead of simply promoting new media, they focus on “taking old media spectrums and inserting the citizen’s voice there.” It’s not about CNN versus a woman’s footage of a fire; “it’s about working together to give a bigger picture of what actually happened.”

I found this extremely pertinent to what ccLearn is attempting to do with Student Journalism 2.0, which is working with high school journalism teachers and students to get them up to speed on how journalism in the Internet age is rapidly changing and what they can do to contribute to its future. Incorporating citizens into news reporting is already huge, as evidenced by current events in Iran, and will only become more so.

Jonathan Zittrain: “Here Comes Everybody”

Jokingly impersonating Clay Shirky, Zittrain was funny and enlightening, referencing the Star Wars Kid as an example of collective consent on the Internet. Wikipedia is a labor of love; nobody gets paid to contribute to this vast online collection of reference articles, yet it continues to grow and sustain itself against vandalism. The Star Wars Kid is a phenomena that occurred when a group of kids decided to put up an embarrassing tape of one their peers on YouTube wielding a golf ball retriever as a light saber. Dubbed only as the Star Wars Kid, the Wikipedia entry for him refuses to divulge the kid’s name due to a consensus that occurred on a related conversation page. Yet, those who disagree still attempt to edit his name in, so why doesn’t it appear? Because others are constantly patrolling pages to make sure the community’s decision is enforced. The page is not locked and no one is forcing these people to enforce anything. So why do they do it? Zittrain says “people contribute because they want to be part of something larger than themselves.”

Mediaspace Potentials and Mapping Open Video

Kari-Hans Kommonen and Sanna Marttila (Arki research group at the University of Art and Design Helsinki) presented on their respective projects at Media Lab in Finland. Both were fascinating presentations, and those who missed out due to conference scheduling should definitely check out their site and the session videos online. Kommonen talked about the change in media environment from analog to digital—how the computer is a meta-medium because it is programmable and you can make it function like any other medium. This is a (r)evolution in design because you “can increase the functionality of all analog devices inside the computer; (it’s) a multifunctional computer that can do anything!” The mediaspace refers to the new media environment that resulted from this evolution in design, the “networked information economy.” In the current world, “Media is our nervous system”; “Society negotiates its beliefs and designs in media. Redesign of the media environment leads to redesign of the societal thinking process.”

Marttila, also on the Creative Commons Finland team, showed us Venn diagram-based maps of social tools, resources, and people intersecting—and how all three combine to produce open video. These maps demonstrated the findings of a study involving documenting people and their interactions with media in the everyday (such people included acrobats and winter climbers). She found that people are the main ingredient for openness, a strong “design belief that people themselves are the best designers of their own activities.” Key finding: Video is a process—not an end result. “Individual videos can not be fully understood outside of the process they belong to.”

Open Video in Education

I was pleasantly surprised by this panel on open video in education. Formal education institutions are so rooted in the past that they are usually less forward thinking than your average open culture advocate. But most everyone in the room, including the audience, were in agreement that open video and open technologies are essential to the future of education. The expressed concerns were more about how to convince the higher-ups at these institutions to see the light.

However, the session was not lacking in representation. Someone remarked how the variety of perspectives yielded a kind of “transformer panel.” From Bjoern Hassler (Cambridge University’s Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) who set the tone in the beginning by assuming that it is (or should be) apparent to everyone that CC BY is the best license for OER, Tiffiny Cheng (Participatory Culture Foundation) who highlighted Miro, the open source free high definition video player, to UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkeley, the panel was diverse but consistent in their view that open video for education is essential, that CC licenses for that video is a given, and that—to quote an audience member’s words—”You have to do more than just tape lectures.”

Xeni Jardin: Keynote

If I had to describe Xeni Jardin in one word, it would be fabulous. With her near-platinum blond hair in striking short swirls and with just as edgy eye make-up, Jardin was the OVC’s eye candy. But we wouldn’t expect any less from Boing Boing Video, from whence she hailed. Do I have anything else to say about her? Just that she has crazy interview skills* and a magnetic personality. Oh, and she attributed Boing Boing’s success to the fact that “all of [it] is Creative Commons licensed content.”

Amy Goodman: Keynote

Amy Goodman, host and founder of Democracy Now! and one of the first independent journalists delivered something powerful to a packed auditorium. I say powerful in spite of the fact that unlike all previous presenters she had no flashy keynote to accompany her speech, only a blank screen, a podium, and a handful of papers. I have never seen her speak before, and it was obvious when she paused for a second near the beginning that she was nowhere near as Web 2.0 savvy as her audience. What gave her credence, however, was the fact that she accepted the change in the media landscape, and not only did she accept it, she supported it—by giving shout-outs to Creative Commons and Twitter. She quoted a time when she was asked what she thought of the mainstream media. Her answer: “I think it would be a good idea.” She drove home the point that open video levels twenty-four hour news networks who are more extreme than mainstream. What I found most striking, though, was her conviction that she and her fellow colleagues were representing the shield, versus the sword. It reminded me of the speech given by world-renowned writer Haruki Murakami on accepting the Jerusalem Prize earlier this year entitled, “Always on the side of the egg.” In light of February events in the Gaza strip, Murakami responded to protests about accepting the Jerusalem prize. He went ahead and accepted, stating that novelists like to do exactly what they are told not to do. But he also gave another reason, that—”Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.” He continued,

“Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.”

She also quoted Woody Allen, which, coming from her, was a hell of a lot more inspiring—”90% of Life is just showing up.” And, she said, “Rosa Parks was not just a tired old seamstress.” (She was a revolutionary.)

Surprise video conference with Pirate Bay’s Co-founder

*Xeni Jardin returned on stage to wrap up the conference and interview Peter Sunde, co-founder of Pirate Bay who is awaiting appeal. I’m not going to say too much about this one (it was the end of the day and live streamed and I didn’t take notes) except that it was incredibly entertaining and Peter was sipping apple juice (it really was just apple juice). He was also incredibly at ease for someone sentenced to one year in prison. Anyway, the video is definitely worthy of a laugh and a lunch break.

That’s all

I’m not a seasoned veteran of conferences, and I usually don’t have the constitution for wading through gigantic masses of people. I have to say, though, that the Open Video Conference really rocked my socks. All two of them. Thanks so much to the Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance who put this on. I look forward to OVC 2010.