…but 20 years on there is a strange symbiosis developing and the challenge is to equip citizens with the appropriate digital/information literacy skills.
Pragmatism and idealism are also uneasy bedfellows in scholarly publishing. The current model is crazy…academic produces research output with public money and/or under institutional contract, signs copyright over to Elsevier (for eg!) who organise peer review (itself an anachronism in my view) also undertaken for no additional renumeration by other academics…then sell it back to the academy in the form of library subscription and/or increasingly APC charges for gold OA (stealing from Peter to pay Paul). Green OA (self-archiving) in an IR has gone some way to shifting the Zeitgeist but it is clear a more radical shake up of scholarly comma is required.
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I definitely think by now #Openess, just as much as any ideological term, needs to be one part of a greater conversation sustainable improvement of democratic access. This is why I work in an access institution (ie community college), instead of one that needs to choose those that can handle the weight of knowledge.
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I’d also like the aspect of the #open idea turned into pragmatic action or intended to lead into action (ie. to teach or to motivate sharing).
But payment can be made in terms not directly associated with monetary advantage.
Barter or a shared community benefit can be maintained through membership, dues and not tuition. There should always be an alternative, a “yeah but that’s OK too” clause.
OneTab is not collaborative but handy and quicker than than bookmarking for grabbing up links. It’s only on Chrome (to keep open pages memory load down). Bundles can be saved as webpages too – shared, bookmarked and added to the toolbar. I’ve got a #WhyOpen one now
Or you can just use them for a session to reduce tab clutter by putting all those pages that would be open browser windows on one page.
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I would have to say that this would have to start at a young age, but it never ends. As learners extend their understanding and knowledge and have access to more diverse registers of language they should continue to hone their literacy skills. I think critical literacy can be done a little on one’s own, but it requires some socratic dialogue with others to really get it going.
Hi MahaBali
I would not categorize myself as anti-money as some form or method is needed for the exchange of goods and services and money fulfils that requirement. I am however pro free education, affordable health care and giving everybody an equal change at being able to succeed in life. I suppose my views are highly influenced by Rawls and the principle that all actions should benefit the poorest of the poor.
If I say I am not anti-money it does not suggest that I an pro remuneration which borders on the ridiculous. I can for the life of me not see why somebody would need more than what they would require to live on. Off course I do understand that there are different standards of living and that some might argue that they therefor need exorbitant amounts of money to survive but all in all I would ideally like everybody to have a fair chance of living a decent life and being able to pay the necessary bills.
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the past few days, but realise now I’ve run out of time before today’s webinar to post a thorough reply, so I’ve included below the initial thoughts I’ve jotted down, and a section from my recent comprehensive exam paper that talks about the past and present relationship between technology and higher education (apologies if it doesn’t make a ton of sense without the whole context).
Thoughts on open:
- transparency, making products and processes visible to all
- sharing, repurposing
- locked vs unlocked - black box vs tinkering
- in education - somewhat subversive, unnatural to academia
From my paper:
Openness
Cutting across both the technology and education realms, and underpinning many of the emerging technologies and learning practices, is the concept of ‘openness’. In technology, the open source movement not only refers to software that can be freely distributed, but also to a mind-set that hearkens back to the tinkering in Silicon Valley garages of the 1970s that produced Apple, Microsoft, and HP. Openness is about making processes transparent; allowing users to not only view but change software code, opening up the black boxes that our hardware has become to tinker and build something new. In education, ideas of openness are not new, especially in relation to distance education (Weller, 2011). The U.K.’s Open University, first offering correspondence courses and now focusing on online learning, has long run on principles of open, equal access without entry requirements, and open, transparent aims, objectives, and assessment (ibid). Canada’s Athabasca University runs on similar principles, and is also highly engaged in pushing for further openness in education. David Price (2013) cites three types of openness in education. Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that are available free of charge and are also open in the sense that the user is welcome to share, adapt, and re-purpose them as they chose. Open access, part of an open scholarship movement, sees researchers and authors distributing, sharing, and accessing work freely. Open teaching involves both offering lessons or courses for free, but also sharing materials with other teachers, using OERs, posting course materials (and often student work) publicly, and using technology to open discussions for input from the wider world. This proliferation of openness is impacting education. A recent survey found that 71% of higher education students have used some type of open educational resources as part of their formal learning (Dahlstrom et al., 2013). With resources available for free, demanding that students pay often exorbitant amounts for textbooks or course packs is becoming more and more unreasonable. And as entire courses are being offered for free online, from the content available through venues like iTunes U or MIT’s Open Courseware, to the actual structured MOOCs being offered by prominent universities, institutions of higher education are being forced to adapt.
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Will save record of hangout until after this post as I have been elsewhere so my own (re)view open so far.
Open is
- usable - share and reuse
- accumulates- adds value and builds on others
- transparent - resources and how used
- designed that way - consent and accessible
How persistent is something I am thinking about. For example, there are repositories but for how long, or does it matter that the “original” is buried under subsequent artefacts?
Open as a belief - so something to be reasserted - and validated by our actions, and the collaboration and education “bias”.
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Thinking again about the “value of information” and openness as the catch-all of goodness to unlock that value. For example in the UK, reservoirs of government data just waiting for someone to come along with an App that can monetise it (so the entrepreneur gets the money, but the public sector has to make it open and available).
My awareness of openness issues in science dates back to 1997, when my dad told me how great PubMed was for his job: it served/s as an indexing service for medicine papers (before Google!), and it was made available for free to researchers worldwide (by Al Gore, of all people!), since it had been originally developed with US taxpayer money. In contrast, in mathematics, we have MathSciNet which is produced with volunteer work from professors and funding from the American Mathematical Society (i.e. fees from the community), and is still sometimes too expensive for mathematicians in developing countries to access.
Since, I have become more aware of Open Access issues (i.e. content, not just indexing), although I don’t know all the subtleties there between the different publishing options (gold etc). I use the ArXiv for my preprints and support some of the boycotting campaigns against the worst offenders in the publishing industry (like the Cost of Knowledge campaign).
I am very aware of openness issues with software: I have been “burned” during my PhD by the fact that I was using a closed source tool like Mathematica, which left me dependent on a commercial company to correct crucial bugs and affect the pace of my thesis. In response, I have started working on an open source project called SAGE (free/libre computer algebra system). William Stein’s account of the creation of SAGE might be of interest to others here. I am also interested in products like those of Mathematical Sciences Publishers, which help mathematicians set up easily their own journals.
Issues of OpenData interest me as well. In that vein, I have been involved in a project called the LMFDB since 2008 or so, with the goal of founding a very pervasive and integrated mathematical database. OpenData is also a good topic to investigate with my mathematics students when teaching them programming (for instance analysing the public transport dataset of Zurich).
Finally, as an academic, I do a lot of teaching. The most recent development in that direction has to do with MOOCs, which will undoubtedly hit all the issues described above.
- OpenAccess/Open Education Resources for copyright issues (because of the difficulty of invoking education fair use when it is used on a large scale),
- Open Source software (for the software powering the platform),
- OpenData in terms of data for educations research (but not only, I think).
In addition, MOOCs are likely to hit the issue of open certification/OpenBadges.
The current situation with scientific publishing is so crazy and it has been so difficult to correct it that I am worried academics might repeat similar mistakes in the context of large scale education. As academics, we have given away to private companies brands we have laboured to create (i.e. reputable academic journals), and we are dearly paying for it now, both with money and with the glacial pace of transition to a web based system of scholarship (it would challenge existing business models). History could repeat itself for the other main output of academic work (educational material), if MOOCs were to simply substitute themselves for textbooks. An alternative negative future would be the possibility that MOOC providers appropriate another type of brands: universities themselves. Indeed, one could imagine a progressive externalisation of the duty of teaching to MOOC providers, which would certainly not promote equity for students and would seriously disrupt the fabric of universities. In fact, the first skirmishes in this direction have started over the past couple years.
Can see the reuse and share in Open. And previously a quote and footnote is attributed (academic) text with shared standards.
A remix is contextual. What is the context? A community like this one because you signed up. But without consent if I went on a raiding party on #ds106 for some content.
As @David_Jones points out, you can already quote and paraphrase and use things from an academic text with shared standards of attribution, without open. And yes, there is the concern about open access academic work allowing for revision because it could potentially distort what you were trying to say and it’s under your name. Though Creative Commons licenses, at least, have the provision that if you do revise, you must not present the work in a way that suggests that the author endorses the revision. So you could still maybe allow revision and be protected with that sort of clause?
Why might one want to allow revision of an academic work? The main case that comes to mind is translation–someone could translate part or all of it without having to ask permission. But also, sometimes I like to excerpt parts of a work before I assign it for my classes so students don’t have to read a very long piece nor do I have to say “start at p. 2, the paragraph beginning…” and “end at p. 15, before the paragraph that starts…”. I can, though, see why someone might not want a teacher to do that b/c it may lead to students (or others reading the excerpt) to get the wrong impression of one’s argument. So maybe this isn’t a good case for revision?
You point to an important tension between open and monetisation that others on this thread have noted too (@Brittney is one of them). I have heard the concern from some people that if they share their work, their methods, their data, what have you, this makes it easy for someone else to come along and find a way to monetise it. And for some, that upsets them enough that they don’t want to share (even if they themselves weren’t going to make money off it, there’s something about someone else doing so that’s bothersome to them). Of course, CC “non commercial” can help with this concern, as can CC “share alike,” especially for those who want to share and make sure that what they’ve created, and its derivates, keep being open. But for others even this is not enough because the onus is on the copyright holder to prosecute (and pay the legal fees) and it’s hard to find out that a commercial use has happened.
I’m not sure what to do about that particular tension between openness and monetisation, nor for your point about us all becoming data for Google (and many others) that ultimately makes them money. For myself, I’m actually not too worried about people making money from my stuff, since I’m not doing the work necessary to do so, and I think becoming fodder for indexed Google data is perhaps an acceptable price for sharing what I do. But I could be persuaded otherwise, probably!
I’ve, as per instructions, not watched the hangout yet so quickly blogged some notes in answer to this question here:
Not sure if it best for conversation to ask folk to go away from the board…
@David_Jones and @clhendricksbc by contextual I mean this:
If I write a short story (purely fiction) you can take my entire open fictional story and remix it. Change the characters, change scenes, change some dialogue and remix it (and share it) as you wish. This would be the purely open part.
If I wrote something that was a true story, you could still take that, modify names, places, specific occurrences, scenes and so on and re-package it and distribute it. However, there is a caveat here, it’s no longer a true story, but based on a true story, so the context has changed.
Finally, if I write an academic research article, you can take parts of it and cite me as a source (people have been doing that for ages anyway) BUT you don’t have the same rights as you do with my short fiction story. By messing around with the original you are risking making harmful changes to anyone down the stream who is reading and interpreting this document for scientific merit and application. What you can do is re-run the experiment and write your own version OR you can (if the data is open) analyze the data on its own and write your own open paper, but you can’t edit the original.
For me remixing (in this context at least) meant that you do something to the original to change its form, not taking part of column A and part of Column B and making something new 
Interesting point @clhendricksbc 
for what it’s worth I don’t consider translation of a work into another language as modifying that work. I see translation as creation of a new original work (for the translated language anyway) based on the original work of someone else.
By the way, others should jump in here because P2P Discourse is constructively critiquing me by telling me I speak too much 
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I have been thinking a lot about ‘openness’ and ‘being open’ recently and I must say that the idea itself is quite ambiguous to me. What does it mean that something is open? Does it have to be freely available to anyone or it is enough that it is available to a person or a group of people the author wants it to be available to? The idea of openness and sharing seems wonderful but what if it comes to us? Would I like to give away materials I prepared, I spent a lot of time on to anyone allowing them to take my materials, use them and throw them away? I am not so sure… If somebody asked me if I consider myself an “open” person, I would definitely say: YES, but giving it a second thought: I am not so sure. Maybe this is because of my cultural background or maybe I misunderstand the notion of openness. If it is the case of the latter, then I am in the right place, I think.
Either a failure of my navigation or poor recollection, but was there a comment (or blog?) from @Mahabali about language translation as an issue in terms of a derivative work? So that can be something not open, a barrier remaining due to language.
And a translation not bring direct, so as to retain the meaning, but potentially making it different. Perhaps less so for the non fiction or academic text, but some kind of contextual “remix” as well @akoutropoulos?