Our own views on openness (week 1)

I do agree with the opinion that openness is a philosophy and an attitude and I also think that this is the hardest part about it. I mean: attitudes are the most difficult to change and they are culturally rooted and what I see from my own experience, growing up in a culture that does not encourage sharing can be a real challenge to the idea of openness.

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This is, I believe, the key to openness. Only by keeping the world of open resources alive: by taking from it, remixing, re-purposing and eventually redistributing will allow the idea of openness and sharing to spread around.

Or I should read more than one thread at a time :wink:

I take @clhendricksbc point in terms of interpretation of text, but had already been thinking of language translation and ā€œnew originalsā€. And not necessarily the one the original author wanted sometimes :slight_smile:

Well post David Wiley viewing and my new original :wink: take on it, it was the need for the Open context for the (copyright) consent to remix. I could just go in and take, but as Alan said about putting the Creative Commons debate right upfront at the start. And to see how people are going to use it.

And the source. For example, taking the open data and analysing it for a different output than perhaps the original (rather than the scientific but there are some examples I am sure).

Hi David, this is gonna sound funny but it sounds like something i would say, i just canā€™t remember when i said it :slight_smile: didnā€™t find it where i thought it was. But thanks for bringing it up :slight_smile:

Hmm interesting point. I would have said revising a work might be a way to re-work it for oneā€™s own context (as you say to give students parts that are relevant), but by doing so, we also de-contextualize it, may misinterpret.

Then again - isnā€™t that what we do every time we reference someone anyway? Always a risk of misinterpreting anyway. What is important, I guess, is not to deliberately misrepresent another?

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Saw a Blogpost with stories of OER reuse by Alan Levine today: http://cogdogblog.com/2014/08/10/mythical-oer-reuse/

More aspects of openness that I have recently become aware of, and would consider important too:

  • Open Contracts (as opposed to non-disclosure agreements, secret dealings, etc)
  • Open Hardware/Open Infrastructure, for instance bitcoin or ethereum

As with any form of communication is an act of decoding someoneā€™s intent and ascribding meaning to it, as such it can be misinterpreted anyway :smile: I think the key is to not make such a mistake intentionally (misrepresent someone else to support your point)

There are a couple of responses to this question on a different topic here on Discourse. I thought Iā€™d link to them here so everyone else is sure to see them!

By @AStrachan About the Why Open? category

By @aristarik About the Why Open? category

Hi there Paul Olivier :slight_smile: those two kinds of openness sound interesting! Had not heard of them beforeā€¦

@JohnJohnston interesting post! The thing that caught my attention the most was ā€œpublish my thoughts and idea without permission (limited by social norms, employment and the law).ā€ I know that this can be a sticky point, especially in work situations where employees arenā€™t necessarily protected by law (in the US ā€œat-will employmentā€) where you can be dismissed for any reason, including what you post on your blog. Itā€™s scary to think that your out-of-work activities (legal as they may be) can cause someone to lose their job. :slight_smile:

Based on extensive quantitative outcomes from triple-blind randomized control trials and some anecdotal experience, as well as heuristic textual analysis of previous discussions on the meaning of open, early findings suggest that open seems to happen at the praxis intersection of some very specific constituencies, so my provisional meaning of open involves some combination of cats, buttons and giving a damn.

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This is an interesting question, especially for me the last part. When one changes an artifact that is licensed with a Creative Commons license, for example, best practice is to link to the original and its license. So for the second artifact the original is still accessible. But if the second one is also CC licensed, then a third one just needs to lead to the second. And so on. So the original does, indeed, get buried. For me, I donā€™t care if my own work gets built on and buried in this way; I think it would be great if it would be the chain to several other things, each moving in different directions.

What Iā€™d like, though, is to be able to know if my work is used, even once, even twice. But I might only hear this if people tell me about it, and they donā€™t of course need to in order to use my work; they just need to cite it and I may never know. One nice thing about the citation system in academic writing and journals is that one often can find out where/how one has been cited. But with CC-licensed stuff, not so much. I just think it would be cool to know, but Iā€™m not sure how that would work.

I agree fully on our concerns about privatising teaching and learningā€¦ I am not familiar enough with the history of academic publishing to know, though, how we gave away journals to private companies. Were journals often originally tied to universities or groups of academics, and then later handed over to private companies? I simply donā€™t know and am curious!

With textbooks, those are often already privately produced, so MOOCs run by private companies replacing textbooks doesnā€™t seem that much of a switch. Unless, of course, there are open or otherwise publicly funded and produced texts that then get replaced by MOOC providers that are private. But in the cases I know most about, the textbooks are already privately produced (and often ridiculously expensive!).

I also worry about public education being coopted by private business, but perhaps I am too optimistic in thinking that the MOOC providers arenā€™t finding good enough ways to make money in order for that sort of worry to come to fruition. Udacity has already pulled out of the higher education market, from what I can tell (for example). Coursera seems to still be in it, but Iā€™m not sure their business model is sustainable. Still, Iā€™m not fully up on all this, so I may be unduly optimistic!

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@MahaBali @David_Jones I remember this point about language translation too; I found something sort of similar in this blog post, about accessibility requiring an accessible language: http://blog.mahabali.me/blog/whyopen/whats-open-anyway/

Was that it?

I think that officially, translation counts as making a ā€œderivativeā€ of the original work, and so if one doesnā€™t allow derivatives of oneā€™s work, say through a CC license that is not ā€œno derivativesā€ (ND), then translation is not allowed without permission: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#When_is_my_use_considered_an_adaptation.3F

So while I agree that one can think of a translation as not modifying the original but a new work itself, under the terms of Creative Commons licenses, anyway. So if one licensed an academic work as CC-BY-ND, for example, then that means one is not allowing translations without express permission. Whether thatā€™s a good way to organize CC licenses or not is another matter! Of course, one could try to explain directly that one wants to allow translation but no other modifications, but then one is creating oneā€™s own custom license I guess.

And Iā€™ve gotten that message from Discourse too, that Iā€™m talking too much! Sigh. I just get so interested in these discussions! But yes, others should jump in where/when they wish to!

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Oh this is nice, thank you :smile:

Yep, I tend to hope that my employers (temporarily the Scottish Government) will be reasonable about blog posts as long as I donā€™t post something that does actual damage, for example spoiling a procurement. I donā€™t write about anything very sensitive, but recently had to avoid blogging my work for a while for this reason.

Very interesting indeed! I like especially the idea of ā€œTalking across domainsā€, but am still struggling with some other aspects of what you are writing too. For instance, how would you compare the freedoms you have on your blog to that you have here? Do you think you have strictly less freedoms here?