I want to welcome David Wiley and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. His post is scheduled to appear on October 3, 2007 (eastern U.S.). David will write about the role of open content in open education.
David Wiley currently serves as an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology and also the Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, (C()SL), at Utah State University. He is best known for having coined the term Open Content and creating the first open source-style license for non-software. His work on open content, open education, and informal online learning communities has been reported in many international outlets. His leadership in the open education resource is wildly recognized.
I am very much looking forward to David’s posting, which promises to build on the great dialog that was generated during the past months on the Series. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.
Author - David Wiley, "Content is Infrastructure". Originally submitted October 3rd, 2007 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
Content is infrastructure.
Why would I say such a thing? For three reasons.
First, I wish to point out that content is absolutely critical. In the late 90s, webmasters frequently heard the phrase “content is king.” Today the notion is often rejected and replaced with something along the lines of Content is Dead. Community is King Now. In the past I’ve said I could care less whether or not learning objects were dead or alive. However, to declare content dead in favor of the coolness of community misses the point that content is irrefutably a critical piece of educational infrastructure. Wikipedia says:
If the content base from which we all teach and learn - the internet, textbooks, library books, journal articles, etc. - were ’significantly damaged or destroyed,’ is there any way to imagine that this would not ’cause serious disruption’ to all education, both formal and informal? It is almost incomprehensible where we would be without content - at best, we would be reduced entirely to purely oral methods of teaching and learning. It may seem childish to point out something so obvious, but content is a critical part of the infrastructure of education.
Second, I want to suggest that we must understand that content is infrastructure before we can see radical improvements in education. Before we can expect large scale educational experimentation and innovation to occur we must deploy a sufficient amount of content, on a sufficient number of topics, at a sufficient level of quality, available at sufficiently low cost. Take the roads (an example of civic infrastructure) as an example. When there are enough roads, going enough places, with enough capacity, and without tolls, we can expect to see significant experimentation and innovation on top of this infrastructure. In the case of roads, we can see people establishing a variety of transportation services (taxis, shuttles), delivery services (food, packages), support services (towing, tire repair), and other services. In the case of content, when there is a sufficient amount of open educational content on a sufficient number of topics at sufficient quality, we can also expect to see experimentation and innovation in localization services (translation, low-bandwidth delivery), accreditation services (degrees, certificates), and support services (tutors, study group locators).
Of course, it costs money to build roads just like it costs money to create content. However, it generally does not cost money to drive on a road, and this encourages people to experiment and innovate in creating services that rely on the roads. We should realize that content is infrastructure in order to more clearly understand that the eventual creation of a content infrastructure which is free to use will catalyze and support the types of experiments and innovations we hope to see in the educational realm.
It’s all very Marxist; when only the wealthy can afford access to the means of production (or, in our case, the “means of instruction”), very little innovation will percolate up from the rest of us. But when everyone has free and open access to the means of instruction, we can expect to see large scale experimentation and innovation. As Linus so famously said,
If we want to see education radically improved, we can’t architect it. None of us is that intelligent. We have to understand that content is infrastructure in order to start Linus’ massively parallel feedback cycle running.
And finally, we have to understand that content is infrastructure to see current “open educational resources” projects and initiatives from the proper perspective. The OpenCourseWares, the Connexions, the GLOBEs, and all the other repositories of open educational resources in the world are critical infrastructure. As such, they are necessary conditions for revolutionizing education. The revolution can not happen without them. However, open content itself is by no means a sufficient condition for the revolution to succeed. So much more is needed! The list above includes only a handful of what needs to be worked on (localization, translation, low-bandwidth delivery, accreditation, degrees, certificates, support, tutors, study group locators).
To say that content, and therefore these projects, are necessary but not sufficient conditions is not to say that content is unimportant. Anything but! Every piece of the system, including content, is critical - as Paul taught the Corinthians:
Content is infrastructure. An important beginning step that absolutely must be completed, and there is much more to follow. If you’re reading this post, I invite you to join our host Ken Udas, the other Guest Contributors in the series, and myself in working on creating this infrastructure and innovating on top of this infrastructure to improve education for everyone.
Do I have it wrong? Have I missed something obvious (or otherwise)? Please join the conversation in the comments below.
Hi David, Great post. I commend your courage in this world of constructivism to profile the humble but decisive role of content in our educational infrastructure.
Education - as a discursive and social endeavour needs something trigger and carry our learning conversations. Education does not take place in a vacuum and in our digital world, our conversations - like this one, become the content for further discussion.
Viva (free) content - Viva
Hello, First, David, thank you. There are a lot of directions to take this. I have a quick question to start things off that I know is full of twists and turns. I am not sure how far we want to take the physical infrastructure analogy, but I will push it just a little further. Roads and other types of public physical infrastructure tend to be funded from public sources (general taxes, road taxes, gas taxes, etc), use-based sources (tolls), and volunteer sources (adopt a highway). I would assume that this combination of resources sort of represents the way we look at appropriate cost allocations. We see the roads as a public good so they should be supported by various governments (federal, state, local) through taxes, it is also recognized that some cost should be assigned differentially to who is using a specific roadway, while others see benefit in keeping the road clean in their community (by adopting a highway) and are willing to take care of that for a number of reasons.
Here is the question. To help ensure that “content” infrastructure is of high quality, functioning to enable rather than constrain education and innovation, how might we think about resourcing “content infrastructure” in a sustainable manner?
Here is another question. Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education & education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?
Thanks!
Hi Ken, Good questions.
I’d like to add into the mix Elinor Ostrom’s 2X2 matrix classification between rivalrous versus non-rivalrous and excludable versus non excludable goods. (Frome Governing the Commons, 1990).
See for example:
Rivalrous versus non-rivalrous goods and
Excludable versus non-excludable goods.
The matrix then classifies for types of goods:
Common-pool resource (i.e non-excludable and rivalrous - eg the classic tragedy of the grazing commons, and a hard copy library book. When one patron has the book, another patron cannot take the book out at the same time)
private goods (i.e. excludable and rivalrous - eg commercially sold book)
toll good (i.e. excludable and non-rivalrous - eg paid subscription to an online journal. Digital copies are infinitely accessible)
public good (i.e. non-excludable and non-rivalrous eg knowledge or free content.)
The point being that content can assume different forms and depending on how the content is stored (hard copy versus digital) and the licensing that is used (excludable versus non-excludable) will determine whether the same content is for example a private good or public good.
Consequently I think we need to think about different resourcing models and a range of value propositions depending on where the content sits in this 2X2 matrix.
Without going into too much detail - I think that there are things we can do to think differently about resourcing content in education. For example, the most significant cost driver in developing high quality asynchronous learning materials is the academic authoring time. By sharing development cost over many institutions, the development of free content (public good resources) can lower the current costs of production for individual institutions. Savings in cost of production is a mechanism to resource more free content development.
David – Seems to be a regular occurrence here at Camp One these days,
One – News comes in, get put on the Big Board
Two – ‘Work’ Stops, Discussion starts and begins to heat the floor up
Three – The Sound Pressure meter goes off, the alarm sounds and everyone disengages and goes to the Basket Ball court.
I first came in contact with Terra Incognita after Gavin Baker’s ‘Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource’ post . and first introduced Camp One with this response posting as well making on to the much coveted, even by those who don’t know it exists yet, 10/10++ rating on the Camp One Way Cool Scale (comment 3).
134 Words in and finally I will get to the point. There are constant discussion by people who are wondering why Camp One is so successful. The answer to this is a simple one and speaks to the ethos of this post. There is no program per say, no dictated vision, just a set of ground rule and an infrastructure built to support those rules. Simply put, the camp is the program, from which has grown the community of learners. It is the content of what goes on here which takes precedence over the infrastructure. To be sure, we have a crack team of Techno Humans, most of them ‘Recovering’ Hackers who have seen a beneficial use for their creativity. But we are a community first and foremost and while there are a few walking through the door, who don’t grasp the concept, the building sways them fairly quickly.
Accepting responsibility for a bit of ‘All about us’
Regards Martin
David– Great post and a very important topic here on our campus. There are lots of smart people doing great things with platforms all over the University — finding new ways to engage students with blogs, social networks, and all sorts of other great tools. What I see lacking is the innovative use of these tools as instructional design and delivery tools. Faculty who routinely use these environments use them in an activity form — not as the vehicle for delivering course content. They use them to engage students in and out of the classroom, but not to design and deliver courses … perhaps when they start to understand more fully how the environments work we’ll see a new breed of content exposed via the social web.
What frustrates me is the notion that our own eLearning spaces are both closed and built on old infrastructure. I have many conversations all over our University with people who say open is good, but when push comes to shove, they ask us to keep it closed. A perfect example is our use of iTunes U. This is an environment that begs to be open so anyone can come in and subscribe to a course podcast and learn. Our faculty produced over 2300 course podcasts last Spring, but there are exactly 12 of them that are open to people outside of a given class. That is no different than our LMS universe.
I agree that content is infrastructure, but there is a philosophical component that goes along with this — that learning designers and faculty alike must embrace the notion of openness in their design. I think we are on the verge of getting to a more open culture as it relates to content … a place where learning designers and faculty are trying to understand how to use new spaces to reinvent the delivery of content. I saw this about 10 years ago — as people were just climbing the Internet mindset. Will it lead to an environment that promotes the use of emerging spaces in the delivery of University content? I hope so. We just aren’t there yet, but given the right context it can become the norm.
Taking my lead from Wayne, Martin, and Cole, it seems to me the question:
Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education & education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?
is pretty reasonable. That is, there is a cultural mindset that that needs to develop on campuses that will enable and promote the development and distribution of free content. Eventually, one way or the next, the “cultural mindset” would pervade the organization, influencing not only the commitment of faculty and learning designers, but also technology managers, marketers, legal counselors, academic administrators, managers, etc.
The level to which the “cultural mind set” needs to pervade the organization (community) will of course vary from university to university depending on a lot of things. It seems to me that one cultural norm that could be pretty debilitating is the assumption of competition over community. I have noted a feeling in higher education (not limited to the US) that we are competing with each other at an institutional level. If this is an organizational orientation, there is an understandable impulse to treat internally generated learning resources as either private goods or toll goods (see Wayne’s comment above).
If my assumptions, assertions, or conclusions are spurious, please question or correct them. Until then I am left asking myself two questions:
Is it possible to harness the competitive impulse to promote free and open content?
What are some of the differences between institutions that have adopted free and open educational resources as part of their identity and those that have not?
As a final note, I have a feeling that organizations that engage in free and open educational resource development principally (or solely) to 1) gain some sort of competitive advantage, or 2) raise institutional profile, are starting on an unsteady foundation in the long-run.
So in light of these questions, are we prepared to ask ourselves (and ultimately our organizations) if open content is a strategic goal (on any level) for us? The “us” is not just the World Campus, but our Institution … there are pockets making a go at this right here on our campus — in the past the College of IST and the Online IST curriculum was mostly open, and currently the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences are making it happen Where do we stand and where do we want to be? Perhaps the most important question is how do we intend to get there?
Ken, great questions! Let’s see what I can make of them…
To help ensure that “content” infrastructure is of high quality, functioning to enable rather than constrain education and innovation, how might we think about resourcing “content infrastructure” in a sustainable manner?
I think your discussion of taxes, tolls, and volunteers is quite interesting! I’m not sure that tolls will be possible in the open content world, however. To implement a toll on a road, you generally either (a) forbid traffic unless they pay the toll (this amounts to commercial content) or you (b) levy a toll on certain kinds of traffic like big trucks (this amounts to discrimination against certain users or uses of content). While discrimination is prevalent today in the open content world (e.g., use of the CC-NC clause), we should be planning for a future in which this discrimination doesn’t occur. So perhaps our long-term sustainability strategy should focus mostly on taxes and volunteers.
In reality, taxes pay for the development and heavy maintenance of roads. Volunteers keep in-tact roads looking neat and tidy, but volunteers neither build new roads nor fix major structural problems (e.g., fill potholes). I think that for sufficient quality, quantity, and coverage of roads to exist, we will likely need to depend on a common recognition that educational infrastructure is just as critical as transportation infrastructure, and tax money being put to this purpose. Volunteers can be wiki-gardners who pull the inevitable weeds and keep things clean, and they will play an important role, but I don’t know if I believe that we can depend on volunteers to build out ~and maintain~ this critical infrastructure.
Here is another question. Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education & education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?
Yes! And the primary thing is thinking about content as infrastructure. Once we realize how critical this infrastructure is to enabling progress and competitiveness in our current world, we will be willing to invest in it.
David, Ken and All – I have introduced this notion in a couple of other venues and perhaps the time is right to do it here. Open Access is seen somewhat a a thorn in is side of the status quo except what we see as the said quo today is not as it always has been. There was a time when Science in all its iterations was practiced for the sake of Science, when people on the streets would hear the sound of ‘Eureka’ shouted from the window of a dingy cell in a musty pile and another discovery born. It has only been since the notion of profit was introduced to the whole area of the dissemination of knowledge has the issue of paying to read about the discoveries, in many cases the public has payed to create, has the issue of how it is paid for become an issue.
May I suggest a paradigm in which all information is made available freely online, and if a hard copy is require that a Print On Demand, pay per page regime be established. We are looking at just such a strategy at Camp One for use in our outreach. Our situation is unique in that access to printed copy will be funded to 100% internally, but we are looking at a system which can produce in colour at high speed with a net cost of $0.03/Page which if we were to double that figure would provide funding for a compensation pool.
I think the major issue for expanding this scenario is that it goes against the status quo which has yet to understand that technology is close to supplanting its perception of worth. The argument that Open Access will reduce the quality of material given the nature of Peer Review in conventional journals is a specious one. Both PloS and arXix have proven that.
We have a unique situation in that the whole focus of what we do is content oriented, which is derived to a high degree from Open Access. The infrastructure is simply the means, and when we encounter a goal that can’t be achieved with what we have in place, we get more. It would be my hope that we will one day return to a Science for the sake of Science model, without the mold of course.
Note to ‘colecamplese’ - I suggest that at Penn State as at many other institutions, the Arlo Guthrie, ‘Alices’ Restaurant’ ethic applies – If they discount your first proposition as the words of a crazy person, what will they do when the whole movement comes through the door? Lead, Follow, or Get out if the way.
Change It Comes
Hi all,
RedSevenOne, I agree with your sentiments of generating and sharing knowledge for the sake of science and society. Great to see that there are still a few of us around.
I concede that my context working to widen access to education in the developing world is very different to many folk reading this blog. I’m somewhat critical of a pay-per-page model if you want to get a hard copy. For the overwhelming majority of people in the developing world, Internet connectivity is an expensive luxury. If “knowledge” resources are free - this freedom should extend to being able to reuse, modify and redistribute the resource without restriction including the option of generating your own print version.
This is not to say that those of us supporting the freedom culture are against the freedom to earn a living from free content. In fact we should encourage this. In my view we should promote publishers and local business entrepreneurs to add value through services and expanding distribution channels using free content. (Not unlike the RedHat Linux model).
By way of example, WikiEducator is currently funding a project to develop an open source extension for MediaWiki software for users to generate their own basket of selected articles and by clicking on a button - the software will spit out a local pdf version on the desktop. This is pretty significant because any free content project using Mediawiki will be able to implement this technology. Depending on whether we can generate further funding from the international donor community, we aim to extend this functionality to export content in Open Office format which would enable faculty to customise free content without restriction. Think about it - the English Wikipedia has more than 2 million articles, and with this pdf feature we will widen access to the largest encyclopedia in the history of humankind in print format for those who don’t have access to the Internet - without the need to pay for a hard copy! So reluctant and conservative faculty are free to stick with closed proprietary content. Others will embrace th