This post is a recap of a session held at the 2011 Open Education conference on Oct 25, 2011.

In addition to a session where we looked at the similarities and differences among “OER” and “Open Science,” I held a “Questioning our assumptions” session entitled “Which License For OER?” may be the wrong question. The brief abstract for the session was:

Tired of the never-ending debate about "Which license for OER?" We agree! Perhaps we should talk about "Which assets" instead.

You can read the full abstract for the session on the page linked above. The session proved to be quite lively and we had no trouble using up the hour in an open and free-ranging conversation. I started by framing the issue in a way that I obviously hoped would spark some interesting responses. To wit:

The licensing "thing" is such an amazing distraction. It dominates so much of the discourse in the OER community and people tend to get tied up in knots about it. Most people find it difficult to understand the subtleties of all the different terms (NC, ND, etc.), and the result is that it is hard to see what is the "right" license.

Can we move past this?

I argue that the only thing that is really special about OER is the ability to freely derive and adapt them. Therefore, if the goal is to put out a pool of resources that anyone can take, change, and (most importantly) republish for anyone else to use, then the license needs to make that vanishingly simple. The only license that does that is the CC BY license (PD does the same, but legally more complex). Others may argue for CC BY SA for the community-building mechanisms inherent in the terms.

Let's focus on the person who is in this situation: I want to publish materials CC BY, but I also want to eat. How do I get there?

To help that person, we created a resource, perhaps as a strawman: an OER Decision Tree. This decision tree was created with input from a variety of OER advocates and addresses legal issues, business issues, and technical issues that face a person or organizational representative who seeks to publish educational resources licensed CC BY while negotiating any constraints that might exist.

This work flowed directly from a prior publication which proposed a Dual Publication Model as a possible mechanism of reconciliation for the licensing battles.

The following scenario is one instantiation of the situations we are trying to address: An organization may create resources that are core to their business, and there are various reasons why allowing anyone to adapt those resources may be a bad idea. For example, a lot of value-adding work may have been put in (aligned with standards, fine-tuned for pedagogical effectiveness, etc.) where changing the resources reduces the value of the products to other users. Yet - how do we help this organization become part of (or closer to) the OER movement?

After this introduction, we had a free-ranging discussion. The notes below capture most things in the order that they were shared.

• Reasons for people to publish under open license -> "Publishing OER will help you get your stuff out to more people".
  • Not sure the open license is necessary. If it's free people will find it.

• How do for-profits survive without making money?
  • There are a whole range of business models for for-profits. You can sell "convenience" - but that doesn't mean we have to limit access to the raw materials.
  • The for-profit publishers are sometimes "stealing" the author's material. They make changes to materials and then re-publish.
  • Doesn't the NC option take care of a lot of these problems?
  • NC causes a lot of uncertainty. Are there ways to not use these restrictions, yet still preserve what we want the open license to accomplish? E.g., the BY requirement means that links to the open version will be available for anyone to see.

• Do we really need to care which license people choose? Two reasons why YES:
  • Assurance for people who put their content out on the web.
  • Foster certain kinds of characteristics, encourage more re-use, create sustainability models and so on - In this case, we don't really know "anything" about what works. If we have a plethora of derivatives floating around there is no control over them.
  • My feeling is for now - let people use whatever license makes them feel comfortable to put things out on the open, and then do research on how licenses affect sustainability, remix, etc. - and document back and then make informed licensing decisions.

• Maybe we should stop worrying about it?
  • At MIT OCW originally we started out thinking we had to choose a license to (... missed this part ...) Now I see the legal environment responding to us as more of "educators around licensing". Choose whatever license you want, eventually the legal environment will adapt.
  • No - there are reasons why license choice is important. We do know a lot about the implications of different license choices, because we can look at the history of open source / free software. The GPL won (although Mac users use the BSD license - which ended up as closed / proprietary software). There are some differences between software and educational content, but there are lots of similarities.
  • "Just choose what fits you" leaves out the long-term dynamic results of license choices.
  • The other issue is license incompatibility.
  • If our goal is a large pool of resources, then standardizing on one open license has benefits.

• Response: This debate has held the debate stuck at the point where we are now. What I am hearing is that we need simple guidelines for people to choose "their first license" - but otherwise largely try to move past the debate.

• Other restrictions, besides licensing restrictions. Sometimes the materials come in technical formats that prevent implementation of the rights that the license entitles the user to exercise. Should authors match the legal permissions with their choice of technical formats, etc.?
  • What takes at the institutional level may be different from personal decisions. In OCW projects, institutions are making the decisions and tend to be quite cautious. The kind of bargains that get struck to be able to release OER/OCW is to choose less open formats for their openly-licensed materials.
  • It's a big ask of individuals to publish their materials in open formats - asking them to openly license is already a big ask, but requiring re-formatting and publishing in different ways, maybe asking too much.
  • It might get easier and easier to "unlock" what are today unusable/closed formats. There maybe a technical solution for making materials adaptable - even if the publisher intended to use the technical format as a protective layer.
  • Culturally, author's notion of their IP is probably embedded in the formats they choose.

• Against the vision of the "canonical" version of resources. I would like to change the conversations. One thing that OER licensing does (which I think is a mistake), it makes the assumption that there is ultimately one version. I would like to see versions be adapted by communities. If we can move the culture to develop community resources instead of "I am the great professor" and here is my stuff.
  • We tried this at open college textbook libraries, and our choices affect the communities' ability to take ownership.
  • Is there a Wikipedia type system for hosting open content where communities can take ownership?
    • WikiEducators, Wikiversity, WikiBooks, Connexions, Curriki, other communities like P2PU.
  • Challenge is to create the scale of community around the materials that is required to make this work.

• Keynote: We want all this research and to discover what works and pick that one thing that works. I don't think there is one "right" version or way for every one.

• What is the situation for students? They produce high quality lecture notes. Students are very powerful resources for open ed that we haven't tapped into yet.

• In Japan, the copyright exception only allows for reproduction, not creating derivative works, so licensing choice matters.
  • Open education content is more about the improvement to learning and teaching experience (the content itself is not the goal / purpose). It's important to talk about how usable the materials are for teachers and learners and others.
  • People are already experimenting with all kinds of licenses (which has started happening in the open world). Open source software lists some 60 licenses as acceptable open source licenses. All of them now have their own version of open licenses. But if you think about the cost of reading licenses - and worrying about combining materials that are published under different licenses - that is an enormous waste. So it's important to have some level of standardization.

• Does the OCW community consider the stuff they publish as "generative" or "reprsentative"?
  • Representative means others can use it as a mode, but not as raw materials.
  • What we seem to see is that people don't directly build on existing resources, and then share them back.
  • Is that a problem? Or just the reality of the world?
  • As an instructor - there is a big question about where do I put it back, and then also a question about the value that others derive from the small changes that I made. The time issue here is huge.
  • Even in free software, remixing is not a huge success. Most active 10% of software projects, the average number of contributors is 1. Top 2% average number of contributors is 2.
  • We don't have to look at that as failure. In education we'll have the same. There will be thousands of single-contributor materials, and then very few OER with thousands of contributors.
  • We have done some of that for textbooks, where we remixed parts of other peoples' materials. Main incentive was cost. In the community college system - textbooks are very expensive.

• This discussion depends a lot on the type of author we are thinking about. We seem to be focusing a lot on individual use, and considerations, but when we think about licensing recommendations we worry a lot about what "businesses" not "individuals" will do. The way we make decisions around the licensing is often based on this perception of something bad that businesses will do with our materials. When you take businesses out of the picture - authors are much more comfortable giving away more rights. It's a challenge for the community to focus on grassroots use, rather than be too concerned with business use.

• If you think about the first principles of "the academy" - we build on other peoples' work, we give attribution to other peoples' work. The community is based around these standards. We should come back to these principles in OER as well - where too often we feel like we have to build everything from scratch, over and over again.

I returned recently from the annual Sloan-C conference in Orlando, Florida. It was well attended by both physical and virtual attendees. Strangely, there were very few people in attendance for any of the concurrent sessions. My guess is that there are way too many concurrent sessions, and that perhaps holding the conference in the middle of Walt Disney World may result in too many conflicts with peoples' time.

In any case, here is the link to my session, wich was entitled, "Architecture and Impact of an Open, Online, Remixable, and Multimedia-Rich Algebra 1 Course." I review the reasons why the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (my employer) decided to build a complete Algebra 1 course from the ground up, how we actually built the course, how we distribute the course components both online for free and directly to institutions, and some preliminary data showing its (very positive!) impact on learning. You can also get the slides directly from Slideshare.

It was hard to get a sense of the current trends and thinking among the broader Sloan community from the conference. There was an OER track, and we had keynotes from two people active in the OER space: Cable Green and Howard Rheingold. But it also seemed like a lot of people remain focused on the question of whether online learning can be done well, or how it can save money, rather than considering all of the various ways that online learning can provide new affordances and often superior educational outcomes. Regardless, there was a lot of positive energy at the conference and I got the sense that everyone feels that online learning is one sector of the economy that is guaranteed to keep growing.

 

Like many people involved in “open” something-or-the-other, Sarah Kirn and I straddle several different communities of practice. At the Open Education 2011 meeting, we held a session entitled, "OER and Open Science: where do they intersect?" focused on the intersection of the OER and open science communities. Here is the session proposal:

The word “open” as been appended to myriad phenomena to date, ranging from “open access” to “open government” to “open source software.” But while there are certainly some fundamental characteristics which are shared across these diverse applications of the word “open,” each of these “open” efforts may not be so seamlessly interoperable as we might think.

In this session, we will closely examine the intersection of “open science” and “OER”. Open science is a catch-all term that generally refers to the democratization of the capacity for anyone to “do” science as well as the elimination of the barriers to accessing the outputs of scientific research (e.g., research papers, datasets, etc). “Open research” and “open data” are, respectively, broader and narrower terms which overlap with the open science meme. The term “OER” generally refers to the openly licensed teaching, learning, and research resources used in the service of education, though the term has also been used as shorthand for “open education” and related concepts which go beyond the materials of education and include educational practices, policies, and infrastructure.

To better understand the points of overlap among these two concepts, we will attempt to diagram different facets of each effort, considering the key drivers, barriers, and current initiatives in each case. For example, many scientists remain skeptical about open science because the concept seems at odds with the need for scientific expertise and precision, such as for experimental design and analysis. Similarly, many producers of educational resources remain skeptical of OER because they have questions about quality, accuracy, and the locus of responsibility for the content. But these seemingly overlapping areas of skepticism are actually directed at very different aspects of each enterprise, and they are likely to demand different solutions and different messaging. As we outline and then consider the different facets of the processes of science and education, we are hoping to better discern how the open science and OER communities may be able to build on shared messaging and developments, or may be better served by pursuing some agendas separately.

We ended up only having half-an-hour, so we had to short-circuit a lot of our ideas about open brainstorming, messaging, and so on. Instead, after a brief introduction, we just asked people to gather into groups and pick one or more issues of interest (see table in attached presentation for some examples) to consider regarding its overlap or divergence among the open education versus open science domains. We provided the following prompts to stimulate the discussion:

• For whom is this an issue?
• Who is responsible for resolving/managing the issue?
• Why is it important?
• Who suffers it it fails?
• How would we know?

Below, I have transcribed or paraphrased the notes I received from people participating in those discussions.

What is the role of expertise in open science and/or open education?

• We agreed that there are often really important functions for expertise in both domains, but that it depends on the specific context and, more importantly, you have to carefully identify the appropriate place in a given process or workflow where expertise is required.
• Vital Signs used as an example. Also, how would peer review work in education? What are the criteria? In science, it seems more clearly defined.
• How does “citizen science” change anything? Is this diminishing the expertise necessary for science, or is it expanding it (by requiring new and additional roles), or simply shifting it to new places?
• How to describe “open science” or “open education”? Are they communities? Activities or processes? Something else?

What about legal and social rules and norms?

• On the science side, one of the issues is that someone could take data and insert potentially wrong data. Scientists have a hard problem with that.
• With an open license, you can specify the type of attribution that you need. You might be able to frame it to help.
• No derivatives form - is it too limiting on a distribution perspective?
• Yes, different licenses are appropriate for different context. Timing is important.
• Ethical perspective: is everyone is using the data with the same ethical perspective; i.e., people who are educated and use those data appropriately? Is everyone coming at it from that perspective? Probably not.
• The potential for evil and [inappropriate] manipulation is harmful to data.
• No qualms with giving the data out, but to allow someone else to add/delete/rearrange, as a scientist, I have a hard problem with that. Not with getting the data out there and open, but with the ability to edit hard facts and data.
• The results and diagnostics would be shared - not the samples. (If the samples are sent around, then potential for contamination exists.)
• So, some aspects can be open. Macro-level stuff - no problem. Micro-level - issues exist.

From an education side, how much of that science should be shared?

• Could do case studies with data that are similar but not exact. This will help protect the data and will also allow students to learn and move forward, to the next step. Students have to be able to do it and understand how you came to your conclusions. Be able to test it.
• Not having access to the micro-level, how does that impact educators?
• If we adopt something from somewhere else, we typically have to add to it. It's good for us in terms of remixing - it's adding, but not changing. We understand the scientist's POV.

The words "remixing of valid results" makes scientists uncomfortable. This is how science gets distorted.

• Does your perception change depending on where the funding comes from? Is that a different consideration in the science world?
• If I get a grant from the federal government, should that info be public? Yes, it should. But, should that data be able to be remixed? No, that's not science.
• Problems exist regardless of who funds it. But, the information should be open.
• If it's not remixable, what license does it fall under?
• It's not OER if it's not remixable.

What about quality and professional practice?

• The other circle - quality - comes into consideration. Who defines quality? Standards - scientific methods.
• The timing issue: you've stated what you've found based on the underlying data at that point. You've published it, and you see that the results come from that data. How does this fit into the quality issue? And the perception issue?
• Science has always been an OER. We're very egotistical - "look at what I've found." We put that out in journals and in the public realm. That's where it stops - you can't go back into information, you have to move forward. As a scientist, you can't jump back-and-forth over the line in the sand.
• What if someone took that data, they weren't changing or manipulating it, but they are looking to add to the piece of the pie?
• This is where peer-review comes into play. Other scientists look at our results and validate.

Communities of Practice

• A fundamental tension: Expertise is good - versus - Let a thousand flowers bloom.
• Cliche - Science 2.0
• Evolving from one way to two way communication of expertise.
• Role of expert evolving and finding a role as collaborator.
• Within Academia, there are accepted standards of quality, expectations of discourse, and so forth, along with a whole host of institutional factors supporting the community.
• How could we produce a similar community of practice within education, which instead focuses on creating high quality OER output and helping learners learn? What are the sets of institutions, community norms and expectations, and divisions of labor between experts and non-experts?

Common principles between Open Education and Open Science

• There will always be a role for experts.
• We’re not quite sure where or how these experts will weight into the production process.
• In open education, it’s likely that the experts will play more of facilitator-like role, helping communities arise and making things useful.

What did I expect of this session? I certainly wish we had more time – the conversations were animated and just getting started when we had to interrupt people. And we did not get any opportunity to actually discuss any of the issues raised above. Regardless, the specific issues and concerns raised mirrored those I have heard from both the OER and open science camps. Here are a few non-ordered reflections:

Much of the concern revolves around evolving norms for expectations of expertise. There is this sense that “openness” means that experts are no longer needed or desired. As intimated in the notes above, people seem to start there, but it doesn't take long to see that the question is not whether experts have a role, but rather where and when that role is best applied.

Similarly, there is this concern about people “messing things up” that is ubiquitous in both OER and open science conversations. As usual, part of this concern is based on a misunderstanding of digital media, where adaptating and remixing activities take place with copies of the original resource, not the original resource itself. Even wikis, which often serve as the first contact many people have with OER, actually work with copies, enabling reversion as needed. In open science, this concern is particularly strong when it comes to allowing people to manipulate datasets. There is this sense that data are different, more sacred, somehow. There is no question that dataset integrity is crucial for accurate archival and referral (e.g., from a research paper), but that integrity is easily maintained by ensuring that there is a canonical copy that is always maintained, and from which provenance can be tracked. These practices are already in place in many cases; see Open Context and DataONE for examples (both projects I am involved in).

Anyway, I'm not sure that we were able to generate a coherent list of key similarities and differences in messaging among OER and open science, but I definitely felt that people were interested in this issue and that it deserves more attention. What next? Watch this space!

Earlier, I shared a white paper about the potential for a dual-publishing solution for sustainable OER production. The aspiration was to inspire some debate and also provide guidance on a tractable method of getting past the licensing debate. The OER decision tree shared here is another attempt in that same vein. I paraphrase below from the introductory text on the decision tree:

There are many projects and organizations that would like to be able to produce OER but are struggling to identify a sustainable production model that nonetheless enables them to release their resources with as few legal and technical constraints as possible. On the legal front, the ideal is to release the resources to the public domain (or equivalent) or under a CC BY license. For the sake of simplicity, this decision tree (really, three different trees) uses CC BY as the specific default target. On the technical front, the ideal is for the resource to be distributed in a form and format that is well suited to the permissions granted by the license (i.e., in a form that facilitates sharing, adaptation, and remixing). And on the business front, the ideal is to enable sustainable, stand-alone OER production that meets prima facie expectations of modern-day publication quality.

This decision tree is offered in the hope that interested organizations might gain some insight regarding some of the variables and options that typically factor into thinking about viable approaches to sustainable OER production. This decision tree does not purport to be comprehensive, nor is it necessarily appropriate for all OER producers. It does not delve into the issue of whether or not "high-end" educational resources are necessary for learning, or whether distributed, collaboratively built resources (e.g., wiki projects like Wikieducator) might ultimately prevail, or any number of other, intersecting questions.

I'll be discussing this decision tree, dual publishing, and related issues at the Open Education 2011 conference in Utah this week. I'll look forward to learning more there.

Off the bat, let me say that I am largely a supporter of the open badges infrastructure and the many interesting activities swirling around its development, from the recently announced DML competition to existing badging experiments to new forms of assessment via platforms and communities such as P2PU. Or, perhaps I should say that I am a supporter of experimentation and dialog around educational and scientific innovation, and badges seem to be inspiring such things, so that's good. My critique here is significantly ameliorated by the openness of the developing badge infrastructure and the well meaning passions of the people involved. I think there are many ways that things could yet evolve, and that many of the conditions necessary for these different evolutionary trajectories to occur are present, which is a great thing.

But I, and others (e.g., see here, and here, and here), have been struggling with some of the ramifications and claims about the potential for badges. Leaving aside the myriad concerns about the impact on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations for learning, the over-commodification of learning, and much else besides, I am focusing on one particular claim here: namely, it is often stated that badges will provide a mechanism for people to better capture the full range and richness of their knowledge and skills, and therefore will also provide a mechanism for employers to better identify and recruit suitable employees (and vice versa). At first blush, this seems quite a reasonable claim, and also sounds like a positive development. But I think this line of thinking is divorced from the reality of how potential employees and employers attempt to discover their interest, and perhaps need, for each other. Bear with me while I try to explain.

We can broadly classify all jobs into two categories: those that are well defined and require a discrete set of core knowledge and skills, versus those that are less well defined and provide opportunities for the responsibilities (of the position) as well as the employee to evolve over time. Obviously, this is a crude division, but I think most of us can quickly agree that a typical service-type position (e.g., a cashier at a supermarket, a teller at a bank, etc.) is probably going to fall into the first category, whereas more entrepreneurial and upper-level management positions will probably fall into the second category. People have argued that badges will help in both of the situations, though I suspect that those involved are typically only thinking about one situation or the other most of the time.

If you are trying to hire someone for the first type of position, then you are seeking someone with a very specific set of skills. This specificity makes it relatively easy for employers to seek employees with one or more specific certificates (or badges) that give assurances that those skills are in evidence. On the other hand, it will be impossible for any employer to stay on top of an ever-growing list of badges which certify the relevant skills, albeit each according to a different issuer and in some semi-unique manner. And employers will not have the time to review the credibility of the unique badges for every applicant for every open position. In the end, such employers are going to want the various badges signifying some skill area to be interchangeable; in other words, they are going to want to collapse the diversity of badges into some simple, summative credential, not dissimilar from the degree system we have today.

If you are trying to hire someone for the second type of position, then you probably have an idea of some of the key skills that will be required, but you are also probably counting on ultimately hiring someone who has other skills besides and may bring added value to the position as a result. In this case, though employers might be interested in people who can provide badges or other evidence of key skills, such evidence cannot be total and prescriptive since it is always possible to imagine someone who lacks any such certifications and yet is the best candidate for the job. Here again, the burden of evaluating the specific badge-claims made by applicants, and the relevance of any badge to the expected scope of work, is unreasonable. As with the first type of position, most employers will fall back to generalized evidence of thinking ability and recommendations. It is only in the final reviews of the top candidates that specific badges and skills-claims are likely to matter, and those can be easily conveyed in other ways.

Looking at things from an employee's perspective, a world of ubiquitous badges is even more problematic. The problem here is a temporal one. If you are seeking work, you can never be sure that you will get the position that seems ideal to you, whether you have the perfect badge suite on your CV or not. As the numbers of badges increase, the degree to which people can distinguish themselves from each other increases as well. But this specificity also means that you may find yourself less and less a perfect fit for any job, especially if the employers are seeking applicants with multiple, specific badges. This is not a new problem, as there has already been an explosion of offerings for certification in various fields, even in fuzzy spaces like “management skills”. If I, as an aspiring employee, obtain a certificate in project management from some issuer, but then a job is posted seeking applicants who have been certified by someone else, what should I do? Perhaps the employer will see the two certificates as essentially equivalent, but perhaps not. Will we see third-party agencies evolve that essentially certify that certain certifications are both valid and roughly equivalent? Or will there be a formal process whereby an applicant can try to prove that her existing certification is a suitable substitute for the requested version? These types of solutions exist already, and indeed these same pressures are largely responsible for the institutional degree structures we have today.

As an aspiring employee in a badge-ubiquitous world, it is hard to know how to proceed. The odds are incredibly low – and will get lower as more badges are issued – that the specific badge I obtain will turn out to be relevant to any position I seek. Perhaps I will decide which badges to pursue based on which badges are requested by companies that are hiring in my areas of interest. But this puts a big burden on me to do significant training for a position that I don't even have, and probably have no guarantee of getting. For employers, this situation can also lead to a sort of rigidity of expectations – if you can hire 'exactly' the right person for the job, why wouldn't you? Among the many reasons why this is wrong-headed, it presumes that the correct person can be completely described as the sum of the various badges she has acquired. Employers can certainly avoid being this narrow-minded in a badge-ubiquitous world, but I think the tendency is for the opposite to occur if the opportunity presents itself.

So what does this mean for the future of badges, education, and employment? I don't know the future any better than the next person, but one obvious solution is to re-order the usual sequence of events so that nearly all of the position-specific skills are obtained on the job. In other words, rather than telling people to go collect badges as a way of positioning themselves for possible employment, we should tell employers to build in time and expectations for employees to seek and obtain specific badges while on the job, presumably related to their current or prospective employment. This inversion of the sequence of events removes the uncertainty around the utility of badges that is an inescapable artifact of having more badges for more things issued by more agencies. Obviously, this is easier said than done.

Interestingly, I think this same trend will actually entrench employee interest in identifying people with somewhat “generic” degrees, much like college degrees function today. What employers want is evidence that you can think, learn new things, and work effectively in certain social and technological settings. The other details and specific skills can usually be obtained on the job. Right now, badges are mostly being discussed as the antithesis to such generic certifications. And maybe a “badge” as a substitute for a degree is the wrong frame. But this seems to me to be the real challenge before us: to the extent that “degrees” are both highly desirable and yet highly suspect as authentic indications of core skills, attitude, and aptitude, what sort of credential can take its place? I'm quite certain it will not simply be a collection of badges, though perhaps badges play some role. I'm also certain that e-portfolios, for-profit degree mills, and related efforts have not proven suited to the task. What else is there, or could there be?

CC BY Simon Davison http://www.flickr.com/photos/suzanneandsimon/4095984571/

In education, I would argue that everything is both a bug and a feature – it all depends on who you are and what you are trying to achieve (and with whom). Lately, I have been dwelling on some of the sacred cows of the OER effort, especially in the ways that we are supposedly falling short. Some of my thinking has been catalyzed by skimming the recently released “Basic Guide to OER,” by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), as well as re-readings of prior guides such as the OER handbook and the OER Infokit. I also found the recent post by David Wiley on “Mycorrhizal networks and learning” quite interesting.

One area in particular continues to suck up a lot of energy: the “search and discovery problem,” which includes related challenges around publishing formats, quality assurance, and metadata standards. There are other areas too, but this serves well as an illustration. The “search and discovery problem” is understood as such because people have a hard time finding the resources they want, especially if they are looking for resources available under specific terms, targeted towards specific groups, or subject to specific guarantees. If the Internet is supposed to be full of amazing OER, surely it is a big problem if we cannot easily find exactly what we want?

Or is it? I happen to spend a fair bit of time on these issues, and I am certainly interested in improving the efficiency of search and discovery for OER. But I also recognize that in many ways we are working against our educational interests in doing so. For example, most educators would agree that the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty actively pursuing an authentic goal. In addition, people who are able to develop or leverage social supports for learning are more likely to succeed. Most educators would also agree that digital literacy, which includes the ability to discover, evaluate, and properly utilize online resources, is a key 21^st century competency. It seems to me that we remove both the incentive to learn these skills and the capacity to do so by engineering discovery systems so that this work is done for us. The savvy educator will correctly point out that there is always additional evaluative work to do, no matter how credible the resource. But as Wiley says in his blog post, drawing upon insights from mycorrhizal networks, “Environments that provide all the needed resources to each individual do not promote community structures. Environments whereby individuals have access to different resources are more likely to support associations.”

Might it be the case that by simplifying the process of search and discovery, we are eliminating the environment necessary to nurture digital literacy skills? In particular, are we reducing the potential for self-organizing (and even scaffolded) study groups and educational communities to form? You can imagine that a major motivating factor for seeking social supports in education is the fact that it is actually quite difficult to create meaningful and efficient learning pathways all by oneself. For the most part, educational social systems are an implicit component of brick-and-mortar educational enterprises; indeed, at least for higher education, many people would say that it is the opportunity to study with peers and leverage the intellectual supports of mentors that gives greatest justification for the costs involved. As more and more learning happens online, and in a more individualized fashion, I think these social supports will gain even greater importance. And certainly we want to lower the barriers to effective use of open educational resources and systems for learning. But is there a point where things have become so streamlined that most “learners” just go through the motions, never feeling any particular need to dig a little deeper, reach out to peers for support, or otherwise challenge themselves in ways that ultimately deepen their learning and render the experience more authentic and powerful? If there is such a point, will we know it when we see it? To wit: maybe the challenges of search and discovery for OER have been misconstrued – maybe the challenges are features of OER, rather than a bug.

I think that most people involved with the OER effort would agree that licensing debates take up more mental energy and conference space than they probably should. There are many reasons why the licensing issues remain such hot topics, but I will propose that one of the most important reasons is the confusion and unease people have around the production and consumption (re-use) of OER by commercial organizations. For many people, sharing freely sounds great until they consider the possibility that a company might profit from their work. Similarly, many companies are willing to make investments in OER production until they discover that there is an expectation (by dint of the license) that anyone, including their institutional competitors, can compete with and maybe even undercut them using their own resources.

These concerns drive a preference for applying restrictive licenses to creative works, such as those with non-commercial clauses, by both individuals and institutions. But more restrictive licenses also eliminate, or at least curtail, the possibility that actual teachers and learners (and anyone else) might embrace adaptation, re-mixing, and republication as core components of their practices. Indeed, if our goal is to create a world of frictionless adaptation and remixability, regardless of the origins of the source materials, I would argue that any restricted license, whether of the standardized (e.g., Creative Commons) variety or not, requires untenable levels of copyright knowledge and unreasonable risk for the typical user. How then, to manage the fears of co-option and competition while generating as much unrestrictively licensed OER as possible?

In this paper, entitled, “OER and open licenses: the dual-pub solution,” I argue that a dual-publication model might get us past the licensing logjam. Specifically, we acknowledge and implicitly support the belief that restrictive licensing may be needed for some or all of the resources an individual or organization might produce. In this sense, we honor the fact that the people who have created the resources are probably best positioned to know what legal and technical conditions are most suitable for disseminating and/or sustaining their efforts. But, as contributing members of the OER effort, we ask and expect that these same producers will also publish some or all of their catalog with an unrestrictive license (e.g., CC BY) and (ideally) in an open format. In effect, this approach will result in the growth of two (dispersed) pools of OER:

1. A collection of resources, all of which are free to access, that are licensed and formatted in many different ways. Many of these resources will be legally and/or technically incompatible with other resources in the pool.

2. A collection of resources which are all licensed CC BY or in the public domain. Even if they are published in different formats, the open license means that anyone, including commercial organizations, can participate in reformatting and replicate archiving the resources to ensure their persistence and maximize their capacity for adaptation, remixing, and republication.

The distinction between the two resulting pools of published resources should be reflective of their relative ease of adaptation, remix, and republication, as opposed to differences of quality, presumed value (or lack thereof), or other criteria.

The dual publication model is not going to make sense in many cases, but it may provide a way forward for the many organizations that are trying to find ways to participate in the OER effort while also serving specific audiences and sustaining their operations. Feedback and comments are welcome. Find the pdf here, and an editable version on Connexions here.

Good question. Yes, it is another blog. It also represents my latest thinking regarding the necessary component parts of a sharing and conversation ecosystem for those of us who work in research and innovation industries but at the margins of academia. I do not have a university affiliation. I can (and do) still publish in academic journals, but doing so is not related to my performance evaluations and is only tangentially related to my career interests. But I spend most of my time thinking about, working through, and ultimately (hopefully) solving problems. And those solutions are then quickly tested on concrete projects and applications.

Why is it called 'Ahrash On Open'?

The word 'Open' is nearly ubiquitous in the innovation space these days. Roughly speaking, it refers to content, policies, tools, and practices that facilitate the unfettered participation and distribution of ideas and products, often with an eye towards achieving some social mission. I have been mostly involved in 'Open Education' and 'Open Science', though involvement in these areas necessarily means that I also engage with open-source software, open government, open data, and so on. I do not see bright lines dividing these different domains of interest, so rather than trying to categorize myself, I'll just touch on whatever seems relevant. 

Why is a blog necessary?

As someone with a research mindset, I want to share all along the way, but I also struggle with stream-of-consciousness writing. I find it quite challenging to put myself and my thoughts "out there" with a definitive voice - instead, I find myself altering the writing according to my own sense of whether it passes muster as a fully referenced and fact-checked research paper, or is a fully informed if not fully literature-supported white paper, or is mostly just a rendering of my (admittedly self-assessed) well informed opinion. These strike me as different things, yet the lines between them are incredibly difficult to define.

To date, I have been trying to manage these different voices by publishing in different places. But in a world of self-publishing, this quickly gets unwieldy. In trying to decide where to publish, I found that I often just decided not to publish at all. This may all seem obvious to those of you who have been blogging for some time now, but it has taken me a while to get here.

So, my solution is to establish a personal blog, but for my thoughts and writings in a professional capacity. I do not think this will become a clearinghouse for what I happened to read yesterday, or for simply pointing to interesting links of possible relevance to my work. Instead, I see this as a place to broadcast aspects of my work, alone and in collaboration, so that there is some sort of intellectual center to what I do. I do this, as I suspect most bloggers do, for mostly selfish reasons. I am involved in many things, both within and beyond my official place of employment, and perhaps this blog will help to bring some coherence to those things as I reflect on them here. If nothing else, maybe it will help me focus!

For the record, here are a few other places where I have also blogged professionally and/or may blog in the future:

http://onopen.net/

http://blogs.p2pu.org/ahrash_bissell/

http://connectedpd.posterous.com/