During the past month my unit’s offices have been affected by construction in the building in the form of diesel fumes filtering in through the HVAC system. Today a couple of staff members who were toughing it out were told by doctors that they have high levels of carbon monoxide in their blood and the offices have to be cleared out. This might explain (1) my fatigue, and (2) the pleasure I’ve been finding in spending a little more time out of doors as I walk across the BYU campus to David Wiley’s IPT 692R. Today’s topic: Media Issues begins with the question,” what is ‘open’?” and examines the 4 Rs of Openness:
- Reuse – verbatim (easy)
- Redistribute – share (fairly easy)
- Revise – derivatives (harder)
- Remix – combinations
Open is a continuum; “Things can be more or less open, like a door.” Watch for 2R vs 4R OER. 2R is waaay better than nothing, but 4R (should be) far superior still. E.g. open Access movement (free access to peer-reviewed articles). Paraphrasing Wayne Mackintosh: “I’d rather have an #@$!? open resource over a great proprietary resource because I can fix the #@$!? resource.”
Media issues outside of licenses (SLAM):
- Meaningfully editable? (e.g. HTML vs. JPG/PDF of notes or printed text)
- Self-sourced? Ready-to-edit and ready-to-use? (e.g. HTML –> HTML vs. fla –> swf )
- Access to editing tools? (e.g. HTML vs. MS OneNote)
- Level of expertise? (e.g. DOC/ODT doc vs. 3D model, Flash quiz)
If you’re not paying attention, an open-licensed OER may still be “closed” for all intents and purposes, because of the 4 Rs.
OCW Examples:
- MIT Simplicity Theory. Clearly handwriting on lined binder notes, scanned in.
- MIT Mathematics. Powerpoint and LaTeX source files are available upon permission.
- MIT Linear algebra. Video, transcripts, downloads in different formats, YouTube.
- OLI Predicting college success. Course has Flash-based quizzes and diagrams.
Context suggests meaning. E.g. Airplane: Q. “Surely you’re joking.” A. “I’m not, and don’t call me Shirley.” and Police Squad: Q. “Cigarette?” A. “Yes, I know.”
Putting things in time or place suggests more meanings. (e.g. Obama, Obama by Lincoln, Obama by bin Laden, Obama flanked by two black athletes). The more things are put together, the more we specify intended meaning.
We can usually tell when things don’t fit the context.
Size of a resource is a function of the context inside the OER.
David’s reusability paradox. An OER/LO teaches effectively vs easy to reuse. (JMS: this plays into what I recall of George Siemens’s work, especially re. connectivity. Will teaching invest in helping students make connections, creating or finding context. Does the (immediate) future of networked information culture require that users be able if not deft at finding connections and making context or meaningful connections between disparate pieces of information? Will technology soon be able to facilitate connecting or providing context for an individual resource? Would “new” ideas of information fluency allow students to adapt to the deficits of high reusability? For instance, scanning and ignoring non-critical information?)
MIT structured content like course so context is apparent, but you can take the context apart. The structure is an aid for helping you find and use individual components. Course as (full of) disposable content. (JMS: Another good perspective on my recent conflicts with textbook publisher e-packs.)
Collections — a collection of marbles doesn’t exist in a strict sequence, but a string of pearls does.
Referenced today’s article in Chronicle on “courseocentrism”. What can we do with “courses” that we have been too limited to do? 2R “open” resources have been accused of being a “Trojan horse”, as evidence of hedgemony of the West, of cultural imperialism. (JMS: Whatever.)
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