The Sale of ‘Open Content’ Recognizing Philosophical Quandaries in OER
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
4 likes•830 views
Slides from a presentation at the Open Education 2015 conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada. 12 years into the Open Education Conference (and nearly 20 years since Open Content was first used as a term to represent the availability of specific media), this presentation uses postmodern theory as a critical lens to look at how the discourse around defining characteristics of the movement may hamper the ability for the Open Education movement to evolve beyond the recent successes of free/low-cost textbooks.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to The Sale of ‘Open Content’ Recognizing Philosophical Quandaries in OER
Similar to The Sale of ‘Open Content’ Recognizing Philosophical Quandaries in OER (20)
More from Rolin Moe
More from Rolin Moe (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
The Sale of ‘Open Content’ Recognizing Philosophical Quandaries in OER
- 1. The Sale of ‘Open Content’ Recognizing and Negotiating Philosophical Quandaries in the OER DefinitionRolin Moe, EdD Assistant Professor Director of Educational Technology & Media Seattle Pacific University Twitter - @rmoejo http://rolinmoe.org Paper – In Review Slides - http://bit.ly/1Ngw5ir First image by Cable Green (CC BY 2.0), Second & Third by Rolin Moe (a postmodern whatevs)
- 3. Three Minutes of Theory Hegel Absolute Knowledge *Scientific advancement will lead us to a totality of all knowledge – ‘abstract-negative- concrete’ triad Marx Emancipation *Scientific advancement will lead us to access and equity for all humans Dewey Pragmatic Reform *Social science advancement is grounded in practice, which can lead us to the potentials of
- 4. Lyotard Paraphrasing The Postmodern Condition The fallacy of scientific knowledge is that it requires proof as well as an ability to refute opposition, which does not result in Truth but rather a likeliness of truth based on our strata of information. Moreover, scientific knowledge is a sender- receiver relationship, a one-sided competence rather than a social bond. If we take connectivism and social constructivism as learning theories resulting from the ubiquity of knowledge networks (i.e., information society), we must recognize narrative knowledge to be legitimate – not better, worse, or the same as scientific knowledge. We
- 8. Lyotard, Les Immateriaux. 1985
- 9. The Buried Hatch Cover by Alan Levine CC BY 2.0 The Content Paradox
- 10. Why not just change the name? Labeling the problem as semantic assumes absolute knowledge, as if there is a True term that will not be laden in two-way discourses and the subsequent complexity. “Open content” was and is an attempt to appropriately adapt the logic of “open source” software to the non-software world of cultural and scientific artifacts like music, literature, and images. - David Wiley, “Defining Open,” 2009
- 11. OER Textbooks! Emancipation & Democracy! This two-dimensional construct in no way suggests an ideal reality.
- 12. Conclusion Gap to Sea 2 by Martin Weller CC-BY-NC 2.0
- 13. Coda Christo and Jeanne-Claude Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83 Photo: Wolfgang Volz © 1983 Christo. Photo utilized for Minimalism and Earthworks as curriculum within Smarthistory by Khan Academy (2015) All Khan Academy content is available for free at www.khanacademy.org
Editor's Notes
- 1. Education will not save the world. 2. This is a critical analysis of Open discourses; nothing is sacred. 3. My wife asked me, “Two sentences – what are you talking about?” Pragmatism over zeal does not mean pragmatism in lieu of other things. Maybe the realization of political wins for textbooks and the wider discussion of Open, and there will be ample US-centric biases here, means we need to rethink if pragmatism still should subside over zeal. Note keynotes and the door being open to a larger culture. But also note the three charts – and how we can argue the amount a door is open, freedom is not measureable in the same terms. Free as in Beer versus Free as in Speech is a debate of use-value: I still have the free. The dissonance in Cable’s chart is not a bad thing; I’d say it’s a good thing. The trouble is when we start thinking about it as an absolute thing.
- Conferences always make me think about openwashing, in part because of the hotel evidence of greenwashing. Rather than asking us to be considerate just because it’s a nice thing to do, mentions of energy and laundry savings are always draped in environmental terms. Many in the Open Access and OER movements have noted this happening in the Open space and have labeled it openwashing. I have done the same. When considered as a pragmatic issue (people are saying open when it’s not really open), we have one response. But what about the charts shown earlier? Pragmatics are a frame of reference and not an Absolute, and that becomes very problematic.
- Maha Bali Trouble with Frameworks (HybridPed) – in talking about this she has said that the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants is problematic because those giants are presented as absolute but in no way represent her experiences. Look at how we talk about education as a philosophy. The pragmatism of scientific knowledge (show us it in use and measure the results) does not allow the recognition of narrative knowledge as legitimate, since it is not restricted to denotative statements. This is not just the phenomenon of media studies or cultural studies; for generations lawyers have utilized narrative theory as defining their prosecutorial practices.
- Lyotard sees a danger in this dominance, since it follows from his view that reality cannot be captured within one genre of discourse or representation of events that science will miss aspects of events which narrative knowledge will capture. In other words, Lyotard does not believe science to have any justification to claim to be a more legitimate form of knowledge than narrative. He wrote this in 1979!!!
- Morozov calls it technological solutionism, Papert called it technocentricism, but it’s the same thing...and it is not what OpenEd was built upon. OER as Solution. OER as The Solution. To what problem? To The Problem. To the Education Problem. Give it an open license!
- This is an example of pragmatics. We want to look at the efficacy of a tool, so we engage the scientific method in order to do that. Today, we love to use Venn Diagrams to show these relationships. I can argue that this both shows the brilliance and the folly of modern education, at least in the US. Venn Diagrams were the scourge of primary and secondary school existence for Generation X, yet here we are relishing their use. Brilliant! This Venn Diagram in and of itself shapes our understanding of the situation, replacing the necessary complexity with seeming ease and efficiency. Folly!
- There is space anywhere and everywhere for research, and we need every bit of that. This might look big, but if we zoom out more like a game of Katamari it will be seen as a twig on a branch of a tree in a forest. We need to understand the way people look as well as the biases, assumptions and fallacies within that space.
- Lane Fischer noted yesterday that we need to consider this from a postmodern lens. Yes! Because I see the postmodern in the genesis of this conference and what OER stands for. There is something inherently postmodern in a field of study where we can both measure degrees of open while also being inclusive of all that is not closed. In the reusability paradox, we recognize the localization of meaning and importance of narrative knowledge. The attempt to be All Things results in a ‘mediocre middle.’ This is similar to the conundrum Lyotard sees in the legitimation of scientific knowledge as The knowledge. His diagram for the language games inherent in creating meaning in a knowledge society wrestles from a different vantage with the same things. Each pole of the structure is only relevant with respect to its relations with the other poles A modification in the function of one of the poles leads to a destructuring and restructuring of the whole, in which case it becomes another message. How the Wiley definition of Open is similar to the Lyotard notion of localized narratives…Open can mean many things except Closed while narratives can be many things but not grand or meta. Then look at how other things line up, maybe the content and materials aspect. The difference – where Lyotard deliberately plays into the dissonance, Wiley offers an escape hatch – stamp content with the open license.
- Content Paradox – the escape hatch Wiley describes has merit as truth but not Truth; however, content in and of itself is problematic in the same way open is problematic. The dominant paradigm of content is a long tail associated with it (beyond discipline information and to include field information, analytics and metadata). It is related heavily to sales and markets, the glacier metaphor. The obvious metaphor is Neo waking up in The Matrix…his open hatch lands him in a dystopia. The open licensing of content forces us to negotiate what we mean when we say content versus what content means. Paradox – by opening the escape hatch in the reusability paradox, we emerge not in a world of Open Acolytes, but in one of discord where open is closed and closed is open.
- Why not just change the name? Go through the Content versus Materials (Lyotard had issue with what we can touch versus what we cannot touch and went as far as to say that the intangible was not ‘real’ which, 36 years after his words, is problematic) versus Information. Those don’t work. Then talk about why this is not semantic and how it’s not absolute knowledge. Share Laura Riding if there is time. I like the quote because of how it ties together the narrative and the science. Content is a fine word. But like this definition understands the legitimacy of narrative as well as scientific knowledge, content needs to be understood as both the forward-facing domain/discipline information and the AI/Machine Learning analytical back-end, iceberg under the surface. The scientific knowledge is in no way absolute, in part because the narrative knowledge of that is so heavily bound in surveillance and commerce. Well, there’s a political foundation in Western societies of control…if we are to believe in libertarianism/neoliberalism/capitalism as bedrock of foundation (whether embedded with democracy or no) (Deleuze, 2006 – societies of control), it’s fallacious to consider that by our group saying this is Open as Speech then we can ignore that structure, that memory, that language game. But we seem to keep wanting an easy solution, even though this field understands the result of ease is a mediocre middle.
- Our responses to this trend seem to be to either focus on an outcome (Free Textbooks) or align with visions of grand narratives (emancipation! Democracy!) Generally speaking, while the choice by open content publishers to use licenses that include requirements and restrictions can optimize their ability to accomplish their own local goals, the choice typically harms the global goals of the broader open content community.
- The global framework is local and cultural frameworks. The subculture of Open is correct in its belief, but so is the non-exclusive provider of contents utilizing the ‘open as monetarily free to the user’ discussion. What is important here is to consider Things left to get into: *Open as problematic because 1) large *content* providers want the immaterial as much as the material (need differnet words for that) *Open as problematic because it drapes itself in righteousness in the same way that those content providers do *The result is through our discourse and our actions we are feeding the beast we say we wish to slay, or at the worst, we are pining for the affections of the beast *What are the solutions *Embrace the messy *Embrace all who come under the Open door (example of museums working with Coursera/Khan) *For those who have come into Open on the side of Free as in Beer. Build examples of where this plays out. *Use our space as roving experts to make the connections for them. For their space, they want Open rather than Free. How to promote and provide this.
- CODA: Talk about the world of art – forgeries and the history behind those, the problems that came out of that system, and the institutional memory that was threatened by various replicating measures. Today, some spaces have put their collections online. Some have opened the image. Some have partnered with Khan, Coursera, etc. Is the right thing to say You Are Not Open, or to say Great! Now…what happens if we do this? And explain our rationale for open from the perspective of their community rather than ours?