Education and the Culture of Openness: New Architectures of

Collaboration

Faculty of EducationUniversity of Glasgow

Wednesday 4th February, 2009

Michael A. Peters Educational Policy Studies

University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

Structure of Presentation

• Defining a ‘Culture of Openness’• Technopolitical economy of openness

- Politics of Openness- Technologies of Openness- Economics of Openness

• Open Cultures/Open Education• New Architectures of Collaboration• Towards an Ontology of Openness

The Politics of Openness

• Henri Bergson - The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)

• Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies

• George Soros – The Open Society Institute, 1994

• Open Government and Official Information Act

• Freedom House

Henri Bergson, 1859-1941Two Sources of Morality and

Religion• Develops from Creative

Evolution (as an engagement with Kant)

• Two sources: - Closed morality, static religion- Open morality, dynamic religion

• Open morality is universal (includes everyone) and aims at peace

• Based on ‘creative emotions’ – the emotion creates the representation (rather than vice versa)

• Mystical experience• Revitalization in Gilles

Deleuze

Karl Popper, 1902-1994The Open Societies and its Enemies

(1945)• Critique of historicism (Plato,

Hegel, Marx); defense of liberal democracy as open society

• Cold war warrior (with Hayek) driven by state phobia and fear of totalitarianism; failure of Marxism against fascism

• Against essentialism of conceptual analysis of early Wittgenstein and for ‘open epistemology’ (Hayek’s evolutionism) called ‘critical rationalism’ based on falsificationism (as a critique of logical empiricism [positivism] and solution of the problem of induction)

• “In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society” (Ch. 10)

George Soros, 1930- • Studied under Popper at LSE• Established Open Society

Institute in 1994 (named after Popper’s work)

• ‘The Open Society Institute (OSI), a private operating and grantmaking foundation, aims to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform.’

• Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001)

• Europe as a Prototype for a Global Open Society (2006)

• Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000)

• Opening the Soviet System (1990)

Open Government• Roots in Enlightenment thought of

constitution of civil society and in democratic practice

• Linked to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other freedoms that have become basis for constitutional law

• Strongly linked with passage of freedom of information law in US (1966), Denmark & Norway (1970), France & Holland (1978), Australia, Canada, NZ (1982), UK (2000), Japan & Mexico (2002), Germany (2005)

• Norms of openness address transparency, accountability, official secrets, public trust

• Linked to open source governance – application of open source to democratic principles encouraging citizen participation in legislative process

Freedom House• Free (green) – 90 countries

or 47 per cent• Partly Free (yellow) – 60

countries or 31 per cent• Not Free – 43 countries or

41 per cent• Increasing from 1977 (43

[28]) to 2007 (90 [47]); from 66 electoral democracies (1987) to 121 (2007)

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=395

Freedom of Mobility?

Technologies of Openness

• Macy Cybernetic group conferences and concept of the open systems

• Claude Shanon’s mathematical theory of communication 1948

• Development of Internet, 1992• Shift from PC to Internet as

platform• Web 2.0 technologies

Group Photo, Macy 10th Conference, 1953

• T.C. Schneirla, Y. Bar-Hillel, Margaret Mead, Warren S. McCulloch, Jan Droogleever-Fortuyn, Yuen Ren Chao, W. Grey-Walter, Vahe E. Amassian.

• Leonard J. Savage, Janet Freed Lynch, Gerhardt von Bonin, Lawrence S. Kubie, Lawrence K. Frank, Henry Quastler, Donald G. Marquis, Heinrich Kluver, F.S.C. Northrop.

• Peggy Kubie, Henry Brosin, Gregory Bateson, Frank Fremont-Smith, John R. Bowman, G.E. Hutchinson, Hans Lukas Teuber, Julian H. Bigelow, Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Heinz von Foerster

 

Wiener, Cybernetics &Communication

A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948

The fundamental problem of communication is that

of reproducing at one point either exactly orapproximately a message selected at

anotherpoint. Frequently the messages have

meaning; thatis they refer to or are correlated according

to somesystem with certain physical or conceptual

entities.These semantic aspects of communication

areirrelevant to the engineering problem. Thesignificant aspect is that the actual

message is oneselected from a set of possible messages.

Thesystem must be designed to operate for

eachpossible selection, not just the one which

willactually be chosen since this is unknown at

the timeof design.

• Reprinted with corrections from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.

Development of the Internet

Web 2.0 Technologies

• New architectures of participation and collaboration

• Social media-social networking

• Wiki-collaborations

• Wisdom of the crowd

• Web as platform

Web 2.0 Mass Customization

• Economics of file-sharing

• Mass customization• Personalization of

services• Co-production of

goods• You as co-designer• Customer integrated

into value creation process

Growing Interconnectedness

Economics of Openness

• Knowledge as a global public good

• ‘Weightlessness’ of digital knowledge goods

• ‘The Economy of Ideas’ - John Perry Barlow (1994)

• ‘How Social Production Transforms Freedom and Markets’ – Yochai Benkler (2006)

Knowledge as Global Public Good

• knowledge is non-rivalrousthe stock of knowledge is not depleted by use and in this sense knowledge is not consumable; sharing with others, use, reuse and modification may indeed add rather than deplete value;

• knowledge is barely excludableit is difficult to exclude users and to force them to become buyers; it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict distribution of goods that can be reproduced with no or little cost;

• knowledge is not transparentknowledge requires some experience of it before one discovers whether it is worthwhile, relevant or suited to a particular purpose.

• knowledge at the ideation or immaterial stage considered as pure ideas operates expansively to defy the law of scarcity.

Weightlessness of Digital Goods

Digital information goods approximate pure thought

• Information goods especially in digital forms can be copied cheaply so there is little or no cost in adding new users.

• Information and knowledge goods typically have an experiential and participatory element that increasingly requires the active co-production of the reader/writer, listener, and viewer.

• Digital information goods can be transported, broadcast or shared at low cost which may approach free transmission across bulk communication networks.

• Since digital information can be copied exactly and easily shared, it is never consumed

John Perry Barlow

• Information is an activity. • ‘Information is a verb, not a noun; it

is experienced not possessed; it has to move; it is conveyed but propagation, not distribution’.

• Information is a life form. • ‘Information wants to be free; it

replicates into the cracks of possibility; it wants to change; it is perishable’.

• Information is a relationship.

Yochai Benkler

• Cooperation and Human Systems Design

• Commons-based information production and exchange

• Freedom, justice, and the organization of information production on nonproprietary principles

• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006) 

Open Cultures/Open Education

Emerging Knowledge Ecologies• MIT adopts OpenCourseWare (2001)• Budapest OA statement; NIH; ERC.• The Ithaca Report, University

Publishing In A Digital Age (2007)• Harvard mandates open archiving

(Feb 14, 2008)

Ithaka Report, 2007• changes in creation, production and

consumption of scholarly resources --‘creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media’ (p. 4).

• ‘alternative distribution models (institutional repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals) have also arisen with the aim to broaden access, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content’ (p. 4)

Wider Cultural Changes:Writer’s strike in

Hollywood ‘Cheap production technology, no-barrier-to-entry distribution, and a Niagara of “product” (65,000 new videos are uploaded on YouTube daily) mean the entire Hollywood story-development complex is now in a daily competition with do-it-yourself writers. Hollywood product itself is remade, reduced to clips, bites, fractals, and mixes. Sitting through an entire feature film more and more feels like an unreasonable commitment. (We use DVRs to fast-forward, to pause, to hold for some other time—anything not to have to watch something from beginning to end.) The narrative is disposable.’--Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair

Open 21st Century?• The present decade can be called the ‘open’ decade (open

source, open systems, open standards, open archives, open everything) just as the 1990s were called the ‘electronic’ decade (e-text, e-learning, e-commerce, e-governance). Materu, 2004.

• It is more than just a ‘decade’ that follows the electronic innovations of the 1990s; it is a change of philosophy and ethos, a set of interrelated and complex changes that transforms markets and the mode of production, ushering in a new collection of values based on openness, the ethic of participation and peer-to-peer collaboration.

• a shift from an underlying metaphysics of production—a ‘productionist’ metaphysics—to a metaphysics of prosumption creating new forms of creativity and freedom

Open Education

‘the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes’

--UNESCO, 2002

The Emerging Open Education Paradigm

US Committee for Economic Development • Open Standards, Open Source, and Open

Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness (April 2006)

• The Digital Economy and Economic Growth (2001)

• Digital Economy: Promoting Competition, Innovation, and Opportunity (2001)

• Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property (2004)

• new collaborative models of open innovation, originating outside the firm, that results in an ‘architecture of participation’

Three Reports on OER

• Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence Of Open Educational Resources (OECD, 2007)

• Open Educational Practices and Resources (OLCOS, 2007)

• A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities (2007)

OECD Report 2007

• ‘An apparently extraordinary trend is emerging. Although learning resources are often considered as key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world, more and more institutions and individuals are sharing digital learning resources over the Internet openly and without cost, as open educational resources (OER)’. (p. 9).

OpenCourseWare

• MIT OpenCourseWare has reached 35 million people and another 14 million in translation

• OpenCourseWare Consortium ‘is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.’

Global Power/Knowledge Systems

• Openness seems also to suggest political transparency, an ethic of participation, collaboration through social media and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of both the logic of inquiry, the creation of value and the dissemination of its results