17.1 Content is infrastructure  (Page 9/10)

12. ken udas - october 11th, 2007 at 5:19 am

So many directions this conversation could go. I am sorry to have dropped out for a day or two. Wayne, thanks also for your support it is of course the contributors to the Series that make it of any value.

It seems to me that we have an “economic” puzzle to solve here. Continuing with the physical infrastructure analogy and the questions about competition, our challenge is to create an environment in which there is more value to institutions and governments (folks who can levy taxes) to invest in a shared, open, and free content infrastructure than to invest in close infrastructure. That is, invest in public libraries rather than bookstores (sorry for mixing analogies). Perhaps the appropriate extension would be investing in public roads rather than private ones, or simply not investing at all. This could be done in a few ways, by either centrally funding the creation of content or creating incentives for distributed creation and contribution. Are there other options???

Simultaneously, the trick will be to encourage volunteerism by reducing barriers to contribute and creating non-financial incentives, perhaps through recognition of some sort. For example, I think that WikiEducator and the OpenOCW initiatives are great steps to reducing some barriers, but there are of course organizational barriers (refer to Cole’s comments above) which are both structural (unfriendly licensing requirements, unfriendly organizational policy, unfriendly work flows, use of a lot of 3rd party proprietary stuff, etc.) and cultural/attitudinal (“what is mine is mine and it is so good, you will have to pay for it”, fear, uncertainty, etc.) that exist in universities. Are there others?

In any event, here is the punch-line to this comment . Suppose that we get the “economics” right and we end up with a vibrant community of governments, institutions, NGOs, foundations, individuals, etc. contributing to an open and free content infrastructure, on which terms do we compete (see Wayne’s comment above about co-opitition) and how does this impact education? Perhaps the second part of this question is more interesting than the first.

13. redsevenone - october 11th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Ken, First off, Here Here!! Well said.

To your question – After we get the economics right. . . how does this impact education?

You will know that you have had an impact, that positive change has occurred when you walk into the lunch room of an Inner City school and hear young people talking about ‘The guy who invented the Ipod got a Nobel Prize’, this happened to me yesterday. While the facts are a bit wonky and the context is a bit off, what it meant was the kids had being paying attention to a blog posting I had flagged during an outreach session that morning while discussing Nanotechnology.

Out of that exchange, the original seven I had been talking to in the morning, swelled to seventeen and we went further into discovering exactly what he real story was.

We researched the archives and found the original reporting, [1991-94] and the sound of ‘Wow’ could be heard around the room. Not only was the content relevant to the learners, had a context relating to something in their reality, the process of getting the information show them tools they could use for further exploration.