5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 18/21)

Ensuring the maintenance of academic freedom and autonomy : The academy has a long tradition of independence. In most countries, the university is the custodian of the critical voice of society founded on the principles of freedom of speech. We have a responsibility to protect the open pursuit of knowledge and unrestricted right to critique and reflect on the world’s knowledge even if that means commercial activity! As Educators we have a responsibility to promote free access to knowledge - otherwise we risk loosing our custodianship of the worlds knowledge. Consequently - if institutions of higher education decide to participate in the freedom culture through the OER initiative, in my view they have an obligation to protect the essential freedoms.

The inclusion of the NC restriction is a contradiction in terms - it suggests a world of conditional freedom in contrast to our fundamental beliefs associated with academic freedom and freedom of speech. It’s a sad world when we start saying “You have freedom of speech as long as you’re not engaged in commercial activity”. Universities have no problem charging student fees to access an education but many in the OER world have a problem with others engaging in commercial activity. That’s double standards.

The academy has no major reservations to commercial activity associated with text-book production and distribution - yet their is an inherent fear of commercialism when it comes to OERs. If universities are concerned about commercial exploitation around OERs - they have adequate protection through the copyleft provisions of the share-alike license. (Any modifications — i.e. a derivative work must be released back into the community - so the resource will always be free). If Universities want to encourage commercial activity around free content (which I personally support) they use the CC-BY license as in the case of Connexions. In my view, the inclusion of the NC restriction is a signal that the institution does not value the essential freedoms associated with freedom of speech. Its a slippery slope where we might loose our academic freedom.

Pragmatic reasons The use of the NC restriction effectively shuts off the OERs from remixing with wealth of free content available under copyleft licenses. Moreover, the definition of “non-commericial” is unclear and it typically results in additional transactions costs for the very users we are trying to help.

The use of non-free licenses in the OER movement is the greatest barrier to radically advancing the rate of free content production. Universities risk being left behind - because the freedom culture will not comprise on the essential freedoms and they will continue with their mission. We hope that Universities will join us - it will be a great loss to society if they don’t.

Ken, relating to your tools question - I believe that those technologies that facilitate mass-collaboration based on the principles of self-organisation combined with emerging XML structured content to facilitate easy remix are going to become the tools of choice. The only technology that currently meets these requirements is the Wiki. However, we still need to do a lot of work in lowering the barriers of entry to participating in the free content authoring process. For most academics - the wiki syntax is still too hard. That’s why were holding the Tectonic Shift Think Tank Meeting. We are plotting the future development path to overcome these problems.