Education and the Culture of Openness: New Architectures of Collaboration

1. Education and the Culture of Openness: New
Architectures of Collaboration
Faculty of Education
University of Glasgow
Wednesday 4th February, 2009
Michael A. Peters
Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

2. 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

3. 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

4. Henri Bergson, 1859-1941
Two 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

5. Karl Popper, 1902-1994
The 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)

6. 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)

7. 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

8. 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

9. Freedom of Mobility?

10. 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

11. 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

12. Wiener, Cybernetics
&Communication

13. A Mathematical Theory of
Communication, 1948
The fundamental problem of communication is that
of reproducing at one point either exactly or
approximately a message selected at another
point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that
is they refer to or are correlated according to some
system with certain physical or conceptual entities.
These semantic aspects of communication are
irrelevant to the engineering problem. The
significant aspect is that the actual message is one
selected from a set of possible messages. The
system must be designed to operate for each
possible selection, not just the one which will
actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time
of design.
• Reprinted with corrections from The Bell System Technical
Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October,
1948.

14. Development of the Internet

15. Web 2.0 Technologies
• New architectures
of participation and
collaboration
• Social media-social
networking
• Wiki-collaborations
• Wisdom of the
crowd
• Web as platform

16. 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

17. Growing Interconnectedness

18. 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)

19. Knowledge as Global Public Good
• knowledge is non-rivalrous
the 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 excludable
it 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 transparent
knowledge 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.

20. 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

21. 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.

22. 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)

23. 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)

24. 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)

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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‘

29. 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)

30. 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).

31. 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.‘

32. 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