Book Review/Science in the Media Open Revolution

Sean R. Eddy

n 2001, Charles Vest, then that can be readily copied. President of the Massachusetts So, while I like storming the IInstitute of Technology, establishment with pitchforks and announced that MIT would make torches as much as anyone, when most of its course material freely I picked up Opening Up Education available online. Browsing the Web site (or rather, when I downloaded the of MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) PDF to my Kindle), I was looking for project (http://ocw.mit.edu), you pragmatism, not utopianism. After 500 feel the stirring of a “my God, it’s pages of “the silos we all know about full of stars” transformation: you can in higher education are under assault borrow material for your courses, study in the new world,” the “hated textbook other teachers’ teaching methods, publishers,” the “epistemological maybe even retake college courses hegemony of higher education,” and you regret having slept through! the “noble philosophy” of making Remarkably, OCW is just one highly everything free—“traitors” and visible part of an “ “patriots” and “communists,” oh my!— movement.” The essays collected my hopes were beaten down. Many of in Opening Up Education, edited by the 30 essays in this collection are more Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, manifesto than explanation, and many describe ways in which individuals and of the 38 authors are writing more for institutions intend to exploit digital their fellow revolutionary comrades communications technology, develop doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000078.g001 than for us. The collection’s editors—Toru innovative and freely redistributable Iiyoshi T, Kumar MSV, editors (2008) Opening educational methods and resources, Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Iiyoshi, a senior scholar at the Carnegie and improve education at all levels Education through Open Technology, Open Foundation for the Advancement throughout the world. Content, and Open Knowledge. Cambridge of Teaching and director of the (Massachusetts): MIT Press. 500 p. ISBN But what does “open education” (hardcover): 978-0262033718. US$24.95. Knowledge Media Laboratory; and M.S. really mean? What is “closed” about Vijay Kumar, senior associate dean of education? Should education be free searching, and crosslinking of the undergraduate education and director as in no cost, or is there something full text of the scientific literature, of the Office of Educational Innovation about education that needs to be freed but traditional publication business and Technology at MIT—gathered as in freedom? This sort of ground is models cannot afford to give open the authors at a 2006 conference already well-trampled by debates about access to full text. The best open- sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, two better-known “open” predecessors, access advocacy promotes innovative which is one of the main philanthropic open-source software and open-access publication business models that supporters of open-education publication, and it is instructive to make full text freely available without initiatives. Iiyoshi and Kumar have make the comparison. putting scientific publishers out of organized the essays roughly evenly In software development, almost business. into three sections: Technologies, everyone recognizes the power of A more utopian “open” advocacy Content, and Knowledge. sharing, verifying, reusing, and simply denies this real-world tension. The Technologies essays are mostly improving source code. At the same Information wants to be free; about creating open-source software time, developing software takes time, corporations are evil; people will to serve educational purposes. For which means that it’s expensive. make great stuff for love not money; example, to assist teachers in posting It’s not obvious that you can give free stuff will save the developing people the right to see, modify, and world; we’ll pay for it with taxes and redistribute your source code without Citation: Eddy SR (2009) Open revolution. PLoS Biol charity. You don’t have to subscribe 7(3): e1000078. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000078 torpedoing your business model. The to Ayn Rand’s brand of laissez-faire best open-source advocacy seeks new capitalism to have serious problems Copyright: © 2009 Sean R. Eddy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms business models for openly sharing with this. It amounts to claiming that of the Attribution License, source code without impoverishing intellectual work doesn’t take time, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, software development. The better or that time isn’t worth money—that and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. we reconcile this tension, the better intellectual property protections exist our software will be. The same sort only to create profit for unnecessary Sean R. Eddy is at the Howard Hughes Medical of tension underlies . Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, middlemen, not to enable the work of Virginia, United States of America. E-mail: eddys@ We need computational indexing, talented professionals who create works janelia.hhmi.org

PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 0431 March 2009 | Volume 7 | Issue 3 | e1000078 course materials on interactive Web licensed educational resources are and public libraries already “open” sites, you’d want to deploy some sort of described, ranging from on-line courses education to a great extent. He writes easily customizable course management (Open University’s OpenLearn project, a well-considered examination of how software in your institution. Several http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn; digital resources can build and improve such open-source projects are Carnegie-Mellon’s Open Learning on the time-tested foundation of books described, including Bodington Initiative, http://www.cmu.edu/oli), and libraries we already have. Diane (http://www.bodington.org), the to freely distributable course material Harley, an anthropologist at Berkeley, Sakai Project (http://sakaiproject.org/ accompanying traditional courses (MIT has actually studied how teachers use portal/), and Moodle (http://moodle. Open CourseWare, http://ocw.mit. and remix materials in their courses. org). The goals of course management edu), to collections of smaller modules Her scholarly and data-driven essay overlap with even more ambitious goals that can be remixed by educators includes many insights, including of visual learning environments such (MERLOT, http://www.merlot.org; pointed warnings to the digerati: as Visual Understanding Environment Connexions, http://www.cnx.org). It is The chasm between what many (VUE) (http://vue.tufts.edu), which an extraordinary and ambitious set of technological enthusiasts envision aim to enable novel visualizations that efforts, all well worth knowing about. in terms of scale and quality of use accelerate learning. One interesting Nonetheless, when I actually went to on one hand, and what productive essay described the MIT iLabs project these sites, it became clear how far they and creative academic scholars say (http://icampus.mit.edu/ilabs/), have to go before they can compete they need on the other, is manifested which aims to make laboratory with a good book. Too many resources in the suggestion that “the lack of instrumentation accessible for student I saw were sketchy, incomplete, and willingness of faculty to change” is a experiments via open-source, web- unsatisfying—more akin to Peter key barrier to wider adoption of and based middleware, standardizing the Norvig’s version of the Gettysburg demand for a variety of technologies, connection of a professor’s laboratory Address than Abraham Lincoln’s and digital content in scholarship. experiments to the Web. original (Norvig’s is a wicked, content- The Knowledge essays are about free PowerPoint satire with bullet “Remix,” “collective wisdom,” “Web ways to improve dissemination of points: “shared vision,” “what makes 2.0”—many of these essays ride a teaching methods by enabling better nation unique”). In his essay, Stuart bubble of popular digital punditry communication among teachers. One Lee, director of computing services enthusiastically but too uncritically. of the better essays here, from Randall at Oxford University, touches on a Many technologists today are infected Bass and Dan Bernstein, points out key insight. Distributing open-source with an idea that “community is that professors tend to be isolated software or open-access literature is only king,” that high-quality content will from others’ teaching experiences a matter of attaching an open license rain down freely merely because we (certainly true, in my experience), to a finished product, but most of an connect digital communities openly. and they discuss interesting ways to educator’s course materials are rarely This confuses ways of sharing ideas create peer feedback communities. a finished, free-standing work. Course with ways of creating ideas. It is a kind This is all well and good, but there is materials are more usually fragmentary, of magical thinking that has much in no tension to resolve with an “open” cobbled-together aide-mémoires that common with the cargo cults that cut movement. No one is opposed to better only make sense in the context of face landing strips in the jungle and carved communication, and nothing was really time in the course. A lot of work must radios from sticks in hope that more closed by design. go into each piece of content to raise sophisticated beings would parachute The heart of the book is the it to the quality of textbook material, technological artifacts down upon Content section, which describes and yet more work is required to have them. With all respect to the passionate open educational resources. This the material best use the interactive and pioneering initiatives described in is where the interesting, real-world capabilities of the Web. The most this collection, building landing strips tension around educational material impressive content was the least to receive open educational content and intellectual property restriction ambitious, capturing and distributing will not be enough. More attention arises. We would surely be better off the existing output of traditional must be paid to the fact that someone sharing and remixing the best course courses in new ways—YouTube videos still needs to spend time painstakingly materials. The trouble is, educational of MIT lectures, for example. developing artful ways to make difficult materials are traditionally copyrighted The disparity between substance and concepts understandable—to teach!— and protected from modification and vision was addressed best in two of the and that it will take even more time redistribution, rather than being collection’s more sober essays. Clifford (thus money) to render these hard-won copyrighted and openly licensed using, Lynch, director of the Coalition for ideas using multimedia web technology for example, the groundbreaking Networked Information, leads his essay compared with writing textbooks. Creative Commons licenses (http:// with a 150-year-old quote from Thomas Success hinges on the adoption of creativecommons.org) that specifically Carlyle, “the true university today is a open licensing by the professionals who enable modification and redistribution. collection of books.” Lynch is almost make digital educational resources, and Efforts to create and organize openly alone here in recognizing that books on finding ways to finance their work.

PLoS Biology | www.plosbiology.org 0432 March 2009 | Volume 7 | Issue 3 | e1000078