Future of objectivism…

I was reading an interesting article by Ard Huizing yesterday… some quotes below. Beware, these quotes should not always be considered as opinions of the author (or me), sometimes as observations;

The only real knowledge is considered to be objective, rational knowledge, for which we need science’s drive towards precision and timeless truths. Science allows us to abstract experiential knowledge from practice in such a way that ultimately correct, general and definitive accounts of reality can be given that are objectively, universally and unconditionally true.

The prospect of value realization and economic growth through efficient exchange explains not only the generally strong appeal of transactional thinking to decision makers in both private and public sectors, but also the logic behind bjectification, or codification, as it is called in the knowledge management literature.

The consequence of this prevalent view is that the subjectivists’ perspective of information and knowledge residing in human minds and relationships that cannot be disembodied into distinct objects is ignored in economics. What cannot be quantified is consistently assumed away.

The logic behind objectification furthermore drives attention towards exploiting what we have or know rather than towards exploring what we do not have or understand.

By its very nature, ICT aids in enhancing the availability and accessibility of information and knowledge and contributes little towards making sense of the messages conveyed.

Consequently, economic reasoning stimulates information management to choose the supply and exchange of information as its domain of expertise and the promotion of this exchange by helping to remove any barrier that prevents information from flowing as freely as possible as its rationale. In theory and practice, therefore, information management is generally described in terms of acquiring, refining, storing, preserving and disseminating informational representations of practice and its goal is described as getting the right representations in the right form to the right person at the right time (Gurbaxani and Whang, 1991).

The promise of economics is: the more closely information and knowledge management adhere to the neoclassical assumptions and the organizing principles implied, the more perfect the established information and knowledge markets will be, and the more efficiently information and knowledge will be distributed. This appealing promise, however, obscures other aspects of reality that have been effectively wished away in economics’ drive towards theoretical rigor. Once captured by economics’ attractiveness, these other aspects of reality run the risk of getting ignored or downplayed, in theory as well as in practice. It is precisely at this point that the theory of the perfect market can become a market ideology.

The assumptions in neoclassical orthodoxy have been designed in such a way that prices contain all information and knowledge for transactions to take place efficiently.

If prices are unknown, why would anybody consider sharing information or knowledge? Extending the neoclassical assumption that rational people always maximize their self-interests and personal welfare, this issue can be solved by assuming that rational people will readily objectify and exchange their information and knowledge through market mechanisms other than price if they expect to be proportionately rewarded with tangible or intangible returns such as pay, promotions and bonuses or reputation, respect and prestige. Google and the many social networking sites available such as LinkedIn exemplify how deeply the market metaphor can inform the shaping of information and knowledge exchange.

Hence, neoclassical orthodoxy provides a static equilibrium model characterized by supply and demand forces that ignores any influence of context, time and immaterial values such as imagination, creativity or trust on people, relationships and transactions. The focus is entirely on the objects being discretely transacted, here and now, which is the aspect of reality the market metaphor exposes and
emphasizes. What it hides are the relationships between people engaged in exchange, their history and future, their affiliations with the objects exchanged, the interaction of which the exchange of objects is just a part, the context in which transactions take place and the dynamics of the organizational processes involved. Economics is a science of nouns, not of verbs. It deals with static objects rather than with dynamic subjects, with information, not in-forming; with knowledge, not with knowing or learning.

The implications for management and organization are straightforward: for information or knowledge management actions taken or technologies implemented, we should maximize the availability, accessibility and use of information and knowledge by attracting as many participants as possible and by avoiding creation of any entry barriers.
This is the economists’ way of presenting markets as non-hierarchical and powerless institutions, where everybody can and should find whatever one is looking for. Praising intranets or virtual community, for instance, for their capacity to cross vertical and horizontal organizational boundaries clearly hinges on this element of the market metaphor, as does the alleged social nature of wikis and other social software tools. Moreover, all these instruments express the belief that group consensus on the basis of free exchange discloses a more objective and thus more accurate analysis of reality than any individual ever could. ‘Crowds’ are assumed to be unconditionally wiser than any single expert could wish to hope for. What this supposed non-hierarchical ‘wisdom of crowds’ conceals is that all kinds of monopolies and power structures are at work in all information and knowledge ecologies. It also hides the fact that the participation of more people or availability of more information may not necessarily translate into higher-quality decisions or superior knowledge creation (Choo 2007). More is not always better.

standardization permits counting and measurement, which is needed to set equilibrium prices for the relevant commodities. It also allows quantitative evaluation of performance and value realized, which adds to economics’ theoretical and practical attractiveness. Commoditization furthermore entails that the identities of the exchange parties and their relationships can be considered irrelevant for economic analysis, because if goods are homogeneous, it does not matter who the buyer or seller is. Under these conditions, the price is the only factor remaining in deciding with whom to trade. Moreover, these conditions allow parties to transactions to be treated as mere producers or consumers, anonymous atoms who do not interact with each other in any other way than by exchanging standardized objects. Finally, commoditization enables organizations to be maximally streamlined, with optimized business processes supported by ICT enhancing organizational efficiency.

Objectivists focus on extracting information and knowledge from people through standardization and centralization processes to transform them into disembodied, de-contextualized commodities. Such standardization and centralization turns information and knowledge into economic values that can be hierarchically controlled ‘from above’ and measured in quantitative terms. Commoditization enables that, for example, information management’s contribution to organizations can be evaluated in terms of its storing and processing capacity. Interestingly, contributions to the information supply side are easier to quantify than those to the demand side, which adds to information management’s inclination to specialize on the supply side as its sole domain of expertise.

Put differently, information’s value is fully dependent upon the meanings people attach to that information and to the contexts they live in. That makes information subjective rather than objective and heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, implying that there is no fixed relationship between economic value and informational content. When a one-to-one relationship between value and informational content is missing, it is impossible to set equilibrium prices. And without equilibrium prices, the entire neoclassical edifice collapses.

Ideas and knowledge are increasingly seen as if they are tradable objects, the
effects of which are spread globally by modern communication.

The first core problem of objectivist economics is that dynamic processes are beyond the analytical reach of economics because they do not demand an exclusive focus on the exchange of static objects and they are not required to conform to rigorous quantification requirements.

Secondly, the emphasis in objectivism on discovering universal truths precludes context as a factor important to economics.

Thirdly, truth and meanings are relative not only to context, but also to people’s mental frameworks or conceptual systems of how the world works. For both reasons, human beings cannot act differently than to impute their own meanings to information. Hence, it is also possible that different people attach divergent interpretations to the same information or that the same person interprets the
same information differently when faced with a different context. Economists cannot deal with such divergent sense making behavior. Information is supposed to help bring supply and demand together in an equilibrium price.

..the so-called information or knowledge economy still misses one of its critical cornerstones - an economic theory of information, knowledge and learning.

..information management with its choice for objectivism and microeconomics as its foundation has precisely selected a philosophy and theory that are incapable of justifying and grounding the very heart of its existence: information. This conclusion also means that an integrative approach to information management should entail more or something different than ‘the management of information as a business resource.

Especially, the conclusion that we need a new economic theory of information, knowledge, and learning, is something that really appeals to me. I have once made an overview of a system I would like to see emerge, which in fact deals with these issues.

It is a bit messy, but it covers my initial ideas.

Below, a nice overview of objectivism and its relation to knowledge/information management and microeconomics is shown;

Definitions

1. Information and knowledge are granules of understanding representing objective realities.
2. Learning is a step-by-step process directed towards the constant refinement of objective representations.
3. Communication is the transfer of granules of understanding from a sender to a receiver.

Information (and knowledge) management

1. The domain of information (knowledge) management is the information (knowledge) supply side, culminating in the moment of truth.
2. The rationale of information (knowledge) management is promoting unfettered information (knowledge) exchange.
3. The goal of information (knowledge) management is getting the right information (knowledge) in the right form to the right person at the right time.
4. Information (knowledge) management is the gathering, refining, storing, preserving and dissemination of information (knowledge).

Organizing principles

1. Shape information and knowledge exchange as a market and create effective mechanisms to fully exploit the market’s self-organizing capacity.
2. Maximize participation, discourage erection of entry barriers, and promote competition among participants.
3. Commoditize information and knowledge to render economic power.

Core assumptions in objectivism

1. Human behavior is determined by forces in the external world.
2. People cannot control these external forces and find them difficult to comprehend.
3. People should therefore be provided with truthful knowledge to help them master their environment.
4. Mastery over the environment leads to successful performance.
5. For developing relevant knowledge, we should focus on these external aspects of understanding.
6. Understanding depends on truth.
7. The environment consists of distinct objects that exist independently of human cognition and use.
8. People understand the environment when they have knowledge of these objects.
9. Such knowledge is developed by studying objects’ inherent properties.
10. These inherent properties can be objectively known through codification and abstraction.
11. Objects’ inherent properties are fixed and objective; meanings are therefore also fixed and objective.
12. The only real and truthful knowledge is disembodied, abstracted and objective.
13. Only positivist science produces real, truthful knowledge and reliable, prescriptive theory.
14. Objectivity promotes fairness and impartiality in social matters.

Additional assumptions in microeconomics

1. Successful performance is defined by its economic value.
2. Efficient exchange maximizes economic value.
3. Hence, efficient exchange at the moment of truth (transaction) should be the focal point of attention.
4. Transactions stand on their own, implying that context, time and people’s identities, values and beliefs are irrelevant for theory and practice.
5. People are economically rational and maximize their personal welfare.
6. Competition among large numbers of non-hierarchical participants enhances market efficiency.
7. Maximizing economic value requires commoditization of information and knowledge.
8. Commoditization enables measurement of performance and management control.
9. ICT is a neutral medium.
   

OpenEd week 13 - The OpenCourseWars

The OpenCourseWars (13 pages) is a short story depicting a possible future for open education from a historical perspective. Written by David Wiley, it is both highly entertaining and informative. It not only has given me more insight in some problematic issues of open licensing and consequences, but also shows interesting and appealing futures of learning with in an open education landscape. After an overview of the most important issues, and some personal reactions, I describe my personal ideas about the future of open education, from a slightly different persective than David’s.

2005 – 2012: The OpenCourseWars

The initial beauty of open education quite rapidly turns grey with problems of the NC license again, with public opinion turning against OCW. Problems with defining Non-Commercial quickly becomes not only a theoretical problem, but a real problem indeed:

Creative Commons’ own publicly posted discussion draft of Proposed Best Practice Guidelines to Clarify the Meaning of Non-Commercial in the Creative Commons Licenses suggested we approach the meaning of the term noncommercial from the “Nature of the User”. To put it simply, the guidelines asked if the would-be user of the noncommercially-licensed material was an individual or non-profit institution. If so, everything was kosher. If not (if the would-be user was a for-profit company), then they were not permitted to use materials. Seems very straightforward, right? MIT OCW, however, saw things in a very different way. They provided their own definition of Noncommercial, in which they said, “Determination of commercial vs. non-commercial purpose is based on the use, not the user”, and that as long as you’re not trying to make money off of their materials, they were cool with whatever else you did.

So on the one hand you had Creative Commons suggesting that Noncommercial should be determined by the nature of the user, and on the other hand you had MIT OCW defining the very same clause of the very same license in the completely opposite way. I had known about this problem for years, and had email discussions with a number of people at both Creative Commons and MIT hoping to get it fixed. But the problem was extremely thorny politically, and nothing had happened yet.

The publishers, clearly not very happy with the whole open education movement, follow with a brilliant strategy attacking the NC clause, and win in court: the NC clause is struck down, and all the content that used to be licensed only for non-commercial use, suddenly became available for commercial use. After this apparent success by the publishers, they could now use and commercially distribute the OCW content, which they did. Still, they would be obliged to mention the Creative Commons license, and share the (now commercial) content under the same open license (Share-Alike). Surprisingly, they even ignored this clause, and they did not Share-Alike, because the publishers thought they could attack and bring down the SA clause as well… but to no avail, and to their own demise.

This lack of judgment started a great new movement in open education, led by students, who happily participated in creating a vast infrastructure of open content. But… another licensing war mounted the surface: CC versus GFDL. This was settled as well, finally, and then there was the dawn of a beautiful period in open education: power to the people, in this case students. David uses the following quote to explain that younger university faculty started to ignore the standard opencoursewares altogether in favor of working:

Putting professors’ lecture notes and things on an university website where students can’t trib test questions and photos and things makes about as much sense as using email. It’s for old people who just don’t get it. I mean, even this eBook reader thing I just got from my sister (who finally graduated, by the way) is pointless. Why would anyone use a device that won’t let you trib

Tribbing is contributing, as you might expect. On the other hand, the opencoursewares are R/O, or read-only, and is “associated with the kind of “authority” young folks want to rebel against, and embodies an entire generation’s frustration with top-down, un-democratic, un-participatory approaches generally.”

Following the pandemonium concerning licensing, opencoursewares, and learner participation, a new kind of university emerged: the competency-based university, where students only had to pass a test or exam to be accredited. One of the first universities adopting this model, a traditional online university, started an IBM/Linux like collaboration with the largest site for open content educational materials, creating an enormous synergy; increasing the quality of learning materials, and cost savings for the university itself. A spin-off of the university provided an additional service, where students could approach experts worldwide through Skype for personalized support, paying a certain fee. This service initiated a kind of e-lance economy in itself, because anyone could be an expert. These experts, most of them students, were not inclined to give bad service, because they would be rated by the user, and bad ratings lowered their future chance on flexible employment.

NB.Despite the beauty of the above depicted future, I have an extra note about the accreditation-only model: it will only be valuable if the diploma itself represents value, which depends on the type of assessment: if it is personal, competency-based, and practical, I think these universities might have a chance for survival. If they don’t, and assess students with normal exams and tests, I see little future in this model.

An important quote in the postlude represents the most important difficulty with current OCW initiatives:

Generally speaking, OCWs were difficult-to-sustain R/O endeavors that relied on relatively small numbers of university employees and outside funding. As important as they were, they could never scale and were unsustainable in the ways their original funders wanted them to be. On the other hand, OER projects were generally democratic remix projects that lived and died on the quality of the trib’ing.

Embracing the trib culture, David says, opens up opportunities for new business models and new ways of learning, something I totally agree with. He created a very interesting future history of open educational resources, going through different transitions, mentioning important problems in licensing, student contribution, and describing great opportunities in learning, competition, and creating value in society. In all, the end depicts a very similar look on the future as I have described earlier (and just posted on this blog), about “How I want to wake up one day…”.

Criticisms and additions

I will provide some additions and criticisms to the very interesting view on the future of open education, by using the same narrating style David uses.

The shift from a teacher-centered university, with professors standing on a stage and transferring knowledge, towards a learner-centered university happened slowly but steadily, when experts are no longer able to transfer knowledge any better than high quality video and multimedia learning materials. In addition, traditional classes turned into some kind of open (and closed) discussion groups in an online virtual world, and face-to-face interaction started to happen in smaller groups for brainstorming and praxis, and large groups in conference like gatherings, organized by students.

Decentralization started to spread into all facets of the learning process, including curricula: students were more and more able to follow learning tracks personalized for them. When the point was reached that faculty and university educators were no longer able to make personalized tracks for each and every one of them, this process is finally decentralized and students were able to make their own learning profile and track, changing and adapting it along the way. Any student could make any track he or she wanted, by aggregating courses, and finding experts to help him (gain knowledge, get employed). These experts were initially paid by universities to do this, but later on another mechanism started to mount, replacing this financial incentive with another one. Lifelong learners got involved in this process, and learning networks came into existence where different facets of society are represented: industry, university, and lifelong learners (including students as we know them today).

Facing quite some opposition, the replacement of normal faculty by these learning networks (ranging from a few to thousands of people) took some time. Learning networks gradually overtook the role assumed for so long by universities: they started to accredit the people in their networks, and were responsible for creating meaningful resources for learning, including challenges and prize competitions, something that became very popular in these learning networks. Universities changed their business models, and flexibly offered hardware (rooms, technology, labs, etc.) and services (creating high-quality materials from bare content, catering, human resource management, etc.) to these learning networks.

New diplomas and certificates were popping up everywhere online, and it seemed that any group was able to give out diplomas, creating quite a disturbance and call for the past. It was not long before a standard appeared, a kind of Netiquette, applying to these diplomas. Diplomas were still given in abundance, but the information relevant to the diplomas were instantly available and linked to the diploma. A group of open source software developers, linked with the group responsible for the diploma Netiquette, created software that aggregated the information of different online diplomas and certificates, automatically scrutinizing them with a number of criteria. Their site, http://cert-check.org, became the number one portal for certification quality check. In the years to come, they developed an advanced technology that could provide anyone with advise on career and learning, based on all the aggregated information.

When trust in diplomas and certificates was restored, other facets became more important. Since any learner was putting their learner results directly on the web, data about their added value was much more consistent and valid than any diploma, which soon assumed a decorative role, a kind of achievement award, only to be given to persons really having shown something, and usually in combination with some kind of research fund. Someone’s online ID, being aggregated by more and more advanced machines, took over the role of certification, and after the students, the companies and industry quickly became aware of this. For persons in a learning network, this created another incentive to add value to a network, because added value would return to you in employment opportunities, and/or access to expertise. Adding value clearly happens not just personal social networks, but merely in professional learning networks. A person’s online ID, combined with the social and professional “tacit” contacts, provided everything a person needed. If someone was not inclined to help anyone in his or her learning (and, by now employment network), (s)he was probably not helped either.

How I would like to wake up one day…

I wake up at noon, because I had to finish this last-minute assignment for a regular client of mine late last night. He pays well for it, so the fact that I could not attend an interesting online seminar this morning on Web 3.0 technologies doesn’t bother me so much. I will watch it back later online. I start up my computer, and go to my personal site on http://myopen.org, a website connecting communities of every interest and profession, where I have my friends, colleagues, employers, teachers, and peer-students, and where I am a friend, colleague, employer, teacher, and student. I see that there are some questions and remarks on an online article I just posted, and comment on them. My teacher status on this subject now increases, which may result in being employed. I post a text on my weblog about some problems I encountered during my last employment, hoping that some people read it and respond to it. Usually this takes no more than a day or two. Another employer has urged me to finish a certain job, and I tell her that I will most probably get the results of an essential research I delegated at the end of the week. I check my balance, and see that I made quite some money last week, which is also good for my credibility. People tend to have more trust in me now, when I have made some money, than before, when I just started living my life through this portal.

I sit back, take a sip of my coffee, and decide on what I want to learn today. A week ago, I really got stuck in a school project on e-government solutions for municipalities, so I type in the tags e-government, municipality, online voting, and corruption. Two communities, a dozen persons, and even more resources pop up. I see that a specific community is quite popular, has a high rating and quite some people involved, and I decide to enter. This is what I am looking for, I was thinking, when I browsed through their collection of free resources. I contact someone online, Susan, and tell her about the problems I encountered. She does not know the answers herself, she is new in the community, like me, but she directs me to George, someone who did a similar project and has a lot of experience. George says he is willing to talk to me for $45 an hour, which I think is reasonable considering his status. He also promises me an assignment, which, if I do it correctly, will earn me $120. In the end, George sells my results to his employer for $200 and earns $90 dollars for teaching me some very useful information. George was helpful, also in recommending me some free online courses and papers, so I make some comments on his public profile. I spend two hours learning from an expert on e-government and put this knowledge directly into practice, creating me a lot of understanding, practical and theoretical, and earning a little money ($30). Besides, it improves my online portfolio, increasing the trust it transfers to other people. Because of my specific knowledge gained in another field, which might be useful in this community, I decide to share this using freely available educational software.

Week 9 readings

This post will discuss some of the books I have read this year, and which I think are relevant for the OER movement, specifically regarding economic models for sustainability. I have pointed out interesting ideas, criteria, trends, rules, issues, and concepts that can be used in education and for sustaining OER. The following literature is discussed or referred to in this post;

• The world is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
• The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson
• Democratizing Innovation, by Eric von Hippel
• New Rules of the New Economy, by Kevin Kelly
• Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
• Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
• Open Innovation, by Henry Chesbrough
• The Nature of the Firm, by R.H. Coase
• Understanding Open Source Communities, by Ruben van Wendel de Joode
• Common Wisdom, by Yochai Benkler
• A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink
• The Future of Work, by Thomas Malone

The World is Flat (A brief history of the 21st century)
The first book I discuss is the “World is Flat”, by Thomas Friedman. I must say that it is a disappointing read, except for some interesting examples. The writer is quite happy with himself and all the connections he has with important people around the world. It annoyed me that the book could be written in less than 100 pages without loosing much of its depth. Despite these criticisms, I think the book offers a nicely illustrated view on the globalized and interconnected economies. Lower transaction costs, improved communication channels, spurring Internet technologies, workflow software, etc. make it easier to decentralize and be more efficient.

Economic transactions are like rivers: they find the least resistance. Low-costs countries like India and China are examples of how in the past few decades they have continuously profited from globalization (according to Friedman then), by embracing the enormous outsource and offshore activities of organizations in rich countries. He warns us that activities are not confined to just simple labor, because economic opportunities have given rise to better educated individuals as well. Better educated Indian and Chinese people write software, provide online support, and undertake other less simple activities in global value chains. The money they earn is usually allocated to pay for education, and although on average, their education might not be of the same quality level as ours (what is ours?), the sheer number of people enjoying education “threatens” the Western priviliged position of having an advantage in this field, which we have always exploited it in economical terms. In combination with the lower birth rate in for example Europe, we can expect Chinese and Indian highly educated groups of people (organizations) to become intrinsically part of our high-end economies, or maybe form substitutes for it. We will and cannot battle this trend, so we must embrace it.

It is a pity that the Chinese government is not democratic, protectionistic, corrupt, unconcerned with environment, etc.. This white-collar crime makes the playing field uneven, and it will be hard for us, great people of the West, to compete with it. This means we will join these networks, indulge ourselves in hardly legal activities because we do not have a choice, and make the situation even worse. Don’t expect international regulation to step in.. nope, economic stakes are not to be touched. In the end, we have only ourselves to blame, I think.

So what about a globalized economy and Open Educational Resources? I would not just look at the OER movement, but consider education in general. I think Daniel Pink mentioned something interesting in his book “A Whole New Mind”, explaining how we, as individuals and as a society, should thrive in the “conceptual age”. This is an age and an economy where creators and empathizers become the cornerstones of the economy, rather than the “traditional” knowledge workers of the 20th century. He explains that some things are hard to outsource, such as design, for which both left- as right brain activities are needed. Because left-sided activities (knowledge workers) can be automated or outsourced, the left-sided activities become more important, economically and socially. Another book, “The Future of Work”, by Thomas Malone, focuses more on the effects on organizations and individual employees in a future economy.

Rather than the boring and trivial “World is Flat”, one should read the classic article by R.H. Coase about transaction costs economics, which is used and remixed by Yochai Benkler. Understanding this simple but ingenious economic theory, and reading the index of “The World is Flat” will provide you more with insight than reading the entire 600 pages of TWIF. In addition, I agree with Jennifer that Thomas Friedman misses the point on education;

However, instead of embracing the same connective processes and technologies that create and foster this new flat world we live in, Friedman says we must “shut off the iPod” and avoid the “instant gratification” that technology has to offer in order to prepare students for this new flat world. He spends an entire book describing countless examples of how connective technologies are flattening the world, but then recommends that students put away these technologies when they learn. Given that the thrust of Friedman’s book is about embracing the factors and technologies that have created and now foster this flat world, I find it troubling that Friedman does not make the connection that these same connective processes and technologies can (and should) support education.

The Long Tail (How endless choice is creating unlimited demand)
Chris Anderson supposedly coined the term “Long Tail”, explaining a shift away from focus on mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve, and moving towards a huge number of niches in the tail. The long tail (of the demand curve) of goods and services is made possible with improved connectivity, better targeted goods and services, and little physical constraints (shelf space etc.) for distribution. Lower costs for distribution and production (music, films, etc.) allows many anyone to offer everything to anyone, a market can be created for almost any niche product. On the other hand, it does not dismiss the more traditional high-volume businesses, but it recognizes the transformation caused by the internet, and its implications for business models, such as those accompanying OER initiatives. Anderson explains the 6 themes of the Long Tail:

1. In all markets, there are far more niche goods than hits;
2. The costs of reaching these niches are now falling dramatically;
3. More variety needs to be accompanied with filters and recommendation systems;
4. The demand curve will flatten and to compensate for the newly created niche markets;
5. The sum of all niches might comprise a market larger than the original ‘hit’ market;
6. This will in the end reveal the ‘real’ demand curve, much more diverse than previously imaginable.

Clearly, some of the themes follow the same argument, and I consider them not significantly different. Besides the whole idea of the Long Tail, which is interesting and should not be overlooked, the only theme I find distinguishable in the above is the need for recommendation systems and filters. I think that recommendation systems will soon overtake the role of humans in creating personalized curricula or learning tracks, that collective intelligence, translated in personalized recommendations are much more powerful than any university representative deciding about a student’s taste, previous (online) education and intelligence. These recommendation systems, clearly driven by use and contributions of connected people, will use any resource available on the Internet, and maybe even human resources. The recommendations will not be confined to just open educational resources, but any website, online movie, etc. This is something my university, but other universities should consider as well: machine is us/ing us.

So what roles are reserved for the university then? Many, maybe even more than there are now. I think new roles will emerge, and the flexibility of the university system will determine the success of any institution. For now, I will mention a number of preliminary recommendations:

• Make educational resources attractive and of high quality, and give them away for free. That will attract people from all over the world, not only to use or change them, but additional requests are done as well. There are two ways to contribute to the value of the university’s network: by giving financial input, or to contribute value in another way. The following options for revenue and contribution are deliberately described in generic terms, because there are many, many more possibilities to make money and create sustainability.
  
• Sources of revenue could include (i) services that concern the original author of the resource, such as teacher services (ii) additional products and services that are provided alongside the resource, (iii) contacting targeted groups within the network, (iv) customization services, (v) face-to-face happenings, (vi) assessment and accreditation, (vii) valorization of innovations, such as selling licenses and IP, and so much more…
  
• Sources of non-monetary contribution could include (i) improving the resources (discussing, answering questions, translating, adapting), (ii) adding resources, (iii) offering positions for learners and experts, (iv) increase network size and external visibility, (v) increase trust, etc..
• Enable flexibility in your organization by decentralizing decision making about what to learn and what to teach, about who to work with, when and where. This means all the way down to the learner!
  
• Enable flexibility in your system by using (and developing) open source or open standards that embrace and integrate external tools and content.

Democratizing Innovation
Chris Anderson claims that Karl Marx was maybe the original prophet of the Pro-Am revolution, where amateurs (better: hobbyists) and professionals work alongside each other in creating innovations, advancing science and technology, and producing cultural goods. Citizen-journalism, where amateur journalists participate in the creation of news items is just one example, but there are many more. Easier tools for production and connecting information items form the most important factor enabling this trend. Eric von Hippel describes in “Democatizing Innovation” a number of issues that relate to user-centered innovation. Without going into much depth into the content of the little book, I will discuss a number of issues that are relevant for the OER movement;

• Mass production leaves many dissatisfied, because users’ needs for products and services are highly heterogenerous;
• Users provide most innovation, because they are better aware of their need and context of use (especially with “sticky information”). In addition, depending less on the principle and learning and pleasure form other incentives for users to innovate themselves rather than by the producers;
• There are different reasons for freely revealing innovations, such as reputation gain (important for academics), efficiency (from the viewpoint of both social welfare and economic rationale), network effects, and increased reuse;
• Within innovation communities the most important function is the accessibility of information. Other important criteria are that freely revealing has to be interesting, specialization, and additional functions, such as social networking and collaboration tools;
• Manufacturers can involve and make use of users by offering or selling toolkits to ease users’ innovation-related tasks, produce user-developed products/provide customization, or sell ancillary products. Especially lead-users are an important group of people, from which the largest part of innovation will flow. This group needs to be fostered.

The question that needs to be asked is: Who are users? Are they teachers, and should they be able to innovate the OER-web and content? Or are they students? Or both? I think we should consider both students (or self-learners) and teachers (or experts) users of the materials. Whereas a student may uptake the role of scrutinizing the resource, discussing it, translating it, and possibly adapting it, the expert will operate on a more meta level, focusing on innovating assessment resources, answering in-depth questions, providing guidelines for use and reuse.

New Rules for the New Economy
Only the term “Long Tail” by Chris Anderson is new, but the ideas portrayed in the book aren’t. A somewhat similar book, but less specific on the Long Tail, is “New Rules for the New Economy” by Kevin Kelly (1998). He explains the power of decentralization, connecting everything with everything, with an emphasis on understanding self-organized networks, and explains that communication is the new economy. He stresses the more active participant in the economy, instead of the passive consumer, like Alvin Toffler did decades ago. He makes a number of valid propositions to embrace the changes caused by the internet. I will not discuss them all in detail here, although they are still very interesting and true, but just point out three interesting issues:

• “Follow the Free”. KK argues that by giving away something that is core of your business, you will attract more customers. You should then try to make an ancillary market for the product or service, so that you can make money and make it sustainable. This is the question being asked within the OER movement as well: we follow the free, but where is the ancillary market and what does it consist of?
  
• Another very relevant proposition is his argument for opening up systems: because it is open, it can interact with other systems, and acquire some of the value of these other systems. The value of a system increases with the number of systems it interacts with.
  
• Human attention will be the only thing being scarce in a network economy: so will the attention of students. The benefit of education is that not only students might be willing to invest time in some network if they see the benefits of contributing to it, but that an institution can also somewhat impose contribution, although this has its limits.

Wealth of Networks (How social production is transforms markets and freedoms)
According to Yochai Benkler, and me, and you, the Internet Revolution is not passé. The Internet has created new forms of individual freedom and democratic participation. It also is increasingly a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture, and finally it is a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere. In “Wealth of Networks”, he has taken a twist with the classic work of Scottish economist Adam Smith “Wealth of Nations”. Rather than explaining the economy from viewpoints of division of labour, pursuit of self interest, and freedom of trade, Benkler argues that there an important mechanism is left out in traditional economics: social (or commons-based peer) production. He has investigated this phenomenon as a separate transaction, coming alongside the market and firm transaction, but acknowledges that it is easy to miss these changes, because

“they run against the grain of some of our most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism… an alternative almost universally considered unattractive today.”

By the way, social production can by no means be compared to communism, which stifles individualism. Social production is all about the individual, and the only egalitarian issue concerns the ability to access the relevant information.

Social production, or, as Benkler has coined it: commons based peer production, represents a new mode of social and economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into meaningful projects. Commons are the opposite of property, in the sense that law does not determine who has the authority to decide what happens to it. This doesn’t mean that commons cannot be regulated, take for instance sidewalks or roads, and open to just a defined group of people.

• Within social production, the commons refer to the information belonging to it; and
  
• peer production relates to commons as a set of practices around commons, referring to production systems that depend on individual action. This happens mainly through the use of Internet technologies that enable fast, structured and reliable communication between people.
  

The most important fact is though, that most of this production happens outside of traditional hierarchical structures and without any financial compensation. Some people share knowledge and collaborate freely out of ideologism, but this is not the only reason. People are diversely motivated beings, and money may be a motivational factor, but it surely is not the only one. One should be aware that it sometimes even can work the other way around (imagine the reaction of your date when you offer money for sex…). Exactly, although social production may not be as good as sex, it sometimes satisfies persons in other ways than money can ever account for. So why does it happen, and why is it likely that it will increase in importance?

Why is this happening?
Social production has always been a part of our lives, but until recently the emergence of this individual and cooperative nonmarket production of information and culture is threatening the incumbents of the industrial information industries. Still, as long as governments are pursuing policies that support these incumbents, and denying the liberative force of social production, which is much more efficient in terms of social welfare, the place social production will occupy in the future economy is still at stake. The free revelation of innovations, meaning that the innovator refrains from exercising intellectual property rights and gives unlimited access to all information concerning the innovation, makes the information a public good. Making information a public good, often at one’s own expense, is something that happened long before the advent of Open Source Software. In “Democratizing Innovation”, Eric von Hippel sums up a number of researchers describing this phenomenon in innovation concerning mining pumping engines, medical equipment, semiconductor process equipment, library information systems, sporting equipment, and of course open source software. Just now, with cheaper communication technologies, the socio-economic playing field is facing a possibly paradigmatic shift.

Although cheaper communication makes decentralization possible and more interesting, the same argument counts for centralization. According to Thomas Malone in “The Future of Work” is centralization still is the answer in some sectors of the economy, such as semi-conductor industries, but not in all. Still, in our knowledge-based, innovation driven society, as Daniel Pink argues as well in “A Whole New Mind”, the critical factors for succes are exactly the benefits of decentralized decision making; creativity, motivation, and flexibility. Benkler, similarly, mentions the allocation of the only scarce resources in our economy: on the one hand human
creativity, time, and attention, and on the other computation and communication resources.

Why this is positive
Benkler describes many positive aspects of social production, on an individual level, but also on societal/economical level. One of the important positive economical and social results of social
production, or rather, decision making in a decentralized self-organizing network concerns the allocation of capabilities/self-identification. Persons, or rather, their talents and creativity is better identified for a task in a distributed model than in a centralized hierarchy.

“Human creativity is too special and divers to standardize and therefore very
difficult to be specified in the contracts necessary for either market-cleared or hierarchically organized production. As the weight of human intellectual effort increases in the overall mix of inputs into a given production process, an organization model that does not require contractual specification of the individual effort required to participate in a collective enterprise, and which allows individuals to self-identify for tasks, will be better at gathering and utilizing information about who should be doing what than a system that does require such specification.”

Malone puts a more narrow, but practical perspective, by saying that when people are doing things for themselves, their motivation, creativity, flexibility in response to differences in their own situation, and quality of work increases. More choices in our work makes us think about what really matters to us, human values, such as making money, spending time with friends/family, having a sense of achievement of what you do, or making the world a better place.

More people have more freedom, and more and more people are becoming wealthier, the whole range of human values are becoming more important, not just the economic ones. Organizations now have to address this wider range of human values, enabling a market not just based on economical rules, but on human values. Information and communication technologies will make this better possible, and more likely to occur, because it is much easier to find a critical mass of people to do these things.

Social production and its relation to working
As said, social production depends on individual action. Individuals choose their tasks, and contribute without any hierarchical interference in a decentralized network. Thomas Malone, although concerned mainly with financial compensation for action in such a free market and the role of companies, provides a similar view in “The Future of Work”, by stating that we are in the early stages of a change towards human freedom in business, and comparing this change in businesses with the introduction of democracy into politics. He justifies this grand statement by saying that now it is possible to have both the human benefits of a small organization, such as freedom, flexibility, creativity, and motivation, and the advantages commonly available for
just large organizations, such as economies of scale and knowledge. As mentioned before, the reduction of costs of communication because of information technologies forms the basis of this enhancement. Persons can now make sensible decisions rather autonomously, because information to make these decisions, and the technology to discuss this information is available at their fingertips. Benkler also assumes that social production will create the perfect match between task and person.

Social production and its relation to learning and OER
Between social production and learning some important analogies can be drawn with learning trends and theories, such as DIY, communities of practice, lifelong learning, networked learning or connectivism. In his article about the peer production of educational resources “Common Wisdom”, Benkler focuses specifically on the creation of content resources. I would rather extend the focus on collaboratively creating a learning web, where rules and mechanisms are created collaboratively, learning contexts in addition to learning content. In “Wealth of Networks”, he describes a number of criteria and rules for that apply for social production of any kind.

Criteria and characteristics
First of all, an important statement about peer production concerns the role of leaders. Leadership is important, but never authorative. Benkler (and others) describe some rules and criteria for fosteringsocial production:

1. Information production must be ubiquitously distributed, meaning that all inputs must be under the control of individual users.
   
2. There are two imperatives for harnessing the excess capacity of humans (in the form of creativity, time and attention). Social production exists of a large number of people working on their own on a small piece of an entire project. Their contributions vary widely in quality, quantity, focus, geographic location, and timing. Successful social production projects have shown a remarkable ability to to pool these higly diverse efforts effectively by being modular in structure, and composed of highly granular pieces.
   • “Modularity” is a property of a project that describes the extent to which it can be broken down into smaller components, or modules, that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole. Modularity reduces the costs of coordination, but is only possible when the interfaces between the modules are clearly defined. (van Wendel de Joode 2005, p.85)
     
   • “Granularity” refers to the size of the modules, in terms
     of the time and effort that an individual must invest in producing
     them.
     
3. The social production efforts and cooperation are maintained by a number of constituents:
   • Technical architecture
     
   • Social norms and values
     
   • Legal rules
     
   • Technically backed hierarchy (validated by social norms)
     

In all, “Wealth of Networks” provides scholars with a wealth of information on how economics work, and specify what the implications could be for society if it embraces the opportunities made possible with the internet and other cheap communication and production technologies. It also acknowledges the threat of “permission culture”, as defined by Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle.

Wikinomics(How mass collaboration changes everything)
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to Benkler in “Wikinomics” to back up their argument that we are changing into new forms of mass collaboration. They describe peer production as the open collaboration between lots of people and firms to drive innovation and growth in industries.

“Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways. Companies that engage with these exploding Web-enabled communities are already discovering the true dividends of collective capability and genius.”

Tapscott and Williams use a number of interesting case studies to explain different ways of how companies nowadays have embraced the collaborative power of all connected individuals. They explain that companies should find the right combination between incorporating external ideas and knowledge, with internal efiiciency and core knowledge, following the paradigm coined ‘open innovation’ by Henry Chesbrough (2003). I will post something about the changing relationships regarding employment and work in a separate post, but want to highlight one specific issue that I find extremely interesting in the book, because it can be a means for sustainaing OER.

Ideagoras
Ideagoras are social marketplaces connecting the innovative ideas of individuals with the needs of (commercial) organizations. A great example of an ideagora is the website InnoCentive, where amateurs and professionals around the world can connect to solve problems, and organizations can use the collective intelligence of all these distributed individuals. Basically, the website hosts scientific challenges to which participants around the world can respond. These participants, being students, scientists and hobbyists (anyone), use their unique ideas and approaches to solve these problems and get rewarded for it. You can consider it a global R&D lab. Not only is it possible to connect problems with solutions, but it also is possible to do it the other way around. Imagine a company or individual with ideas and patents that may be very useful in other sectors.

Websites like Nine Sigma offer not only the possiblity of posting problems on which people can
respond, but also a marketplace where ideas and patents are transferred to anyone interested. One is the idea searching for a problem, and the other is the problem searching for an idea. You can imagine that in an OER environment, these two possibilities should be represented as well in order to create a thriving community where no idea or problem is left behind. My interest for this type of valorizing knowledge is that it can have a number of positive consequences:

• It may form incentives for learning, because solving real-life problems can be both fun and rewarding;
  
• It can also constitute an input for creating or remixing educational resources, or the result of the problem solving results in new educational resources that can be used and reused;
  
• The value of education and educational resources is seen immediately because of its application within society/economy;
  
• Such a platform creates effervescence and viability because people can form networks to solve problems collaboratively, and it offers a platform for individuals to make value out of their ideas. Etienne Wenger, amongst others, have researched the fact that experts in a field spontaneously form interest groups that communicate to exchange their views and learnings on how to carry out and improve the practices of their profession, similar to how participants in open source communities do that.
  

Criteria to set up such an environment are senior level support, and a high liquidity, i.e. involvement of sufficient buyers and sellers. Without that, the marketplace will not give enough opportunities and advantages for either sides. The OER environment and problem/idea platform should therefore be open enough for anyone to join. I think that convincing companies and participants to adopt a more or less open source philosophy, and showing them that commons-based peer production of ideas and solving problems will create the highest social value for everyone, the highest value will be attained.

Wrap-up
This post has been quite voluminous again. I hope I have used headings and bullets well, so people without much time can skim through it. I have tried to take ideas that are described in different books treating socio-economical subjects, and bring these in an OER-context. In some future postings, I might describe another set of ideas that can make OER initiatives sustainable, but this will do for the moment.

OLCOS Roadmap 2012 - Skills

In this authorative report on Open Educational Resources, education, and other related issues, skills for knowledge workers are discussed (amongst other things). Professional skills needed in a knowledge economy are acquired by using interactive, collaborative, and constructive tools as weblogs and wikis. The reason I am now blogging, and more or less used to it, is because of a course given by David Wiley (http://opencontent.org). Not because of my university, where not a single course mandated or suggested any of these technologies. (BTW. I assisted in setting up a wiki for a course, which was one of the first wikis to be used for a course on the uni :: evaluation on my blog next week)

Introduction