[Oer-community] Is MIT thinking of putting its OCW material behind a pay wall?
Tim Cook
timothywayne.cook at gmail.com
Tue Oct 12 07:48:48 MDT 2010
On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 08:24 -0300, Stephen Downes wrote:
> One of the characteristics of a system managed by economic priorities,
> rather than social, cultural and political priorities, is that it
> amasses wealth and influence in a few.
...
> I do not deny this. I expect commercial companies to continue to
> manufacture chalk brushes, computers, bricks and windows, and a wide
> variety of other materials purchased and used by the educational
> system.
...
> The model I advocate is none of these. The model I advocate is:
>
> e. (i) the production of OERs is crowd-sourced; public institutions
> provide policies, (iI) resources and tools to support this production;
> resources are vetted and selected through a society-wide
> network-filter process (which is the natural point at which qualified
> and expert review takes place) and (iii) distributed through the
> educational process itself.
...
Excellent points Stephen.
The 'push-back' I see regarding your model suggestion is from those
industries that have grown up around creating commodities on the backs
of researchers and educators.
Historical thoughts of the weavers vs. the loom?
We have seen this in the software world where software originally came
free with the hardware purchase and then was later converted to a
product itself. Now, with FOSS, that approach is changing. Look at how
Red Hat, Canonical and others are changing that 'marketplace'.
We can also see this movement in the music and video industries.
At least with OER and CC licenses, the original creator gets to keep the
rights to their work and not assign it to some other entity.
This is truly a grassroots/golden opportunity for researchers and
educators to create excellent material and see it nurtured through many
cycles of improvement as opposed to the printing company deciding when
the next edition should be printed based on their market-share survey.
Also, Wayne Mackintosh's email regarding educating the educators is a
necessary step in this process.
Cheers,
Tim
--
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Timothy Cook, MSc
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