Some thoughts around Tuomi 2006

De Estigmergia

Ilkka Tuomi, in Open Educational Resources: What they are and why do they matter (2006, Report prepared for the OECD), offers a very interesting and complete approach to OER, its definition, the technical, social an pedagogical issues, a wide enumeration of some wide known projects in the field and some other concepts that I would like to comment:

• The potential impact of open educational resource initiatives: although I agree we live times in which information is one of the main forces driving our economies and societies, like Manuel Castells described in The Information Age, I'm still not so sure about the existence or even the becoming of the so-called "knowledge society". I think the prospective introduction of Tuomi is somehow optimistic, since it doesn't mention any indicator about how has the OER movement helped to fight the Digital Divide or empowered learners (citizens!). Maybe is too soon. Maybe I'm not starting my writing properly neither, but this is the feeling I get when he says that "the ongoing transformation towards the knowledge society will accelerate in high-income countries and gain momentum in developing countries" or "access to knowledge will increase in both developed and developing countries faster than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago". Don't misunderstand me, I will love to see that happen and I'll do my bit, but maybe this kind of euphoric considerations are due to the main target of the report, the OECD. We are intensely adopting ICT in the developed countries, and hoping to make them help too the developing ones, I agree, we tend to we more and more networked each day, I agree with that too, but such transformation are happening so quickly that the only possible discourse is maybe about the past or the present (or maybe I'm tired today of so many e-vangelists around :)

• Open Source influence: the report highlights some very important issues concerning OS development and its reasons for success, such as high-quality systems, transparency of processes, ability for growing in a distributed and fee way and how innovation is produced constantly in its projects. More significant from a pedagogical perspective, Toumi mentions how the OS development also means ways of learning in a constructive way, where constant negotiations, calls for help, netiquette and learn by doing play a big part. I consider this is a very important issue, since as he states later there are different approaches, concepts and theories around learning resources that sometimes imply constrictions and heritages from offline models, while the OS model demonstrates (like this course itself) that learning can be as free and distributed, non-structured, as the way people adapt and produce knowledge constantly in OS development processes. In this part of the text is where I find also an interesting fact based on a study, proving that OS can represent also cost savings for schools (the kind of evidence I'm missing in the first part of the text). But how far can we take the comparison with OS development? For example, studies like the one carried by Kuwabara (2000) have pointed how important it is for emergent systems like OS development to allow the personal identity based on merits evolve inside them, not anonymously but showing each one the contributions and the efforts done in behalf of the system itself (something that should maybe be an important default characteristic in OER platforms, like actually happens in Wikiversity and Connexions).

• Openness: considering the GNU General Public License and somehow copyleft as a method for facilitating the social interoperability of software, as the study reflects clearly, and at the same time the sharing of ideas that could provide in the cultural domain, the text shows how there are more than one solution in this terms applied to the technical domain in computer-based learning architectures. This seems to me another important issue, since although there is openness in the OKI, ELF and SIF architectures, no single solution has come to aggregate them in a shared application or system for making the OER reside in a definite architecture. I think Erik Duval's project of IEEE standard on Learning Object Metadata tries to solve this issue of interoperability for Learning Objects. However, and considering more constructive learning theories like the ones mentioned in the text, I think that this final technical solution is very difficult to happen since every blog post, wiki page or conversation in a chat can be a kind of modular piece of knowledge that no system can incorporate in a shared repository, and they can constitute a very important part in the learning experience of people, specially following a OS way of learning.

• Object vs flow resources: the definition of resource from a platonic or heraclitian point of view is a very complex idea, compared to all the definitions given in the text from an economic, social, instructional or pedagogical perspective, and if we consider the possibilities for learn and teach of "all the things that can be pointed to" (everchanging processes or abstract concepts) there is as Tuomi suggest many epistemological and ontological views that should be taken into account when we consider object-centric interpretation of resources. I think that the limitations here can be applied to language in a broad sense: what cannot be said cannot be learned, but the freedom of language for constructing sense is a very difficult thing to systematize and make available in an OER repository, while on the other hand I think the more constructivist approach has to do with the Gibson idea that "relation between subjects and objects that are dynamically constructed by these subjects as they move in their world", and again language itself is the only think that can bypass the technical barriers for making this a continuous negotiation (internally or teacher-to-learner).

• Types of openness and its place in OER definition: considering OER resources as non-rival goods, but also as common goods (or even more specifically as commons-based goods, taking Benkler's definition) regarding all the above, I found very instructive and interesting the definition of three levels of openness, a simple but effective way for classifying OER initiatives in a better way than the UNESCO definition (and also a shared solution behind the learner's, teacher's, economical, technical and institutional view): "Open resources are sources of services that do not diminish their capability to produce services when enjoyed and which (1) provide non-discriminatory access to information and knowledge about the resource (level I openness); (2) the services of which can be enjoyed by anyone with sufficient non-discriminatory capabilities (level II openness); (3) can be contributed to (level III openness)". The third level, then, if we consider initiatives like Wikiversity or Connexions, seems to me the one that allows for a more constructive way of teaching and learning, but also the one that leads to more complexity in terms of evaluating or having learners in the same "pool". But it also has the systemic problem that Tuomi faces elegantly: free contribution doesn't mean all kind of contributions, the norms of open science mean accumulating and revising knowledge (where the scientific production process can be broken up to fit a peer-production model, as in OS development, again like Benkler explains too) and the principles of CUDOS can be perfectly applied to the definition (and creation and use, one might say) of open educational resources.

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