‘Openness’ and ‘Open Education’ in the Global Digital Economy: An Emerging Paradigm of Social

Production

Michael A PetersUIUC, 2008

Paper presented at Economic and Social Research Council (ERSC, UK) Seminar Series on ‘Education and the Knowledge Economy’,

University of Bath, March 6-7th, 2008.

Open Systems‘Systems are rarely ever either open or closed but open to some and closed to other influences… Systems without output are non-knowable by an external observer, e.g., black holes in the visible universe… Systems without inputs are not controllable’

Principia Cybernetica Web at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Asc/OPEN_SYSTE.html

Structure of Presentation

1. Introduction2. The Emerging Open Education Paradigm3. The History of ‘Openness’ in Education:

From the Open Classroom to OCW4. Bergson, Popper, Soros and the Open

Society5. The New Paradigm of Social Production6. Conclusions

Introduction: Emerging Knowledge Ecologies

• Harvard mandates open archiving (Feb 14, 2008)

• MIT adopts OpenCourseWare (2001)• Budapest OA statement; NIH; ERC.• The Ithaca Report, University

Publishing In A Digital Age (2007)

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)

Open EducationOpen Education that builds on the nested and evolving convergences of open source, open access and open science, and also emblematic of a set of still wider political and economic changes that ushers in ‘social production’ as an aspect of the global digital economy, an economy that is both fragile and volatile as the current world credit and banking crisis demonstrates so well.

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

Open 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.

Change in Philosophical Ethos

And yet 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.

New Forms of Freedom• a shift from an underlying

metaphysics of production—a ‘productionist’ metaphysics—to a metaphysics of consumption

• new logics and different patterns of cultural consumption in the areas of new media where symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily activity.

Information & FreedomInformation is the vital element in a ‘new’ politics and economy that links space, knowledge and capital in networked practices. Freedom is an essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices develop or transform themselves into knowledge cultures. --Peters & Besley, 2006

Information and ControlThe specific politics and eco-cybernetic rationalities that accompany an informational global capitalism comprised of new multinational edutainment agglomerations are clearly capable of colonizing the emergent ecology of info-social networks and preventing the development of knowledge cultures based on non-proprietary modes of knowledge production and exchange.--Peters & Besley, 2006

Open Education - Definition

‘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

OECD, 2007• Learning content: Full courses, courseware,

content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.

• Tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organisation of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.

• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licences to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localise content.

Knowledge Systems and Complexity

Complexity as an approach to knowledge and knowledge systems now recognizes both the development of global systems architectures in (tele)communications and information with the development of open knowledge production systems that increasingly rest not only on the establishment of new and better platforms (sometimes called Web 2.0), the semantic web, new search algorithms and processes of digitization

‘Open Knowledge Production Systems’

Social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding value as evidenced in the growth of open source, open access and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities that transcend borders of the nation-state.

Global Knowledge Systems

Openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results

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)

‘open innovation’new collaborative models of open innovation, originating outside the firm, that results in an ‘architecture of participation’

Three Reports• 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)

OECD Report‘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).

OLCOS‘OLCOS emphasizes that it is crucial to also promote innovation and change in educational practices. In particular, OLCOS warns that delivering OER to the still dominant model of teacher centred knowledge transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences, knowledge and skills to participate successfully in the knowledge economy and society.’

‘Competences for the knowledge society’

‘priority must be given to open educational practices that involve students in active, constructive engagement with content, tools and services in the learning process, and promote learners’ self-management, creativity and working in teams’ (p. 37)

Skills of ‘digital competence’

• Ability to search, collect and process (create, organise, distinguish relevant from irrelevant, subjective from objective, real from virtual) electronic information, data and concepts and to use them in a systematic way;

• Ability to use appropriate aids (presentations, graphs, charts, maps) to produce, present or understand complex information;

• Ability to access and search a website and to use internet-based services such as discussion fora and e-mail;

• Ability to use ICT to support critical thinking, creativity and innovation in different contexts at home, leisure and work (p. 39).

The History of ‘Openness’ in Education: From the Open

Classroom to OCW

•The Open Classroom •Open Schooling•The Open University•Open Courseware•Open Education

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.’

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration

‘We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.’

The Open Society • Henri Bergson (1859-1941)- The Two

Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson, 1977 [1935]).

• Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1945): The Spell of Plato and The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath

• George Soros & Open Society Institute (est.1993)

Henri Bergson• ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to

mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly’ • ‘The concept of open society was first used by the

French philosopher Henri Bergson in his book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion published in 1932.  One source is tribal and that leads to a closed society whose members feel an affinity for each other and fear or hostility toward the other tribes.  By contrast, the other source is universal and leads to an open society which is guided by universal human rights and seeks to protect and promote the freedom of the individual’

Karl Popper‘I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous - from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.’

Ideology of the ‘Open Society’

• Popper was a ‘Cold War warrior’ like Friedrich von Hayek, his countryman, who wrote the fiercely anti-socialist tract Road to Serfdom (1949)

• Hayek was responsible for inviting and securing a place for Popper at the London School of Economics (LSE).

• Hayek and Popper together formed a formidable twin opponent to socialism and strong defense of the principles of liberal democracy and the ‘free market’ in the postwar period.

George Soros‘Fundamental principles have been traditionally derived from some external authority such as religion or science. But at the present moment in history, no external authority remains undisputed. The only possible source is internal. A firm foundation on which we can build our principles is the recognition of our own fallibility. Falli bility is a universal human condition; therefore it is applicable to a global society. Fallibility gives rise to reflexivity and reflexivity can create conditions of unstable disequilibrium, or to put it bluntly, of political and economic crisis. It is in our common interest to avoid such conditions’ (Soros, 1998: p. 84).

Benkler & The New Paradigm of Social

Production In The Wealth of Networks: How Social

Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Benkler develops a vision of the good society based on access and distribution of information goods in a networked global information economy that places a high value on individual autonomy where within the public information space of the Internet and the information commons people have the individual means to pursue their own interests.

Nonmarket p-t-p production

The emergence of the global networked information economy made possible by increasingly cheaper processors linked as a pervasive network has created an information economy based on the production of information and culture that enables social and nonmarket or peer-to peer production and exchange to play a, perhaps even, the central role.

‘The Economy of Ideas’ - Barlow

The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.

Creative Commons• Richard Stallman• John Perry Barlow• Larry Lessig• James Doyle • Pamela Stephenson • Yochai Benkler• Creative Commons, http://

creativecommons.org/

Networks of Collaboration

Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks links ‘to a broader tradition of thought; that of people like Jane Jacobs, James Scott, Richard Sennett and Iris Marion Young.’

Educating for Participation in the Networked

Environment ‘To conclude, the basic questions we face are how we understand the human being who is revealed by the new practices of large scale, distributed cooperation in the networked environment; and how we educate such human beings as they are and become. My answer is that we must see, with increasing clarity, that human beings are basically diverse in their motivational profiles, proclivities to sociality, backgrounds, insights, and creativity, and that networks allow us to pool these individual capabilities in an ever-wider range of combinations and institutional frameworks, well beyond those that were available in the past, to a new and ever growing set of effective social tasks’ --Benkler, 2008

Conclusions (I)Criticisms of the major reports on Open Education:(a) Critique of underlying ‘engineering’ concept of

information (as opposed to knowledge) and therefore also underlying notion of skills;

(b) Problem of ‘structured ignorance,’ ‘information overload,’ ‘misinformation,’ disinformation’;

(c) Lack of context claims for open education in order to understand of fundamental changes to liberal political economy;

(d) Relation of OE to traditional goals of education policy to notions of freedom, equality, access and distribution of public goods.

Conclusions (II)Criticisms of the ideological nature of the ‘open

society’ as proposed by Popper and Soros:(a)Contextualizing Popper in the Cold War, state

phobia of late 1940s, rise of neoliberalism, links to Hayek and LSE;

(b)Differences and dangers of ‘openness’: open society/institutions vs open markets; preservation of cultural differences; Ameri-English as global lingua franca; asymmetical power relations; rise of the ‘information utility’ and new forms of ‘information imperialism’;

(c)‘Societies of Control’ (Deleuze, 1992) vs Open Society: 1. Historical, 2. Logic, 3. Program

Conclusions (III)Criticisms of Benkler and limitations of

liberal political economy: (a)‘open governance’ in an era of

globalization; (b)UK community cards, House of Lords

and the problems of the digital self;(c) state & corporate surveillance;

privacy; (d)copyright; WTO & GATS etc.

Conclusions (IV)An ontology of openness? (a)Deleuze’s postion as ‘a radical, non-

essentialist realism that encompasses the virtual as real’ (Cooksey, 2005) (as opposed to ‘actual’)

(b) See also DeLanda (2005a,b) and Agamben (2004).