Open Revolution

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