A lot of cool things get started in dorms, and this is no exception. Students for Free Culture (SFC) just launched their Open University Campaign. SFC defines an open university as one in which:
1. The research produced is open access;
2. The course materials are open educational resources;
3. The university embraces free software and open standards;
4. The university’s patents are readily licensed for free software, essential medicine, and the public good;
5. The university’s network reflects the open nature of the Internet.
The university, they conclude, should be a place that "includes all parts of the community: students, faculty and administration."
I think it's cool that those who can go to college are working to make what they learn available to those that can't. Now that's Shareable. To join the campaign, go here. If you're not a college student, you can support the effort here.
Comments
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 11.05.09, 6:52am:
I like this idea very much; in a time when the White House uses Drupal, open source universities make perfect sense. In that respect, this is a simple modernization effort.
However, I share some of forgotmylogin's concerns and I see the Open University Campaign, worthy in and of itself, as limited in its potential, and perhaps not-well-thought-out in its larger goals. Efforts like this one are not new, though these particular applications are; the 1960s saw a huge push by both faculty and students to open up universities. Partially as a result--and spurred by the needs of the information-based, creative economy--college enrollment (and access to research) has climbed dramatically.
But here's the rub: During the same period, inequality has also climbed dramatically. Correlation isn't always causation, of course, but in this case the two are probably intimately related--if you google "college enrollment" + "inequality," you'll see a pile of new research on this subject--this month, American Prospect is publishing a special report on this topic, which can be read at http://www.prospect.org/cs/special_report. More people have been going to college, but lots of people aren't, and their lives are getting measurably worse and worse. The path to inequality starts way before people reach university age.
So, yes, by all means, let's continue to open up the universities--but let's not fool ourselves into believing that this is sufficient to actually change the structure of our society. Much more fundamental and less glamorous: Fund low-cost early childhood education, make health care available to all (there are all sorts of interesting correlations between health and educational accomplishment), adopt policies intended to establish a floor and a ceiling for wealth and income, make teaching at preschool and elementary levels more attractive to the most talented, thoughtful college graduates, improve the physical and intellectual conditions at public schools through steady and equitable distribution of funds, educate parents about how to limit the impact of commercial culture--the list goes on and on, many of us have heard it before, and I suppose it's overwhelming.
And yet most of these policies rest on a single idea, that everyone does better when everyone does better; that are society thrives when people share what they have. As the health care debate revealed, quite a large number of Americans reject that idea, and one of my frustrations with the health care debate is that the various leaders involved didn't (were afraid to?) articulate the ideals behind reform, to try to enlist people in a different vision of how we might organize American life. This is why I consider a project like Shareable to be important, though we have to acknowledge its limits as well--we're building it and people are coming, but the trick is to reach the people who aren't coming.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 11.05.09, 11:35am:
David, interesting history. And I agree that getting class materials from the Internet is not the same as going to college. My experience is that it's the network - or access to opportunities - that colleges offer that's equally if not more valuable than the education. I hope that the idea of the open university will evolve so that those outside the walls of universities can form their own learning groups around opencourseware and find ways to work together to access opportunities. Perhaps these are the steps toward a open+network approach to high ed.
And to Jeremy, I think policy fixes are important too, but we shouldn't rely on these nor push business so far into a corner that they're inadvertently radicalized. This is what happened in reaction to the New Deal. The New Deal was view as so anti-business that business essentially birthed and funded the modern conservative movement in the US, which was also influential globally. A key strategy in this movement was to redefine what the good life in a way that was business friendly (consumerism and free markets). By all accounts, they were successful, and the moment of social and environmental crisis we're in is largely the result. Everyone is to blame.
This doesn't mean the public should somehow back off checking corporate power, but that we should realize that in terms of collective action, business has a gigantic advantage. This is a smaller, richer, more networked, and more unified community. It's easier for them to organize than it is to organize millions of citizens with less money, divergent agendas, and less connectivity. This imbalance will never change, Internet or not. Instead of resurrecting New Deal policies wholesale, we need another way toward change that at a minimum doesn't mobilize business against the common good, and that perhaps harnesses business for the common good. It can be a blend of approaches, because I think many of the fixes of the New Deal were smart, banking regulation for instance!
In any case, we need a way out of what I see as an extreme oscillation between strong government and free markets policy approaches, and the way out may be a commons or peer-based economy. I would like to see policies that support that. Ostrom's Nobel points the way.
Jeremy Adam Smith wrote on 11.05.09, 2:14pm:
I didn't say anything about the New Deal, but...oh, well, I guess now I have to talk about it.
For the record: I think you're overreaching in your analysis of the New Deal, Neal, and in the process buying into the conservative narrative. The New Deal emerged because capitalism experienced a catastrophic system-wide failure--unemployment stood at 25 percent and people were literally starving. So government stepped in to meet basic needs and stimulate the economy. Some parts of the business community resisted, but most leaders signed on, knowing how dangerous the situation was. That was the context. Did New Dealers go too far? For decades, millions of Americans didn't think so and they kept the architects of the New Deal in power. So during this period, inequality fell, prosperity rose, but problems like Vietnam, stagflation, and crime emerged that undermined confidence in the New Deal consensus.
The environmental crisis contributed to the New Deal's crisis in confidence. It's important to stress that the highway system and the policies that built the suburbs (for example; there are other examples) fundamentally grew out of the same New Deal context. New Dealers were not treehuggers. They used tax dollars and public policy to underwrite the American Dream, which, from our perspective today, has turned into a social and environmental catastrophe. The New Left was one solution to these problems, and they won some victories but failed in other ways; the New Right was another solution, a decade later, and they had a run that they would call good and you and I would call bad. However, I would not blame conservatives for our environmental crisis (though it's fair to say that conservative deregulation and tax policies did create our economic and fiscal crisis). It was a mindset that cut across political categories, that arose from a condition of crisis and scarcity.
So, yes, everyone is to blame--it might be more correct to say that yesterday's solutions become today's problems--but I'd suggest that it might be excessively divisive to drag in a dubious and politicized analysis the New Deal. We can leave that bickering to the American Prospect and National Review. I say, just leave that one alone, and focus on the positive message.
Jeremy Adam Smith
www.jeremyadamsmith.com
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 11.06.09, 3:42pm:
Good points Jeremy! Your line "yesterday's solutions become today's problems" resonate with me. It's true that the policy prescriptions coming out of the Great Depression were meant to prevent another catastrophe but contributed to where we are today. And my main point, which I could have made with out my incomplete history, isn't to take sides but suggest that something new is tried - a direction that includes peer or commons-based economy in the mix of solutions.
Reminds me of the old "open," "public," or "worker's" universities of the late 19th and early 20th century, which attempted to "share" the elite knowledge across class divisions through free lectures and readings. One result of this was the apparent contradiction of the erudite worker: in Maugham's The Razor's Edge, the character meets a fellow worker in an English coal mine, and learns from him about the Bhagavad-Gita.
The problem that this sort of open, or popular format ran into, is that it is hard to simply "transfer" elite knowledge, and that what goes on in universities is not simply the packaging and distribution of a fixed product that may be shared or freely altered (on the analogy of computer software), but a type of training that seems only replicable in sustained interaction of small groups in seminars and laboratories. A lot of research in the sociology of science suggests that it is some time, in the life of a scientific idea or object, before it becomes stable enough to be "sharable."
But once it is, then an Open University is ready for business, and plenty of information is ready for distribution this way.