Open Content -- Musings
2 min read
I've been thinking about Open Content recently for a few reasons -- As he does with many things, Jim Groom had a great post over on his blog about his experiences at Open Ed 2007.
Here is a lightly edited version of my comment on his post:
On days when I'm feeling cynical, I can't get around the sensation that some of the motivation driving the discussion on "issues of scalability, sustainability, localization, and other infra-structural issues" has less to do with scalability, sustainability, and culturally competent/translated content than it has to do with controlling the flow of content, or slowing the process while businesses figure out how to make money off of licensing.
Because: we have rss and atom, json, soap and rest calls, and xml-rpc, to name a few -- all lightweight methods of moving information from point A to point B. When content is transported (not referenced, but actually copied) from one place to another, it can then be recontextualized, remixed, reused -- all the things that most folks within the open content arena agree need to be happening.
One of the things that is amazing to see about what Jim and Company have done at UMW is that they have proceeded to build out a lightweight infrastructure that works. People can criticize it as unscalable, etc, but when the dust settles you have the same basic response as defenders of Wikipedia: it only works in practice.
The same is true of using existing tools to make truly open content possible -- it only works in practice. We need make broader use of the existing tools, but they need to be improved and made more friendly in order to allow the everyday user (a teacher, a student, someone working on their own without the resources of a university behind them) to access, import, and recontextualize content. These tools need to run on FOSS platforms to guarantee free availability and access.
