Semi-porous Silos
3 min read
Over the years, we have seen a slow but gradual shift from fully closed content silos to content repositories or sources of information that have made some initial steps toward being more open. However, even the best of these silos are only semi-porous. They allow information and data to leak out via API calls, xml formats, LTI, SCORM, ePub - all the Frankensteins of interoperability - but these leaks retain the bedrock assumptions upon which the data was built, or published, or distributed.
And this is not a bad thing - content needs to be written for a purpose, and semi-porous is light years ahead of fully closed. But, embedded assumptions get in the way of reuse. Embedded assumptions - in the form of css that supports a visual effect in one web site, in the form of a learning objective that is not universal, in the form of semantic markup that might not be relevant in different uses - create a nest of cruft that needs to be removed or reworked if content is going to be modified, adopted, or remixed in a new environment.
If the process of cleaning up content for reuse and adoption was the same across platforms, we'd be having a different conversation. However, the cleanup required to adopt content varies between systems, and can even vary based on different authoring methods within systems. For example, some older content might use multiple methods to embed videos. Most openly licensed content has inline css in content that make no sense outside the original system. As a result of these and other foibles, the cleanup process varies widely. Adopting content is an unpredictable combination of undoing assumptions, redoing some sections, and - in some sections - starting from scratch and authoring something new.
And for each piece of adopted content, the amount of undoing, redoing, and new work will vary. Every. Single. Time.
The solution here is a sane starting point, as devoid of assumptions as possible. If openly licensed content was broadly available as a collection of text, with related binaries and links, we could start on a more even foundation. When we think of the elements within a page - including the assumptions that get added to the content to make it more useful within a specific context - as decoupled elements that can be readily reassembled, we eliminate the need to discover what we will need to undo. We also eliminate the guesswork around what we will need to edit, and what we build from scratch.
The process of adopting openly licensed content is really a process of ownership and responsibility. The person or organization adopting the material actively works with it, shapes it, and makes it their own. Right now, though, our toolkits interfere with that process. We have done some work on solving this problem over the years as part of our internal development roadmap. Our internal project name for this is "Sally" and the project has taken multiple forms as our thinking on the barriers to OER adoption have evolved. But for the last few years, we have been circling closer toward a tool that strips away the assumptions that leak out of semi-porous silos.
