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Archive for June, 2009

Let’s rethink OpenCourseWare

Jun 29th, 09 / 7 Comments

You can’t knock down the gates around higher education by putting up virtual borders instead.

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I’m on the open source movement like Daniel Tosh on videos of people puking.

Which is why I engage with MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative as if I were trying to embody the very definition of insanity itself. This time, I’ve gotten my dander up over the promise and disappointment of an awesomely titled course, Research Topics in Architecture: Citizen-Centered Design of Open Governance Systems. Here’s the description from the course’s syllabus:

Imagine if networked computers and other devices could unleash full democratic real-time participation in official decisions by all stakeholders. To date, member-led debate and decision-making has always been subject to physical limits in space, time and numbers of participants. Current technologies and business practices can allow architects and planners to break through the traditional constraints to member involvement in the agoras of our public and private institutions. The implications for corporate transparency and accountability, as well as for more responsive government are provocative.

In this seminar, students will design and perfect a digital environment to house the activities of large-scale organizations of people making bottom-up decisions, such as with citizen-government affairs, voting corporate shareholders or voting members of global non-profits and labor unions. A working Open Source prototype created last semester will be used as the starting point, featuring collaborative filtering and electronic agent technology pioneered at the Media Lab. This course focuses on development of online spaces as part of an interdependent human environment, including physical architectures, mapped work processes and social/political dimensions.

Perfect, right? And not only that, but I keep going back to the noble origins of OCW and wanting the tool to live up to its promise. As the site proclaims,

In 1999, MIT Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of MIT’s mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.

It’s an expensive–according to the site, it costs between $10,000 and $15,000 to upload materials from a single course–but laudable effort, ideally suited to highly resourceful learners looking for ways to supplement their formal or informal learning.

Again and again I return to OCW. Again and again I’m disappointed by how hostile OCW materials are to even the most dedicated, passionate learner. The materials are easy to download and unzip but difficult to unpack: They’re so dense, and so decontextualized in their current format, that they’re nearly nonsensical.

The architecture course is a case in point. While I’d be hard-pressed to find a more perfect class for the likes of me, the materials, though organized according to the course schedule and packaged with lecture notes, handouts, and supplemental readings, are simply too much to make head or tail of. Here, for example, are the class notes from week 1, “slashdot as example”:

Class Notes

Slashdot.org – Karma – six levels – terrible, bad, neutral, positive, good, excellent

Self-Organizing

Fiction (Jeremy) – similar point system

Pathfinder (Stylianos)

Shock Experiment – Anonymity

Slackdot – takes time to penetrate – no ‘design’ (‘blurb’ upon ‘blurb’)

Legibility should be more important

Hard to read – squint eyes

Only get ‘tip of the iceberg’

Graphic way of searching for info – rhizome.org (starry night)

The Brain EKP – Enterprise Knowledge Platform

Spider Map – Irish PM interface – drag and drop

How things get ‘about the iceberg’ – organized on screen – very different

Slashdot – every user is not equal – ‘superusers’ have more input – antidemocratic

Mediation – 3rd party neutral – resolution among themselves.

Arbitration – 3rd party neutral – arbitrator rules based on evidence.

EBay- used same technology to resolve dispute

High reputation, good feedback – typically did nothing wrong – past performance

Filters – like minded people (ie ACLU) or only hi-karma people

Maybe have user-defined (voted for things you also want)

To what extent are user comments and actions transparent?

Is real identity necessary?

Next Week:

How to preserve minority rights – mediation – therapeutic circles!

Debate Notes:
#2
What do you mean by project based experience?
Really there is 2 proposals – eliminate GRE, use project-based evaluation
Other criteria still valid.

I’m sure this makes perfect sense to the student who was able to sit in on that week’s lecture, but it’s all but useless without that guidance. Though I’m sure the readings and other assignments clarify nicely, it’s up to me to locate the texts, read them alone, and figure out the link to the key ideas of the course. This is only slightly better, and perhaps a good deal more time-consuming, than if I were to simply email the instructor with a request for reading recommendations.

The resources aren’t completely useless, of course; the reading list saves me the time and energy of having to locate, contact, and wait to hear back from the instructor. I imagine, too, that OCW is an invaluable resource for higher ed faculty and administrators as they approach course planning. Used right, this kind of resource could help us make enormous strides toward leveling the higher education playing field.

But I’m not sure what using it right might look like. Should all universities compare their course offerings and reading materials to that offered by MIT faculty? Should all students pick an accompanying OCW course to complement their chosen field of study? Or should we ignore the content and emulate the approach: Making all course materials at all universities available to anybody who wants to access them?

Perhaps, as a colleague pointed out, it’s not fair to use a course from 2002 as proof of OCW’s failings. After all, as she explained, 2002 was too early to judge anything by today’s criteria: “In 2002,” she said, “the New York Times was still charging for content.”

Fair enough. But more recent courses appear similarly information-dense and context-sparse. All I’m saying (and I’ve said it before, here on this blog) is that while the impetus behind OCW is grand and nob
le, it doesn’t seem like anybody’s getting their $10,000 to $15,000 worth. It seems much more valuable–not to mention cheaper and more readily accessible–to capture one or two key lectures per semester, surround those lectures with related readings designed by the lecturer for the OCW context, and link learners to a cluster of resources available through other open educational resources, online networks, and offline texts. This seems much more closely aligned to the spirit of the open educational movement, an effort that hopes to break down archaic and arbitrary geological, achievement-oriented, and class-defined gaps in participation.

Okay, now I’m just repeating myself.

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Tosh.0 is my favorite new show

Jun 28th, 09 / 0 Comments

Why? Because it has included a puke scene in every one of its first four episodes, that’s why.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wog6cF1A_IA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

In case you haven’t been following along on Comedy Central, Tosh.0 is a new show hosted by comedian Daniel Tosh. The main conceit is that Tosh introduces, and comments on, a series of viral videos.

It’s funnier than you think, even if you think the premise is a downright hoot. But you do have to kind of like watching people throwing up, people making idiots of themselves, and goats that sound like humans.

If you do, you also need to think it’s funny when comedians revel in the most humiliating aspects of the human attraction toward spectacle and performance.

If you do, you’ll agree with the Reuters review of Tosh.0 by Dan Carlson, who exclaims that

it succeeds on the strength of host Daniel Tosh, a talented stand-up comedian who isn’t above poking fun at the show’s premise even while gleefully introducing a fresh batch of clips. He’s self-deprecating and quick-witted enough to keep the action breezing right along.

Carlson writes, and I agree, that the best part of the show is the weekly “Web Redemption” segment, in which someone whose humiliation has gone viral gets a chance to come on the show for an opportunity to regain her or his dignity. Guests on this segment have so far included Afro Ninja, Miss South Carolina, the famous tumbling-table star of the video “Scarlett Takes a Tumble,” , and my personal favorite so far, Tyrone Davies, most recently known for his massive puke-puddle on a morning news show. Davies gets his shot at web redemption here:

Tosh.0

Thurs, 10pm / 9c

Web Redemption – Puke Guy

www.comedycentral.com

Daniel Tosh

Miss Teen South Carolina

Demi Moore Picture

Simple redemption’s not enough for Daniel Tosh, oh no. He has to take it one step farther and take on the “60 minute milk challenge”–drinking a full gallon of milk in under an hour, which everybody knows is physically impossible.

Puke News Kid Does Milk Gallon Challenge – watch more funny videos

Why do I love this show? Mainly because of Tosh himself, who takes such obvious delight in excoriating the self-humiliation drive. If you like his new show, you’ll love his recent stand-up movie, “Daniel Tosh: Completely Serious.” Here’s a teaser:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIXZUmC7Dyc&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

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just because I’m frothing at the mouth doesn’t mean I’m rabid

Jun 27th, 09 / 1 Comment

My friend Clement recently gave me an amazing book by Patrick J. Finn called Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in their Own Self-Interest. The description on the back cover explains that this book “dares to define literacy as a powerful right of citizenship…. Our job, (Finn) argues, is not to help students to become middle class and live middle-class lives–most don’t want it. Education rather should focus on a powerful literacy–a literacy with an attitude that enables working-class and poor students to better understand, demand, and protect their civil, political, and social rights.”

Finn picks up on the foundational work by social-justice educational theorists like Jim Gee, Lisa Delpit, Jonathan Kozol, and–most importantly for his approach–Paolo Freire. Freire is best known for his work with the poor, illiterate, and undereducated population of Brazil, out of which work emerged his key text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire argued for an approach to literacy that Finn calls “dangerous literacy”–the kind that is acquired for the purpose of struggle, for personal and social justice.

Finn asks what might happen if we approach literacy from a “Freirean motivation”–a motivation to identify and fight against the features of a culture that serve to oppress you and other members of your community (including overcrowded schools, unemployment and underemployment, substandard housing, and substandard health care). What if, he asks,

your teachers addressed these issues while teaching history, English, art, music, and even math and science? What if your parents and teachers were involved in grassroots organizations that demanded better schools, a living wage, or universal health care? What if they were active in their unions and supported other union campaigns such as Justice for Janitors or organizing housecleaners, nannies, and car wash workers? What if your teachers taught the history of democratic movements such as abolition, suffrage, and labor and helped you to see that you and your fellow students could become more powerful if you appropriated the discourse of power and prepared to become union members or community activists or organizers or teachers or lawyers or elected officials with a passion for social justice so you can fight to get a better deal for yourself and families like yours?

As Finn makes clear, schools as they are currently structured are not designed to support learning experiences that answer the above question. It’s not, he explains, the fault of teachers, many of whom are doing the best they can. But the education system is designed for “empowering education for some and domesticating education for others” and, Finn writes,

about as savage as any I can think of, but it’s much harder to pin down…. The easy (but I believe incorrect and ultimately self-defeating) answer is to shout conspiracy. But subtle mechanisms (that) deny working-class children access to higher levels of literacy work so well–even when there are competent teachers and reasonable resources–that there is no need for conspiracy. Savage inequalities persiste because a lot of well-meaning people are doing the best they can, but they simply do not understand the mechanisms that stack the cards against so many children.

Teaching for Freirean motivation, according to Finn, is teaching kids to want what the teacher wants and being willing to cooperate in order to get it. It’s teaching kids to understand what Jim Gee calls the “master myths”–the belief systems on which our society is built–and to understand the extent to which these myths serve or fail to serve their own best interests.

This book is blowing my mind, and I’ll offer up a more thorough review soon. Right now, I want to just highlight something interesting that I’m learning about being mad enough to fight with people about how effed America’s public education system is: While it’s easy to talk about the subtle mechanisms that support current social structures with people who already agree that school is effed, it’s unbelievably hard to talk about these things with people who aren’t yet convinced. Consider the following sample conversations:

Me: Here’s why I think school is effed (reasons A, B, C, D).
Katie Clinton: I agree with reasons B and C, but I think reason A is actually an effort to make schools more fair.
Me: Well but A requires administration buy-in, which is hard to get.
Katie Clinton: Actually, a good teacher can overcome administration hostility because….

Me: Here’s why I think school is effed (reasons A, B, C, D).
Benighted conservative: School isn’t effed.
Me: Wha–
Benighted conservative: I mean, look at me–I was born into the working class and overcame my roots through education.
Me: But that’s not–
Benighted conservative: What we need is a more rigorous, standardized curriculum, including more focus on the classics, a better testing system, and greater accountability.
Me: No no no, the problem isn’t that curricula aren’t rigorous enough, it’s that curricula are designed to serve the interest of the dominant Discourse.
Benighted conservative: There’s a reason Shakespeare is still taught–it’s because he’s universally valued and valuable. We need to teach poor people to understand that.
Me: This isn’t about Shakespeare, it’s about an education system that’s–
Benighted conservative: I succeeded through hard work and dedication, and anybody who works hard enough can do what I did.
Me: *sputter*

I’ve had many versions of both of the above conversations, and what I’ve learned is that while there’s no need to convince the Katie Clintons of the world that our school system is inherently slanted in favor of dominant groups who participate in the dominant Discourse, it’s almost impossible to convince the benighted conservative of the world that this conversation is even worth having. Once somebody has experienced success in a screamingly unjust educational system, that person is far less likely to be willing to engage in a conversation about whether that system is unjust. There’s just too much to lose.

Which is why the approach of Finn and others–teaching a healthy sense of outrage both within and toward the education system–seems like the best approach for real, systemic change.

I’m also learning an important lesson about the rhetoric of social justice. It may not, for example, be the smartest thing to begin a conversation by offering the four reasons I think schools are effed, at least with people who don’t already embrace the assumption that schools are seriously broken. It’s just that my hackles are already up and I’ve gotten a good growl going, deep down in my throat.

I hope graduate school isn’t like a kennel for angry dogs. I hope it’s not a place to keep people caged until they forget what they were mad about in the first place. I hope it’s more like a place where they offer you thin
gs to chew on so the anger gets channeled into something productive.

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seven things I know about Michael Jackson

Jun 26th, 09 / 0 Comments

He changed the way we think about movement:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIq2UWCTCBM&hl=en&fs=1&]

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Michael Jackson, pop icon, dead at 50

Jun 26th, 09 / 0 Comments

Can you even BELIEVE it?

Michael Jackson was THE pop star of my generation, maybe even the last real unifying star before social media screwed everything up and made it impossible for one star to rule them all.

Jackson was confounding in almost every sense. He forced us to rethink and approach anew cultural attitudes toward race, gender, masculinity, sexuality, and public performance of identity. In many ways it was easier to think of him as an anomaly, a phenomenon so far outside of the world we understood that we didn’t need to bother figuring out what he meant to us, and why.

With his death, analysts will probably find fuel to continue down this path–approaching Michael Jackson as a simple freak instead of the product of a complex interaction between the technologies and (human and inanimate) objects of our culture and one person’s difficulty in being offered up as a cultural object. If we’re lucky, someone will offer up a smart analysis of the cultural tensions that created the two Michael Jacksons: The (damaged, brilliant, trouble, dangerous) person, and the (brilliant, confusing, performative, captivating) public persona. The personal and the public increasingly intersected, especially as Jackson aged into a new media era and suddenly it was more than cameras that surrounded him.

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applying the abundance model to the classroom

Jun 24th, 09 / 1 Comment

In a recent Wired article called “Tech is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity,” Chris Anderson considers the difference between a scarcity management model and an abundance model. His point is linked to management of technology resources; he writes that

[i]f you’re controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating. There are real costs associated with those half-hour chunks of network time, and the penalty for failing to reach tens of millions of viewers with them is calculated in red ink and lost careers. No wonder TV executives fall back on sitcom formulas and celebrities—they’re safe bets in an expensive game.

But if you’re tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low. Nobody gets fired when your YouTube video is viewed only by your mom.

Anderson’s point is that when resources–in this case, willing content producers with cheap production tools–are abundant, we need to rethink how we structure, market, and make money off of content.

The point, though linked to media marketing models, might easily be applied to the domain of education. The following graphic accompanies Anderson’s piece:

Clearly, the abundance model as presented here aligns with the spirit of participatory culture, at its heart an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical movement wherein cultural decisions become crowdsourced. Here’s where many school policies confuse scarcity and abundance: They block participatory media (including YouTube, many social networking sites, and sometimes Google and Wikipedia) and evaluate students based on their ability to repeat back to the teacher (or testmaker) the big ideas of the class. Knowledge, in this case, is treated as a scarce resource, when in a participatory culture knowledge is almost the most abundant thing we have.

What would it look like to apply an abundance model to the classroom? What new roles can and should teachers and students play in an egalitarian classrom in which “everything is permitted unless it is forbidden”? What’s the difference, practically speaking, between a “command and control” classroom and a class without that type of control?

Important questions to chew on. More soon.

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Katharine Weymouth’s ulterior motives

Jun 23rd, 09 / 1 Comment

what print newspaper editors have to gain from arguing that content is king and format is just something to quibble over
You have to read Washington Post editor Katharine Weymouth’s shrill defense of print journalism, thinly disguised as a commencement speech for Medill School of Journalism grads. For my money, the most interesting part of the speech is this chunk, which comes right after a grudging nod to the role of new media technologies like Twitter and Facebook in the ongoing Iranian revolution:

But using new tools do not mean doing away with the profession of reporting – of cultivating sources and spending days and weeks and sometimes years developing a story and digging to the bottom. Of parsing sides in order to get at the underlying truths. Ariana Huffington refers often to the new era in media as that of the “linked economy.” She is right to a degree. But like a chain, a linked economy is only as good as its weakest link — meaning it’s only as good as the quality of the content to which you are linking. Without serious sources of news, both our economy and our society would suffer.

What format that content comes in is a separate question.

Just as Weymouth nods to Huffington, I’ll grant that Weymouth is also right to a degree–a linked economy really is only as good as its weakest link. But treating content as separate from format flies against the principles that led journalists to want to expand reporting across new formats in the first place: New formats offer new types of journalism, new chances to reach new audiences, and (let’s face it) new potential advertisers. Indeed, the effort to separate content and format–to suggest that one exists independent from the other–descends beyond confusing into the realm of the absurd.

Format may not matter if you’re rich, white, and a resident of a large (democratic) metropolitan city, where you have access to just about all imaginable news delivery platforms; it matters a little more if you don’t have a television, or you can’t get online, or the only communication tools not controlled by the government are tools like Twitter and Facebook.

Oh, and also, it’s easy to argue that weak links can be identified by an examination of content, not format, when you’re a dyed-in-the-wool member of the weakest news delivery format we have. Newspapers aren’t dying because their content is weak; they’re dying because the format they use to deliver the content quickly dies on the vine. While online journalism is easily picked up and spread across platforms, the material offered in a print newspaper gets tossed at the end of the day. Iranian Twitter users break the news of revolution to a global audience of millions; the Washington Post reports the same revolution and a few thousand, at best, first learn of it via the print edition that lands in their driveway. The rest of the WaPo readership already got the news, from Twitter or hundreds of other news platforms, including–perhaps–the online edition of the Washington Post. If the goal of journalism is to deliver the news, then it seems pretty obvious that print newspapers are the weakest link.

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Ray Bradbury smacks down new media types

Jun 21st, 09 / 1 Comment

First, in case you weren’t aware of this, Ray Bradbury is alive and kicking at 89.

If Bradbury’s name doesn’t trigger instant recognition and a flood of memories of high school English classes, then it’s possible it’s simply too late for you to make any useful contribution for society. In case there’s still a chance, here’s why you should recognize Bradbury’s name: He penned Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a future in which critical thought is outlawed (451 degrees is the temperature at which books burn). Though this is his most famous work, Bradbury is a highly prolific writer and in addition to dozens of novels, short story collections, and novellas, he has also authored multiple teleplays and screenplays. His most famous is the 1956 version of Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck, which became the canonical representation of the novel (despite certain liberties taken with Melville’s novel–most notably, a significant rewrite of the ending).

Bradbury is in the news lately because of a crusade to save public libraries in Ventura Country, CA. According to this New York Times article, the libraries there are under threat of closure because of a drop in property tax funds in the city. Property taxes make up the lion’s share of public funds to support libraries in Ventura.

When friends of the library went to Bradbury for help, he was apparently an easy sell. As the article explains:

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Readers of this blog know that I take my joy out of pummeling people who attack the internet as “meaningless” or “not real.” In this case, though, I’m going to let Bradbury off easy, and not just because I’m easily dazzled by literary stars. Bradbury gets a free pass because he points to a key problem inherent in the social revolution: That the demise of print newspapers, public libraries, and books in general means that kids who either can’t or choose not to engage with participatory media will get left behind. This means that the most disadvantaged learners will, once again, live at the mercy of the educated class.

The NYTimes article explains why libraries matter so much to Bradbury:

His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene.

…“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Look, I know it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. But if the same groups of people who have always lost–the poor, the undereducated, the underclass–lose this time, too, then what kind of revolution are we hosting over here?

I will admit, though, that it’s kind of confusing that one of the most innovative, creative, and future-oriented writers of 20th Century America is displaying such a resistance to a technology that appears to feel just a little too futuristic to him. It’s not real? It’s in the air? Isn’t that the premise of the vast majority of Bradbury’s body of work?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5NxG_rr5aU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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I don’t even care that posting this now shows how late I am at getting on the Adam Lambert bandwagon

Jun 18th, 09 / 5 Comments

jkl;fjdksl
jdfkls;jkdls;
is all i can say in the face of this much talent

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUmzGl0zy4k&hl=en&fs=1&]

I don’t even care how lame it makes me look. This man is perhaps the most mind-blowingly talented singer to come out of the American Idol popster factory. I don’t even care that I’m a month late in noticing it.

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open source, open access, open education: some definitions

Jun 18th, 09 / 0 Comments

For my upcoming study at Indiana University, I’m working on a position paper on the Free / Open Source / Libre movement, the open source ethos, and open education. It’s kind of weird having to draft a position paper when I kind of feel like I’ve done that, over here at sleeping alone and starting out early.

In fact, a position paper focusing only on the F/OSS movement and open education seems to somehow miss the point, since the spirit of these movements embraces an open-source approach to culture at large. In this way, this blog feels more appropriate as a position statement than any short paper ever could.

Still, academia is academia, and I can’t just turn in a one-liner (http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com) as a position paper. The paper I’m drafting, though, belongs to and informs this blog as much as this blog informs it. For that reason, I’ll be posting my work here as I go.

Today, I’ll start with some definitions.

Open Source: Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code. Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, which provided access to diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source)

Open Source Software (OSS): computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user-generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software.

Free Software (vs. Open Source Software): The term “free software” was coined by Richard Stallman, who explains that

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

Briefly, the difference in the terms highlights different ethical approaches to software development. In general, the OSS movement emphasizes the collective engagement with source code in order to develop, and sometimes to market, powerful and efficient software. The free software movement identifies as a social movement. Stallman explains:

Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.

Many adherents to these movements, to avoid this issue, simply refer to the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Movement.

Community Source Software (CSS): Community Source Software differs from OSS in that institutions devote paid employees to the project, with the intention of collaboratively developing a product that embraces the open source ethos. From the Wikipedia article on Community source,

An important distinctive characteristic of community source as opposed to plain open source is that the community includes some organizations or institutions that are committing their resources to the community, in the form of human resources or other financial elements. In this way, the open source project will have both more solid support, rather than purely volunteer efforts as found in other open source communities, and will possibly be shaped by the strategic requirements of the institution committing the resource.

Examples of CSS include: the Sakai Project, Kuali Foundation, and Open Source Portfolio.

Open Access (OA): From http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, “open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The goal of adopting OA policies is to remove barriers to information. Many higher education institutions have adopted an open access policy, as for example the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which explains that it adopted an OA policy because “The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”

Open Education Movement and Open Educational Resources (OERs): From Opening Up Education, a key tenet of this movement is that education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection. The open education movement embraces a shift away from a scarcity-based model of higher education, which bases its value on limiting access. As Batson, Paharia, and Kumar explain (in chapter 6, “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”), open education works within a “knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.” In the open, “abundance-based” learning framework, we see the following shifts, with the “trend indicators” column showing features of higher education that point to the shift.

Recursive Publics: This term was coined by Christopher Kelty, who describes it at length in Two Bits (available for download, online browsing, and modulation for free online):

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives. kquote>
More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:

Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.

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