A colleague at Eduserv asked me the other day why there isn't as much noise as there used to be about OpenID and whether it was indicative of a loss of interest or something else.

It's inevitable I guess. New developments, particularly those that look as transformative as OpenID looked at the time, tend to generate a lot of noise and activity, often at a level that isn't sustainable for very long. Something else of interest comes along, there are various contenders in this case, and the world shifts its interest - or, at least, the audible noise that results from such interest.

In the discussion that followed the initial question it turned out that we both thought that some combination of OpenID and OAuth was somehow being used behind the scenes of things like Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect but we weren't quite sure how much and how often.

I decided to look around and find out.

Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed with what I could find - at least without spending more time on it than I could afford. The OpenID.net website carries an impressive list of adopters across the bottom of the page but doesn't indicate whether they are Identity Providers or Replying Parties (or both), nor what the status of their adoption is. So I asked on the openid-board@lists.openid.net mailing list:

Also, when I chose to login via Google, Facebook, whatever... from a typical pull-down list (e.g. that offered by something like Janrain Engage)... is it ever using OpenID behind the scenes? If so, what proportion of the time?

and got the following helpful response from Brian Kissel at Janrain:

So... OpenID is alive and well (I'm sure you knew that) but looks like it is probably disappearing into the infrastructure to a certain extent - which is exactly where it belongs.

In case you were worried...

We’ve often claimed that opening up development of a project can help in its long term sustainability. By allowing new funders and participants to take an active role, even leadership, in a project it is possible to survive the natural coming and going of project participants.

Today I added the following update to the OSS Watch sustainability case study on Apache Cocoon:

Steve Lee, our accessibility expert, has been working with a team at the University of Southampton to open up a cross browser ToolBar designed to help make the web more accessible. It’s a great project that allows users to control the way a page is displayed, invoke a text to speech reader, spell check editable content, look up dictionary definitions and extract reference information (amongst other things). Although the tool is an accessibility tool many of its features are of much more general use, Lifehacker said the work brought “something long overdue for web users.”

Steve helped the team open source the project and tried to work with TechDis to explain the benefits of collaborative development, in particular the ability to spread the cost (and risk) of development across multuple partners. Steve spoke about this with the H Online at our TransferSummit back in June:

Lee told The H that the tool, developed as an open collaboration between JISC TechDis and University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, was created to replace a previous toolbar … Lee said the open development process … has allowed the project to be more sustainable.

With the support of both TechDis and Southampton the ToolBar has been getting plenty of attention and use. Nobody can call it perfect but it is certainly useful. Furthermore, since it is open source others can help improve it.

Despite the success of the ToolBar in terms of raw use figures Sal Cooke, Director of Techdis, recently announced the demise of the ToolBar. She said that TechDis were “delighted by the response and the positive feedback we’ve had from users” and that the “number of downloads has surpassed all expectations.” So why kill the project?

Sal goes on to say “many of you will be aware that we [TechDis] have undertaken a major overhaul of our own website, with a commitment to embedding within it, a set of new accessibility tools.” Here Sal appears to be saying that TechDis no longer has a need for the ToolBar in addressing the accessibility needs of their own site users. Sal goes on to say, “in view of the above and the current economic climate, we have taken the decision to discontinue further development of the JISC TechDis Toolbar in favour of channelling resources into areas where we can make the most impact.”

On the surface this looks just fine, Techdis have not invested beyond the initial pilot funding and if TechDis have an alternative solution available to them then why should they pay again to support the ToolBar?

However, for me this misses one of the most important advantages of this work. As an open source project it is not just useful for TechDis, it is useful for every web user and every website developer.

So what about the rest of us? How can we address the accessibility needs that the toolbar tackled?

Fortunately, for us, the ToolBar has never been an in-house TechDis development, despite what TechDis may think. It is an open source development managed by the University of Southampton, Dr. Mike Wald followed Sals mail saying:

Although the toolbar was initially funded by Techdis and we provided a ‘Techdis badged version’ for them, the toolbar is an Open Source Project and my team at Southampton University are continuing to develop it …

The point here is that whilst TechDis (rightly) considered the TechDis branded version of the software as their own, the project is an open source one and can therefore be modified and distributed by anyone. To date all of the “quarter of a million uses of the toolbar” have carried the TechDis logo in recognition of their support of the project, but the future of the project is not dependent on TechDis.

OSS Watch are working with the Southampton team on a number of initiatives and we are pleased to report that we have been asked to help ensure the ToolBar continues to survive. I’m certain that it will and can only repeat Steve’s words from June:

they [Southampton ECS] are undoubtedly a group to watch as they steadily increase their portfolio of widely applicable open accessibility projects

Take a look at this great accessibility project and help the Southampton team by reporting any bugs you find, suggesting new features or even contributing code. The ToolBar will live on under a different name (to be decided ).

The Modeller.

OK... not a real Batman villain (I didn't realise there were so many to choose from) but one made up by Chris Gutteridge in a recent blog post of the same name. It's very funny:

I’ve invented a new Batman villain. His name is “The Modeller” and his scheme is to model Gotham city entirely accurately in a way that is of no practical value to anybody. He has an OWL which sits on his shoulder which has the power to absorb huge amounts of time and energy.

...

Over the 3 issues there’s a running subplot about The Modeller's master weapon, the FRBR, which everyone knows is very very powerful but when the citizens of Gotham talk about it none of them can quite agree on exactly what it does.

...

While unpopular with the fans, issue two, “Batman vs the Protégé“, will later be hailed as a Kafkaesque masterpiece. Batman descends further into madness as he realises that every moment he’s the Batman of that second in time, and each requires a URI, and every time he considers a plan of action, the theoretical Batmen in his imagination also require unique distinct identifiers which he must assign before continuing.

I suspect there's a little bit of The Modeller in most of us - certainly those of us who have a predisposition towards Linked Data/the Semantic Web/RDF - and as I said before, I tend to be a bit of a purest, which probably makes me worse than most. I've certainly done my time with the FRBR. The trick is to keep The Modeller's influence under control as far as possible.

I write this post with some trepidation, since I know that it will raise issues that are close to the hearts of many in the community but discussion on the jisc-repositories list following Steve Hitchcock's post a few days ago (which I posted in full here recently) has turned to the lessons that the withdrawl of JISC funding for the Intute service might teach us in terms of transitioning JISC- (or other centrally-) funded activities into self-sustaining services.

I'm reminded of a recent episode of the Dragon's Den on BBC TV where it emerged that the business idea being proposed for investment had survived thus far on European project funding. The dragons took a dim view of this, on the basis, I think, that such funding would only rarely result in a viable business because of a lack of exposure to 'real' market forces and the proposer was dispatched forthwith (the dragons clearly never having heard of Google! :-) ).

On the mailing list, views have been expressed that projects find it hard to turn into services because they attract the wrong kind of staff, or that the IPR situation is wrong, or that they don't get good external business advice. All valid points I'm sure. But I wonder if one could make the argument that it is the whole model of centralised project funding for activities that are intended to transition into viable, long-term, self-sustaining businesses that is part of the problem. (Note: I don't think this applies to projects that are funded purely in the pursuit of knowledge). By that I mean that such funding tends to skew the market in rather unhelpful ways, not just for the projects in question but for everyone else - ultimately in ways that make it hard for viable business models to emerge at all.

There are a number of reasons for this - reasons that really did not become apparent to me until I started working for an organisation that can only survive by spending all its time worrying about whether its business models are viable.

Firstly, centralised funding tends to mean that ideas are not subject to market forces early enough - not just not subjected, but market forces are not even considered by those proposing/evaluating the projects. Often we can barely get people to use the results of project funding when we give them away for free - imagine if we actually tried to charge people for them!? The primary question is not, 'can I get user X or institution Y to pay for this?' but 'can I get the JISC to pay for this?' which is a very different proposition.

Secondly, centralised funding tends to support people (often very clever people) who can then cherry-pick good ideas and develop them without any concern for sustainable business-models, and who subsequently may or may not be in a position to support them long term, but who thus prevent others, who might develop something more sustainable, from even getting started.

Thirdly, the centrally-funded model contributes to a wider 'free-at-the-point-of-use' mindset where people simply are not used to thinking in terms of 'how much is it really costing to do this?' and 'what would somebody actually be prepared to pay for this?' and where there is little incentive to undertake a cost/benefit analysis or prepare a proper business case. As I've mentioned here before, I've been on the receiving end of many proposals under the UCISA Award for Excellence programme that were explicitly asked to assess their costs and benefits but who chose to treat staff time at zero cost simply because those staff were in the employ of the institutions anyway.

Now... before you all shout at me, I don't think market forces are the be-all and end-all of this and I think there are plenty of situations where services, particularly infrastructural services, are better procured centrally than by going out to the market. This post is absolutely not a rant that everything funded by the JISC is necessarily pants - far from it.

That said, my personal view is that Intute did not fall into that class of infrastructural service and that it was rightly subjected to an analysis of whether its costs outweighed its benefits. I wasn't involved in that analysis, so I can't really comment on it - I'm sure there is a debate to be had about how the 'benefits' were assessed and measured. But my suspicion is that if one had asked every UK HE institution to pay a subscription to Intute not many would have been willing to do so - were that the case, I presume that Intute would be exploring that model right now? That, it seems to me, is the ultimate test of viability - or at least one of them. As I mentioned before, one of the lessons here is the speed with which we, as a community, can react to the environmental changes around us and how we deal with the fall-out - which is as much about how the viability of business models changes over time as it is about technology.

I certainly don't think there are any easy answers.

Comparing Yahoo Directory and the eLib Subject Gateways (the fore-runners of Intute), which emerged at around the same time and which attempted to meet a similar need (see Lorcan Dempsey's recent post, Curating the web ...), it's interesting that the Yahoo offering has proved to be longer lasting than the subject gateways, albeit in a form that is largely hidden from view, supported (I guess) by an advertising- and paid-for-listings- based model, a route that presumably wasn't/isn't considered appropriate or sufficient for an academic service?

The Register reports that the UK government is calling for ideas on future 'identity' directions, UK.gov fishes for ID ideas:

Directgov has asked IT suppliers to come up with new thinking on identity verification.

The team, which is now within the Cabinet Office, has issued a pre-tender notice published in the Official Journal of the European Union, saying that it wants feedback on potential requirements for the public sector on all aspects of identity verification and authentication. This is particularly relevant to online and telephone channels, and the notice says the services include the provision of related software and computer services.

The notice itself is somewhat hard to find online - I have no idea why that should be! - but a copy is available from the Sell2Wales website.

Oddly, to me at least - perhaps I'm just naive? - the notice doesn't use the word 'open' once, a little strange since one might assume that this would be treated as part of the wider 'open government' agenda as it is in the US where a similar call resulted in the OpenID Foundation putting together a nice set of resources on OpenID and Open Government. In particular, their Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government whitepaper is worth a look:

Open government is more than just publishing government proceedings and holding public meetings. The real goal is increased citizen participation, involvement, and direction of the governing process itself. This mirrors the evolution of “Web 2.0” on the Internet—the dramatic increase in user-generated content and interaction on websites. These same social networking, blogging, and messaging technologies have the potential to increase the flow of information between governments and citizenry—in both directions. However, this cannot come at the sacrifice of either security or privacy. Ensuring that citizen/government interactions are both easy and safe is the goal of a new branch of Internet technology that has grown very rapidly over the past few years.

Many years ago now, back when I worked for UKOLN, I spent part of my time working on the JISC-funded Intute service (and the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) that went before it), a manually created catalogue of high-quality Internet resources. It was therefore with some interest that I read a retrospective about the service in the July issue of Ariadne. My involvement was largely with the technology used to bring together a pre-existing and disparate set of eLib 'subject gateways' into a coherent whole. I was, I suppose, Intute's original technical architect, though I doubt if I was ever formally given that title. Almost inevitably, it was a role that led to my involvement in discussions both within the service and with our funders (and reviewers) at the time about the value (i.e. the benefits vs the costs) of such a service - conversations that were, from my point of view, always quite difficult because they involved challenging ourselves about the impact of our 'home grown' resource discovery services against those being built outside the education sector - notably, but not exclusively, by Google :-). 

Today, Steve Hitchcock of Southampton posted his thoughts on the lessons we should draw from the history of Intute. They were posted originally to the jisc-repositories mailing list. I repeat the message, with permission and in its entirety, here:

I just read the obituary of Intute, and its predecessor JISC services, in Ariadne with interest and some sadness, as will others who have been involved with JISC projects over this extended period. It rightly celebrates the achievements of the service, but it is also balanced in seeking to learn the lessons for where it is now.

We must be careful to avoid partial lessons, however. The USP of Intute was 'quality' in its selection of online content across the academic disciplines, but ultimately the quest for quality was also its downfall:

"Our unique selling point of human selection and generation of descriptions of Web sites was a costly model, and seemed somewhat at odds with the current trend for Web 2.0 technologies and free contribution on the Internet. The way forward was not clear, but developing a community-generated model seemed like the only way to go."

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/joyce-et-al/

Unfortunately it can be hard for those responsible for defining and implementing quality to trust others to adhere to the same standards: "But where does the librarian and the expert fit in all of this? Are we grappling with new perceptions of trust and quality?" It seems that Intute could not unravel this issue of quality and trust of the wider contributor community. "The market research findings did, however, suggest that a quality-assurance process would be essential in order to maintain trust in the service". It is not alone, but it is not hard to spot examples of massively popular Web services that found ways to trust and exploit community.

The key to digital information services is volume and speed. If you have these then you have limitless opportunities to filter 'quality'. This is not to undermine quality, but to recognise that first we have to reengineer the information chain. Paul Ginsparg reengineered this chain in physics, but he saw early on that it would be necessary to rebuild the ivory towers:

"It is clear, however, that the architecture of the information data highways of the future will somehow have to reimplement the protective physical and social isolation currently enjoyed by ivory towers and research laboratories."

http://arxiv.org/macros/blurb.tex

It was common at that time in 1994 to think that the content on the emerging Web was mostly rubbish and should be swept away to make space for quality assured content. A senior computer science professor said as much in IEEE Computer magazine, and as a naive new researcher I replied to say he was wrong and that speed changes everything.

Clearly we have volume of content across the Web; only now are we beginning to see the effect of speed with realtime information services.

If we are to salvage something from Intute, as seems to be the aim of the article, it must be to recognise the relations on the digital information axis between volume, speed and quality, not just the latter, even in the context of academic information services.

Steve Hitchcock

Steve's comments were made in the context of repositories but his final paragraph struck a chord with me more generally, in ways that I'm struggling to put into words.

My involvement with Intute ended some years ago and I can't comment on its recent history but, for me, there are also lessons in how we recognise, acknowledge and respond to changes in the digital environment beyond academia - changes that often have a much larger impact on our scholarly practices than those we initiate ourselves. And this is not a problem just for those of us working on developing the component services within our environment but for the funders of such activities.

A very interesting blog post was published on the 100% Open website about 7 tactics and incentives for open innovation. It struck me how well these all apply to open source software projects. So I’ll discuss all 7 of them from the perspective of open source, but make sure you’ll also read the original post for the original, more generally applicable view on these tactics and incentives.

1. Share both Risks and Rewards

When participating in an open source project you are largely in the same boat as all the other contributors to the project, therefore sharing the risks among each other. If a release is delayed or major bugs are introduced in the software, everybody suffers. However, some open source licences allow you to add your own private rewards by building your own customization of the software without contributing it back to the project. It is a bad idea to do so because when you let your code deviate from the project’s code you always end up with more complex migration paths which makes it harder to keep profiting from the efforts of the community.

2. Tap into Intrinsic Incentives

Intrinsic incentives are extremely important for open source software projects. There is still a widespread misconception that open source software is being developed by hobbyists where there is no money involved. This is not the case, because a large majority of the code in open source software projects is being developed by people who are paid by their employers to do so. This is also true in the educational sector in the UK, where software projects are being fund by the likes of JISC and the research councils. Nevertheless, for any sustainable open source community intrinsic incentives are very important. For example in the Apache Software Foundation, when a contributor becomes a committer to an ASF project they personally become one and never as an employee of some company X. Being part of a community that builds cool software is just great and having a culture within the project that feeds into that is therefore extremely important. A nice illustration of this Dan Plink’s TED talk on motivation. He shows in a very powerful way that highly skilled people are not mainly motivated by money, but by being challenged and by the opportunity to develop a mastery.

3. Don’t Expect Something for Nothing

For an open source software project to be truely sustainable, external contributions and engagement from new participants are extremely important. Usually, a public mailing list or forum is the first entry point for potential contributors. Although it is likely that people first ask questions on these lists rather than answering them, in a healthy project all participants help out each other. This makes the project scalable and is one of the reasons why it does not necessarily takes a lot of time to open up a software projects to the outside: if you manage to engage new people they will help out others and that way a truly sustainable community can develop.

4. Ask Engaging Questions

People or companies that are involved in open source projects never have completely overlapping problems and therefore it is not always clear which solution is the most appropriate for all of them. Moreover, if you encounter a project that provides a lot of the functionality you need but not all of it, there are very effective mechanisms to discuss the features of the project. Mailing lists and forums are used widely to engage in discussion and find ways of merging features different people need. Of course, if you require a specific piece of functionality, it is up to you to build it and contribute it to the project. But discussing the requirements and problems of different people can lead to interesting insights that can be valuable to the whole project. Due to the distributed nature of open source software projects people with very different backgrounds will bring their own viewpoints, which can lead to more creative solutions and spark new ideas.

5. Build Business Empathy

Open source projects can thrive or be damaged by reputation just like businesses. The plea in the original post for an honest and human approach is very well applicable to open source projects. But in many cases it comes more natural to open source projects to have that approach because, as mentioned earlier, there is already a focus on individual contributions incorporated in the dna of many projects. For new projects or projects that are working towards sustainability it is important to define processes that support this approach and to fix it in a governance model document, so it is clear to everybody what they can expect from the project, thereby providing a more level playing field.

6. Target Quantity before Quality

This tactic is well-known in software where it is more commonly known as the ‘Release early, release often’ mantra. If you are active in a young open source software project that is still in its infancy, getting a release out is a very effective way of engaging new contributors and is therefore a huge opportunity to let your project grow to become sustainable. Releasing early makes the barrier to entry lower for new users, albeit that the first few releases will be of lower quality and contain less features. As long as this is clearly communicated to the (prospective) this need not be a problem but can help the project as a whole move forward more quickly.

7. Find Your Top 1%

In the original post the 100% open team explains that out of 100 users, there are usually only 10 who are really engaged and just 1 who will provide a substantial contribution. Although the percentages may vary, also in open source software projects it is very important to identify the users of today that are most likely to become the contributors of tomorrow. It is essential for any open source project to engage those users and try to have them contribute to the project and perhaps even become a committer to help achieving sustainability in the long run.

OSS Watch community development manager Gabriel Hanganu published an excellent briefing note recently, in which he explains how the sustainability lessons can be appied to research infrastructure. Gabriel’s analyis shows that a lot of the tactics and incentives for open innovation are also important in that space.

Open education seems to be getting some traction here in Utah. In addition to our recently launched Utah Open Textbooks project targeting high school science, I was very pleased to see open education generally, and the Open High School of Utah model specifically, recommended prominently in the Utah Advisory Commission to Optimize State Government’s Report to Governor Herbert issued last week. The Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative gets a mention also, although I don’t believe it has a website yet.

Education recommendations are included in Section 3. Quoting from throughout the report (emphases below are mine):

3. Leverage technology and existing resources in education to expand the use of technology in teaching and learning, utilizing open?source learning materials, and coordinating efforts to generate economies of scale.

3d. Expand the use of online textbooks

Details: Encourage participation in open-source or online textbooks and related materials to reduce costs to school districts and post-secondary education students. Support the Utah Student Association Open Textbook Initiative, which seeks to provide a common open textbook for Math 1050, with materials for additional core courses expected. The initiative requires a one-time investment of approximately $75,000 for administration and development of materials.

Impact: Combined school district savings could eventually be $1 to $2 million annually. Collectively, Utah’s higher education students could save $1 to $3 million annually.

3e. Expand online high school courses

Details: The Governor, along with the State Board of Education, should set a future goal of the number of high school courses to be delivered online by 2015 (e.g. 20%). The Governor, working with the State Board of Education, should evaluate the available online courses and delivery methods.

The Commission evaluated one model with great potential to deliver high-quality, online education with teacher-targeted “just in time and just on topic” assistance to students. The model gathers information that allows educators to know the capabilities of each student and to individualize learning to individual students’ strengths. Through technology, teachers could handle a higher number of students while providing higher-quality instruction to those students on a statewide basis. Consideration should be given to providing some courses in an online format only to reduce the need for specialized teachers.

Impact: Further analysis required. Online instruction should result in savings related to a reduced need for buildings, buses, and administration and a higher student-to-teacher ratio. The value of delivering high-quality courses to underserved areas of the State should also be evaluated.

Slowly, but surely…

Two weeks ago, Washington state representative Reuven Carlyle wrote a blog post about his vision for open education in the state of Washington, in which he referred at length to my recent Educause article, Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation.

A thoughtful constituent of Carlyle’s, Professor Amy Kinsel, professor of History at Shoreline Community College, took the time to pen a thoughtful, critical response to his post and my ideas specifically. I’d like to respond to several of her points here.

As you note, access to information is powerful, and government-supported institutions should not be in the business of restricting access to information. However, equal and open access to information is only a part of what is necessary to provide educational opportunity for everyone. You write, “We need to educate more people to higher levels.” But will educating more people to higher levels happen simply through opening the spigot of information and letting it flow?…. As an experienced educator, I know first-hand that education does not consist primarily of the transfer of information from books or professors to students. Access to information alone does not equal education…. Merely knowing ideas and information is not enough.

I wholly, completely agree with this statement. Access to a wealth of content, information, books, articles, and other resources is a necessary – but not sufficient – condition for learning. What we must not overlook in this statement is that access to content is a necessary condition for learning. While it would be inappropriate to suggest that access to content alone is sufficient, it would be equally irresponsible to overlook the critical role content plays in supporting learning.

Yesterday’s Chronicle included a story about Mirta Martin, dean of the Virginia State University business school:

Last year Ms. Martin became so frustrated from hearing stories about students who were performing poorly because they could not afford textbooks that she made a pledge that no needy student would go without a book…

The Chronicle story goes on to describe how Flat World Knowledge, a for-profit company that publishes openly licensed textbooks, has partnered with the VSU business school to insure that those students have access to all the content they need to succeed in their classes – including (of course) the option of free online access to all of FWK’s textbooks.

As I have said before, content is infrastructure – a critical piece of the teaching and learning puzzle we all need to be able to assume is freely available to everyone at very high quality. Once this kind of ubiquitous, high quality learning infrastructure exists,
student success will increase (as per Ms. Martin’s story), and the rate of innovation and experimentation in education will increase. Increasing the rate of innovation by providing necessary infrastructure is the best way to help desperately-needed breakthroughs in education to happen more quickly.

Wiley doesn’t like proprietary textbooks and advocates for open-source textbooks, presumably because of cost rather than an aversion to textbooks. For any introductory college course that presents a great deal of material that is new to students, assigning a pedagogically-sound textbook is essential to student success. This is especially true in an online course where reading is the primary method for conveying this material to students.

Yes, one problem I have with textbooks is their ridiculously absurd cost. In the Chronicle story I referenced above, Ms. Martin is quoted as saying “For our accounting books senior year, there’s nothing under $250.” The unjustifiably high cost of textbooks turns into access problems for students, which means they can’t complete assigned readings, etc. This is a serious problem.

But there are other problems with textbooks. For example, in many instances a textbook is out of date (that is, important new information has become available in the field which is not included in the textbook) before the book is even printed – yet alone used by students. Or consider the way that, once you’ve finally got your course planned and working, the publisher cancels the edition of the text you use and issues a new one (with no substantive changes) that still somehow requires you to spend a significant amount of time replanning your course…

But more importantly to me, as a scholar and educator, the copyrighted nature of a typical textbook prevents me from using it in all the ways I want to. For example, if I only need one chapter out of a book, can I (legally) make 100 copies of that section and hand it out to students? No. Can I (legally) directly change outdated parts of the text? No. Can I (legally) add my own material or other openly licensed material directly into the text? No. Over the years faculty have found workarounds for all of these issues (e.g., ignoring the law and photocopying anyway, assembling course readers at great expense in copyright clearance time and to student pocketbooks, etc.), but these are all workarounds. Yes, we’re used to them now, but when you step back and examine the issue critically there is no good reason we should have to work-around the content we teach with. Adopting openly licensed textbooks and other materials eliminates these and many other problems.

Like most educators, if I could find a good well-written open-source textbook, I would assign it. Yet high-quality open-source textbooks don’t exist in many disciplines, particularly in politically-contentious fields like History. Until pedagogically-sound open-source texts are available in our disciplines, faculty like me will continue to assign commercially-published textbooks.

This is, of course, an entirely legitimate concern. This is why initiatives like Washington’s Open Course Library are so desperately needed. Hopefully when the Open Course Library opens its doors next year, a much larger number of professors will have a top-notch alternative set of materials that are available for their students at no cost, that they can customize specifically for their needs, etc.

This year, if students who register for a U.S. History survey course at Shoreline buy used textbooks and sell them back to the bookstore, they will have an effective cost for a commercial text with full-color illustrations and maps and online study aids of $27.26. Because this textbook covers the entire three-quarter U.S. History survey curriculum, students who enroll in all three U.S. History courses, buy a used textbook, and sell it back to the bookstore will have an effective textbook cost of $9.09 per quarter. With a cost-effective commercial textbook option like this, I don’t need to ask my students to use a second- or third-rate open-source text.

I don’t believe anyone would recommend assigning a second or third-rate book regardless of its licensing status or cost.

I think the kind of alignment of courses Amy describes, which reduces the costs of materials for students, is absolutely commendable. In fields where there is currently no legitimate openly-licensed alternative, this may be one of the best scenarios. But wouldn’t it be even better if, for the same cost (e.g., a printed version of an open textbook from FWK costs $30) a student could get a brand new textbook, that s/he could highlight and annotate according to his/her own study habits (without having to try to decipher the highlighting of previous owners), and that s/he could keep at the end of term?

Many absolutely first rate textbooks are already available from FWK and CK-12, complete with teacher’s editions, problem sets, and other supplemental materials. Some openly licensed courses and course materials are created through grant and governmental funding, like the Washington Open Course Library. Others are created by individual faculty as labors of love, like Preston McAfee’s first edition of Introduction to Economic Analysis. Of course these books don’t appear ex nihilo, created without effort or incentive. So if you really wish an open textbook existed for your class, you have two choices – sit back and wait for one or go find some funding and write your own!

Wiley doesn’t like commercial learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard. It’s true that these are profit-making ventures and colleges pay fees to use them. If the cost of these systems is Wiley’s main concern, there are open-source alternatives available.

In today’s environment, cost is a real concern, although not the largest. And yes, open alternatives like Moodle and Sakai have existed for years now.

Yes, passwords in Blackboard restrict access to each classroom to students who are enrolled in the class, and student information and student postings are inaccessible to students after the end of the quarter. But why is this wrong? The online class disappears just like a face-to-face class ceases to exist when the instructor and the students no longer meet.

I think it’s a terrible shame that our face-to-face courses end after 15 weeks. Just when you’re finally learning everyone’s personalities and preferences, and students are starting to really master the material, it all ends. In a traditional, physically-bound classroom setting, this may be inescapable. But again, if we step back and critically reimagine teaching and learning in the context of modern technology, there is no a priori reason that courses must work in this manner.

What’s more, the “conceal-restrict-withhold-delete” process that Wiley criticizes is necessary and desirable for a number of good reasons that include student privacy rights and the responsibility of the instructor to create a safe learning environment for students. Frankly, I don’t see how a different approach would be consistent with federal law and with appropriate classroom pedagogy. Students may share their own personal information and classroom work as they see fit, but a college may not. Not only would doing so be illegal, it would not help students learn. In a “thriving community of learning,” students explore ideas, voice opinions, and try out arguments. All of these things are a bit scary and ought to be done in a classroom environment that feels safe to the students. Students need to feel confident and secure in their classrooms in order to risk stretching their minds by asking the “dumb” questions that show they are thinking or voicing the “weird” ideas that show they are learning. What sort of freedom of expression and thought would students engage in if they were worried that anyone in the blogosphere could see their names and read what they wrote forever? I’d have at least half or even more of the class opting out of posting online if they thought their posts would be open to the world.

Amy and I agree that no faculty member can legally post student work in public. And we agree that students need to feel safe in order for them to engage substantively in conversations and other activities. However, in several years of inviting my students to carry out discussions on the public internet and inviting them to post their assignments to the public internet (rather than submitting them to me privately), I’ve only ever had one student decline.

I explain to my students that discussions on the open internet can still be framed as formative, learning conversations and not as one’s final opinion. I tell stories about comments and perspectives that have been shared by people from other cultures and other countries (folks coming from the public internet outside our formal class participants) that have enriched previous class conversations. I tell stories about electronic newsletters linking to particularly thoughtful student essays, engaging an even more diverse group of people in the conversation and building students’ professional reputations. And I remind students that, at the end of the day, many of the jobs they will take will require them to frame and publicly present their ideas (often their ideas in progress!) in a thoughtful way that their peers can engage with. They need to learn how to disagree with someone respectfully (a skill sorely lacking in today’s society), and they need to learn how to take the harsh criticism that sometimes comes. And the principle of transparency improving quality comes into play, too – knowing the whole class is going to see their homework gets most students to turn it up a notch.

My observations (and students’ comments back to me) indicate that students’ experiences with engaging in content-related conversations publicly, sharing and refining their “best current thinking” while drawing on all the resources of the network (including the people in the network), are incredibly valuable for students. For legal reasons I always present this public path as an option to my students, but my experience has been that almost everyone takes it – and is glad they did.

Wiley conceives of online instruction as easily and cheaply expandable. This differs significantly from the reality of my online teaching experience. Wiley’s contention that online teaching can be easily scaled up “to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand” for higher education would be plausible if education really did consist of transferring information from textbooks and faculty to students. But since an education worthy of the name consists of learning, not information transfer, I submit that Wiley is wrong to suggest that online instruction is a cheap solution to higher education’s capacity and funding shortfalls. Certainly, there are no physical barriers to adding as many students as possible to the online courses I teach. But as a practical matter, making a course open to all comers will mean there are far too many students in the online classroom for critical thinking skills to be developed. If I were responsible not for 25-30 students per online class but 60 or even 100 students, I would need to change how I teach.

I don’t believe I’ve ever suggested that scaling meaningful learning opportunities to large numbers of people will be easy or cheap. However, I do contend that it is absolutely possible if – as Amy indicates – we are willing to change the way we teach. “Blended” or “hybrid” models of instruction provide one example. Take the college professor who teaches three sections of a course. Rather than stand and deliver the same lecture three times a day, three times per week, these lectures can be pre-recorded for students to watch online before coming to class. The nine hours the professor previously spent giving the same lectures over again can now be dedicated to serving the individual needs of more students, answering their questions, etc. This one change results in a large increase in the number of students we can serve with our course offerings.

Other innovative uses of technology can enhance this effect. For example, take a scenario in which students submit their work online and some of this work can be automatically scored. Student performance and grades can be tracked and analyzed at the item / learning outcome level, and this information can be accessed by teachers through rudimentary data dashboards. Using these data teachers can make informed decisions about how to allocate their (new surplus) time interacting with and supporting students’ learning. Not every student will need help every week, and knowing who doesn’t need help this week frees up more time to help students who do need help this week.

This combination of online media and data-driven teaching is not pie-in-the-sky techno-dream, but a concrete strategy that can be implemented today. For example, the Open High School of Utah operates on these principles.

Online education is a useful tool for reaching out to students, but it requires adequate funding. In this necessary discussion of how to make good on the core value of providing access to educational opportunity for everyone, I would first carefully examine how Washington’s colleges and universities are funded and look for ways to stabilize this funding. The current system of ever-declining state support and ever-increasing tuition rates is not sustainable and is already failing to make educational opportunities available for all students. Until we tackle the funding problem, talk of reaching additional students through online instruction will not result in additional capacity, additional access, or additional opportunity. I’d love to teach a second online class this fall, but even a dedicated public servant like me can’t do it for free.

Funding models are an important topic to discuss, and the cost of curriculum materials should be an important part of those conversations. Open educational resources have much to add to the discussion of affordability, increased access, and improved success. Pedagogical models are also important to discuss. When we’re willing to change the way we teach, we can leverage technology and data thoughtfully to increase the number of students we are capable of serving appropriately.

Educause, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges, and other organizations are currently sponsoring a program called Next Generation Learning Challenges. Three of the first four areas they have identified for research are open educational resources, blended learning, and learning analytics – the three themes I have discussed above. The fourth is Web 2.0 engagement, and there are ample opportunities here to further engage and interact with students if we are willing to thoughtfully change the way we teach.

In summary, I believe that where high quality open educational resources are available we should be adopting them. Where none are available we should be supporting their creation. High quality content is critical infrastructure that education cannot succeed without. When this infrastructure is too expensive (as is currently the case), innovation is stifled. When this infrastructure is free and open, innovation will quickly multiply.

As Amy points out, information provision is not education. While we should work diligently to increase free and open access to the content infrastructure, we must never lose sight of our equal responsibility to innovate atop this new infrastructure. By definition, innovation necessitates a willingness to teach differently – thoughtfully leveraging the capabilities of the myriad social, analytic, and other technologies available to us. When we can honestly say that we are using all available tools to the best of our individual abilities, we can honestly say that we are fulfilling the sacred trust society and our individual students have placed in us as teachers.

...revisited for me that is!

Last week I attended an invite-only meeting at the JISC offices in London, notionally entitled a "JISC IE Technical Review" but in reality a kind of technical advisory group for the JISC and RLUK Resource Discovery Taskforce Vision [PDF], about which the background blurb says:

The morning session felt slightly weird (to me), a strange time-warp back to the kinds of discussions we had a lot of as the UK moved from the eLib Programme, thru the DNER (briefly) into what became known (in the UK) as the JISC Information Environment - discussions about collections and aggregations and metadata harvesting and ... well, you get the idea.

In the afternoon we were split into breakout groups and I ended up in the one tasked with answering the question "how do we make better websites in the areas covered by the Resource Discovery Taskforce?", a slightly strange question now I look at it but one that was intended to stimulate some pragmatic discussion about what content providers might actually do.

Paul Walk has written up a general summary of the meeting - the remainder of this post focuses on the discussion in the 'Making better websites' afternoon breakout group and my more general thoughts.

Our group started from the principles of Linked Data - assign 'http' URIs to everything of interest, serve useful content (both human-readable and machine-processable (structured according to the RDF model)) at those URIs, and create lots of links between stuff (internal to particular collections, across collections and to other stuff). OK... we got slightly more detailed than that but it was a fairly straight-forward view that Linked Data would help and was the right direction to go in. (Actually, there was a strongly expressed view that simply creating 'http' URIs for everything and exposing human-readable content at those URIs would be a huge step forward).

Then we had a discussion about what the barriers to adoption might be - the problems of getting buy-in from vendors and senior management, the need to cope with a non-obvious business model (particularly in the current economic climate), the lack of technical expertise (not to mention semantic expertise) in parts of those sectors, the endless discussions that might take place about how to model the data in RDF, the general perception that Semantic Web is permanently just over the horizon and so on.

And, in response, we considered the kinds of steps that JISC (and its partners) might have to undertake to build any kind of political momentum around this idea.

To cut a long story short, we more-or-less convinced ourselves out of a purist Linked Data approach as a way forward, instead preferring a 4 layer model of adoption, with increasing levels of semantic richness and machine-processability at each stage:

1. expose data openly in any format available (.csv files, HTML pages, MARC records, etc.)
2. assign 'http' URIs to things of interest in the data, expose it in any format available (.csv files, HTML pages, etc.) and serve useful content at each URI
3. assign 'http' URIs to things of interest in the data, expose it as XML and serve useful content at each URI
4. assign 'http' URIs to things of interest in the data and expose Linked Data (as per the discussion above).

These would not be presented as steps to go thru (do 1, then 2, then 3, ...) but as alternatives with increasing levels of semantic value. Good practice guidance would encourage the adoption of option 4, laying out the benefits of such an approach, but the alternatives would provide lower barriers to adoption and offer a simpler 'sell' politically.

The heterogeneity of data being exposed would leave a significant implementation challenge for the aggregation services attempting to make use of it and the JISC (and partners) would have to fund some pretty convincing demonstrators of what might usefully be achieved.

One might characterise these approaches as 'data.glam.uk' (echoing 'data.gov.uk' but where 'glam' is short for 'galleries, libraries, archives and museums') and/or Digital UK (echoing the pragmatic approaches being successfully adopted by the Digital NZ activity in New Zealand).

Despite my reservations about the morning session, the day ended up being quite a useful discussion. That said, I remain somewhat uncomfortable with its outcomes. I'm a purest at heart and the 4 levels above are anything but pure. To make matters worse, I'm not even sure that they are pragmatic. The danger is that people will adopt only the lowest, least semantic, option and think they've done what they need to do - something that I think we are seeing some evidence of happening within data.gov.uk. 

Perhaps even more worryingly, having now stepped back from the immediate talking-points of the meeting itself, I'm not actually sure we are addressing a real user need here any more - the world is so different now than it was when we first started having conversations about exposing cultural heritage collections on the Web, particularly library collections - conversations that essentially pre-dated Google, Google Scholar, Amazon, WorldCat, CrossRef, ... the list goes on. Do people still get agitated by, for example, the 'book discovery' problem in the way they did way back then? I'm not sure... but I don't think I do. At the very least, the book 'discovery' problem has largely become an 'appropriate copy' problem - at least for most people? Well, actually, let's face it... for most people the book 'discovery' and 'appropriate copy' problems have been solved by Amazon!

I also find the co-location of libraries, museums and archives, in the context of this particular discussion, rather uncomfortable. If anything, this grouping serves only to prolong the discussion and put off any decision making?

Overall then, I left the meeting feeling somewhat bemused about where this current activity has come from and where it is likely to go.

Creative Commons published an interview today with the Open High School of Utah’s Director, DeLaina Tonks. DeLaina does an excellent job describing the school and talking about the impact of OER on education and learning.

Congrats to OHSU on all their recent press and the great things happening there!

A couple of upcoming UK identity events worth highlighting...

Firstly, FAM10, which is being held in Cardiff on the 5th and 6th October:

Some of the areas that delegates can look forward to hearing about this year include:

• Detailed overview of the progress made in the school's sector to adopt federated access management;
• Interfederation use cases, including links to the Government Gateway to allow parental access to schools data;
• Detailed technical information for advanced programmers;
• Update on JISC Services for accounting and statistical mnagement;
• Updates on identity management, user management and licence management;
• International speakers on areas such as Kantara, Shibboleth and Gartner;
• Service updates from the UK federation.

Secondly, the Internet Identity Workshop - Europe, which is being held a few days later in London on the 11th October:

Congratulations to Amy Pace, who teaches science at OHSU, for receiving the Presidential Math and Science Teachers Award!

David Porter asks for research about the sustainability of open educational resources. Here is a list of our articles that appeared in peer-reviewed journals last year on the topic of sustainability of OER (with links to publicly available versions in the BYU Institutional Repository):

A Sustainable Model for OpenCourseWare Development
Johansen, Justin and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2353
Keywords: OpenCourseWare; sustainability; open educational resources; development; cost
Description/Abstract: The purposes of this study were to (a) determine the cost of converting BYU Independent Study’s e-learning courses into OpenCourseWare, (b) assess the impact of opening those courses on paid enrollment in the credit-bearing versions of the courses, and (c) use these data to judge whether or not an OpenCourseWare program could be financially self-sustaining over the long-term without grant monies or other subsidies. The findings strongly suggest that the BYU Independent Study model of publishing OpenCourseWare is financially self-sustaining, allowing the institution to provide a significant public good while generating new revenue and meeting its ongoing financial obligations.

In addition to reporting original research, the literature review for this study includes the following new data on sustainability:

“The OpenLearn Initiative at Open University in the United Kingdom (OUUK) was the best comparable program to use when considering the impact opening courses could have on BYU IS. The OUUK has approximately 200,000 course enrollments and 130,000 students each year, similar in scale to BYU IS. In two years of offering course samples, 7,800 enrollments have come from people who used the “enroll now” button in the OUUK’s course samples to convert to a fully paid enrollment (A. Lane, personal communication, December 5, 2008). This means that approximately 1.95% of the OUUK’s enrollment over the past two years has come through conversions from free OCW users into paid course enrollments. Approximately 33% of those conversions were people who were new to the OUUK system, meaning that approximately 0.64% of OUUK’s entire enrollment for a given year were new users that converted to paid enrollment from a free course sample. That equates to an average of approximately 1,280 new paying students converted through course samples each year. Similarly, the Open University of the Netherlands reported that 18% of OCW users were “inspired to purchase an academic course” based on their interactions with OUNL OCW (Eshuis, 2009). The University of California-Irvine (UCI) also launched an OCW offering in November 2006 with a “click to enroll” feature. They report that their OCW site has consistently generated more site traffic and more sales leads than any other form of advertising (K. Tam, personal communication, June 4, 2009).”

A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2330
Keywords textbooks; open source; flat world; college
Description/Abstract: Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model.

Free: Why Authors are Giving Books Away on the Internet
Hilton, John and Wiley, David
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/2154
Keywords: open educational resources; online technology; digital publishing
Description/Abstract: With increasing frequency, authors in academic and non-academic fields are releasing their books for free digital distribution. Anecdotal evidence suggests that exposure to both authors and books increases when books are available as free downloads, and that print sales are not negatively affected. For this study we interviewed ten authors to determine their perceptions of the effect free digital distribution has on the impact and sales of their work. In addition, we examined the sales data of two books over a two year period of time, in which one book was freely available for the second year. All of the individuals we surveyed felt free digital downloads increased the distribution and impact of their book. None of the authors felt that print sales were negatively affected. Data from our book sale comparison suggest that in the case we studied, free digital distribution did not negatively affect sales.

John Hilton’s dissertation also made strides in the area of sustainability:

“Freely Ye Have Received, Freely Give” (Matthew 10:8): How Giving Away Religious Digital Books Influences The Print Sales of Those Books
Hilton, John
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3433.pdf
Keywords: open educational resources, e-books, open access, open culture, free books, free e-books
Abstract: Lack of access prevents many from benefiting from educational resources. Digital technologies now enable educational resources, such as books, to be openly available to those with access to the Internet. This study examined the financial viability of a religious publisher’s putting free digital versions of eight of its books on the Internet. The total cost of putting these books online was $940.00. Over a 10-week period these books were downloaded 102,256 times and print sales of these books increased 26%. Comparisons with historical book sales and sales of comparable titles suggest a positive but modest connection between this increase and the online availability of the free books. This dissertation may be downloaded for free at http://etd.byu.edu.

As for OER impact, I’ll quote a few paragraphs from a book chapter I just finished drafting.

From Sharing to Adopting

The first decade of work in open educational resources involved laying the groundwork of copyright licensing and demonstration projects. Before anything else could be done, it had to be legally possible to share teaching and learning materials, and we had to demonstrate that sharing these materials would not put universities out of business. While this infrastructure work has largely succeeded (e.g., Creative Commons licenses have been both widely adopted and upheld in court), infrastructure is typically deployed in order to be used – not just for the sake of deployment. Consequently, emphasis in the field of open educational resources is beginning to move from sharing OER to adopting OER. Like the first decade of work in OER, this first involves helping adoptions happen, and then demonstrating that they do no harm educationally.

Flat World Knowledge (FWK) was not the first organization to produce Creative Commons-licensed textbooks, but they seem to be the first to take widespread adoption of their materials seriously. As a for-profit publisher, FWK provides their complete textbooks online for free under a CC license and sells copies of their textbooks in other formats (e.g., paperback, audiobook, etc.). By employing a full-time sales team and working in harmony with the traditional university textbook adoption process, FWK has gotten their open textbooks in front of tens of thousands of students. According to a FWK press release:

This Fall [2009] semester, 38,000 college students at 350 colleges are enrolled to utilize Flat World textbooks, up from only 1,000 in Spring 2009 at 30 colleges. The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82% cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class. “We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While statements about how many courses an OCW project shares can be impressive, statements like Frank’s that demonstrate a concrete, positive benefit on learners begin to indicate the real power of open educational resources.

Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, a collection of complete, online courses licensed as open educational resources, has gone well beyond showing that OER do no harm. In a study authored by Lovett, Meyer, and Thille (2008), OLI demonstrated that OER can be used both to decrease the amount of time necessary to learn statistics and improve student learning:

During the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 studies, we collected empirical data about the instructional effectiveness of the OLI-Statistics course in stand-alone mode, as compared to traditional instruction. In both of these studies, in-class exam scores showed no significant difference between students in the stand-alone OLI-Statistics course and students in the traditional instructor-led course. In contrast, during the Spring 2007 study, we explored an accelerated learning hypothesis, namely, that learners using the OLI course in hybrid mode will learn the same amount of material in a significantly shorter period of time with equal learning gains, as compared to students in traditional instruction. In this study, results showed that OLI-Statistics students learned a full semester’s worth of material in half as much time and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction over a full semester.

The Open High School of Utah was the first accredited school in the world to commit itself to using open educational resources exclusively across its entire curriculum. OHSU opened for 9th grade in 2009-2010 (with additional grades opening in subsequent years), and demonstrated conclusively in its first year that OER can support learning effectively in a high school context. In the three core areas measured by the state’s ninth grade Criterion Referenced Tests (i.e., English 9, Algebra I, and Earth Systems Science), the percentage of OHSU students achieving proficiency was well above state averages.

I’ll also mention our new Utah Open Textbooks project, which just launched a few weeks ago – the demonstration of impact from that project will be substantial.

Now, more work can be done, but to say that there hasn’t been any forward progress in the last year is disappointing. I think we’re making very reasonable progress, but that may just be my cheery optimism coming through. =)

Back in 2008 I helped define the technical requirements for the UK OER Programme .  We were very keen to have as minimal technical requirements as possible so that we can find out what choices people make, for example, decisions about their metadata, and we wanted to see how people use different platforms, as individuals and within teams.

As we described in the last IE blogpost on OER (May 2010) the non-prescriptive approach has allowed us to monitor organic emerging trends. For example, the Key Lessons of the evaluation and synthesis report states: “There is a clear model emerging of resources being deposited in a local repository (institutional or subject centre) where trust and community engagement can be built, then surfaced through syndication to general open repositories such as JorumOpen, Merlot, and to third-party sites such as iTunesU, YouTube, flickr, scribd, slideshare”

There is much more in the synthesis report section on technical and hosting issues and the detail can be found in John Robertson’s excellent summaries of technology and descriptive choices.

There’s a lot to absorb from the OER Programme Phase 1, and more to explore. Here are some issues that I think might benefit from from further work:

• Rights – how effectively are creative commons licences being used, are they being accompanied by attribution information, are they being used by machine services to help find and filter content?
• Platforms – what’s the mix of institutionally- JISC- and commercially- managed services that best support the range of OERs produced within the UK FE/HE community?
• Aggregation – how is the distributed content drawn back together, by who, for what purpose? Will people use search to source content that is then packaged into e-textbooks, courses, journals, wikis and blogs?
• Data model – will content be embedded, rendered, mirrored, copied? Do we want or need to track it? Is the virtuous circle of use, reuse, feedback an idealised process rather than a reality?
• Scope and scale – how far do we need to zoom out to find the most effective points of critical mass for presenting content? Should we only focus on open resources? Is granularity an issue for aggregation and resource discovery?
• Curation and sustainability – how do we sustain subject collections not owned by individual institutions? What needs preserving? Who pays for the long-term hosting?

These questions are being explored by so many people it’s impossible to summarise in a blog post. There is some really useful work done by Lisa Rogers about discovering OERs through RSS and APIs.  Brian Lamb’s vision for OER, illustrated in his Open Contempt talk (audio available) includes presenting syndicated content in wiki-stype interfaces, blending open assets into more packaged experiences for the end user. Jorum is exploring issues around hosting open collections, such as rss export and import, collections policy and licensing. The OER Phase 2 projects will soon be announced, and particularly relevant to these issues will be the Strand Ci “Thematic Collections” projects, who will be using aggregation approaches to making the most of existing OERs. I’ll be taking a keen interest in how the work of the JISC Resource Discovery Task Force can provide some answers for effective release and sharing of OERs. Licensing and rights are an important part of the jigsaw, and JISC is discussing with Creative Commons where we can usefully collaborate, for example with DiscoverEd search. Meanwhile the Learning Registry project in the US  is exploring similar issues on a large scale, and are using a very open ideas development model which means we’ll be able to learn from and with them.

Over the coming months I’ll be looking at how best to draw together the ideas and activities in this area, and I’m keen to hear from you about what you most want to know or share. Please email me, a.thomas @ jisc.ac.uk , contact me on skype amber_thomas , or talk to me on twitter @ambrouk .

Amber

In Norse mythology it’s predicted that the final days of the world will see a supernatural wolf called Sköll swallow the sun before helping to kill Odin, the mightiest of the Gods. In a move that will surprise no ancient Vikings, Oracle – the gigantic database corporation that up swallowed Sun Microsystems – has made a wide-ranging patent and copyright infringement complaint (pdf) against the mighty Google Inc. that may or may not indicate that the world will soon end.

The complaint concerns the use of Java-related technologies in Google’s Android mobile Linux platform, and the details are ugly indeed. Ever since Sun released Java back in 1995, they (and now new owners of the Java IP Oracle) have been looking for ways to make some money off it. Java was intended to provide a solution to the problem of platform fragmentation – the unfortunate situation that means software developers have to write many differing versions of their code to cater for all the different varieties of computing environment out there (Macs, Windows, Unix etc). Sun’s Java provided a layer of virtualisation, so that in theory you could write your Java code once and have it run anywhere, confident that the virtualisation layer (or ‘virtual machine’) on each system would handle the complexities of translating your program for use on the local hardware.

It didn’t help that the technology grew in ways that Sun had not really predicted – seeing far more adoption on the server than in the client area at which it was initially targeted. When mobile phones and set top boxes began to become more powerful and able to run consumer software, Sun launched a ‘Micro Edition’ (ME) of Java that was intended to coalesce this massively fragmented market. This ought to have given Sun a strong, commercialisable position as gatekeeper between software developers and a wide spectrum of hardware platforms, but in the event the technology was not equal to the vision and developers still needed to tweak Java ME software to run efficiently on each platform, causing much woe and despondency. Nevertheless, the mobile market remained Sun’s core focus in the struggle to wring money out of Java. At the same time, Sun was positioning itself as an open source-friendly company, and was therefore receiving quite a lot of pressure from the open source community to put its money where its mouth was and release Java under an open source licence. In 2006, when Sun finally did release Java as free software, the strategy to monetise mobile was still very clear in their licensing choices.

The standard edition of Java – designed to run on desktop computers and servers – was released under the GNU GPL with the so-called ‘Classpath Exception’. This was a licence created by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project to cover their own free software implementation of the core Java-compatible class libraries (essentially toolkits of functionality for building complex applications). The exception meant that you could use the GPL-licensed libraries to build your applications without having the copyleft requirements of the GPL transmit to your own code. However for the ‘Micro’ edition of Java, Sun used a dual licensing model, leaving out the exception from the GPL version and selling commercial licences for device manufacturers and developers who wanted to write mobile software which was not compelled to be GPL.

Thus, when Google decided it wished to use Java as the development language for software on their eagerly anticipated mobile Linux platform Android, one could argue that it should – finally – have been a huge payday for Sun. However it was not to be. For whatever reason, Google did not want to go down the road of licensing and mandating the use of Java ME. Instead, they took an open source implementation of Java called Apache Harmony and made some variations to it of their own. First they created their own virtual machine called Dalvik, which ran a different kind of code to a standard Java virtual machine (a tool in the Android development kit converts standard Java ‘byte-code’ to the new Android format). They also added many new libraries to support more modern functionality such as Bluetooth and the 3D graphical acceleration technology OpenGL. Everyone – except Sun – was happy. Developers did not need to buy commercial Java ME licences from Sun but could still use the Java skills they had developed over the last decade. Google did not have to rely on another company to mediate their relationship with developers and handset manufacturers. Sun had lost out again. Perhaps their previous highly-publicised love affair with open source meant that they could not easily start suing a competitor over a piece of open source software? Finally in early 2010 a financially embarrassed Sun was acquired by Oracle.

Oracle itself has some open source credentials – they run a proprietary/open dual licensing model for the product Berkeley DB. However the majority of their business is unashamedly closed source and therefore ever since they acquired the Java IP with Sun there has been much speculation that they would come after Google over Android and Dalvik. The complaint that has finally emerged is a wrathful document indeed, accusing Google of wilfully infringing on Sun/Oracle’s patents and copyright and seeking the seizure of all infringing devices, code and even advertising materials. Due to what they see as the egregious cheekiness of the infringement, Oracle want punitive triple damages.

What makes this case interesting – apart from the enormity of the two combatants – is the range of the counts. Along with seven fairly generic technology patents dealing with program compilation and execution, Oracle are also alleging copyright infringement. This would normally imply – in the case of software – that Oracle believes that Google (and quite possibly Apache Harmony) have incorporated verbatim sections of their code in their own products. Here, though, it’s hard to see how that could be the case. As an open source project Harmony’s source has been available for the world to see for many years, and one might have expected any literal code inclusion to have been noticed and acted upon a long time ago. As for the parts added by Google, it seems extremely unlikely that a company with Google’s resources would risk any kind of ‘code contamination’. Dalvik has been widely reported to have used ‘clean room’ reimplementation in its creation – meaning that no-one with any experience of (in this case) Java’s internals would be allowed to contribute any code to the project. The only point of connection between the original and the new code in a clean room reimplementation is the specification – the detailed but high-level description of how the software should operate. Could Oracle be suing over the use of the specification?

Oracle’s complaint says this:

38. The Java platform contains a substantial amount of original material (including
without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) that is copyrightable
subject matter under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.

39. Without consent, authorization, approval, or license, Google knowingly, willingly,
and unlawfully copied, prepared, published, and distributed Oracle America’s copyrighted work,
portions thereof, or derivative works and continues to do so. Google’s Android infringes Oracle
America’s copyrights in Java and Google is not licensed to do so.

…so specifications are explicitly listed as a variety of copyright work Oracle considers itself to hold in Java. This is of course true – specifications are copyright works as they are original and complex. The documents themselves are clearly ownable and their owners rightly get peeved if people copy and distribute them without permission. Here’s another quote from the Java Specification Participation Agreement – the agreement which allows third parties to get involved with defining and implementing new parts of Java:

For any Specification produced under a new JSR, the Spec Lead for such JSR shall offer to grant a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable license under its licensable copyrights in and patent claims covering the Specification (including rights licensed to the Spec Lead pursuant to Section 4.A and 4.C) to anyone who wishes to create and/or distribute an Independent Implementation of the Spec.

(JSRs are Java Specification Requests – basically descriptions of new features). Taking the language of the complaint along with the language of the participation agreement, it seems quite possible that Oracle are going to argue that any implementation of their specification is a derivative work of that specification and therefore needs a licence from them. This kind of copyright action – essentially claiming a high-level copyright in the design of the technology – is controversial and difficult to win. The more abstract the entity for which you are trying to claim copyright ownership, the harder it is to show indisputable infringement. Verbatim code copying is fairly easy to spot and demonstrate; the duplication of structures and interfaces is harder to demonstrate and is always open to arguments that there is no substantial relationship between the design and the implementation.

Of course, it may be that Oracle does have evidence of more concrete low-level copyright infringement, despite my personal instinct that that is unlikely. However if they will be arguing on the difficult basis of ’specification infringement’ I have to wonder why. Is it a plan to bolster a set of patents they are unsure about? Somewhat selfishly part of me hopes that the case will play out publicly and not be settled behind closed doors, if only to clarify this controversial area of copyright.