IT

As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. The medium is far from perfect.

The experience with OpenCourseWare illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of open online education. Heralded as making all MIT courses “open” to the world, much remains to be achieved if that promise is to be fully realized. A big surprise to those who conceived OCW was learning that other professors routinely distribute proprietary materials which would have to be laboriously duplicated or scrubbed out of the public version. At variance with the initial headline, this causes OpenCouseWare to be rather different from the internal one (run on Sonwalkar's Stellar) used by MIT students.

OCW does little to serve the needs of professors or students enrolled at MIT. How could it do better? Advancement at all levels including even of students towards graduation could be linked to improvements made to OCW. Every student could be required to scrub and improve at least some content and tutor a student not enrolled at MIT. Teaching a subject develops a mastery that is as important as sampling from a virtually limitless intellectual buffet. Promotion could then be based directly on the global success of one's output.

However, greatly improving the quality of free education would eventually threaten the academy. The advancement and compensation its faculty is based on publication in fee based journals. While making those articles costless and easily to adapt is already increasing access to and vigor of research, it does so at the expense of those who can then be quickly replaced after having long labored to climb up and heap upon the pinnacles of their domain. Those who materially benefit from providing views from intellectual summits have to be motivated very strongly to make those vistas free - both costless and able to be evolved at will.

So, there is little reason to hope that change will come solely from within the existing institutions, even MIT. Just as wiki software structures the interactions of Wikpedians, new software will be needed to support the processes that help to create a global educational machine. (OCW publishes to .PDF files which are particularly inappropriate for collaboration because they need to be converted into a freely modifiable form before even one small improvement can be made. (cf. New York Times article heralding OCW)

What do collaborative systems still lack? Wikis have only very rough mechanisms to prevent changes that degrade articles. There need to be much better processes to structure and weigh evidence. They also do not directly compensate professionals to participate in an freely modifiable collaborative setting where peers compete fairly to create views accessible to all. Such shortcomings preserve the role of the faculty savant but restrain the development of a global mind. Is that really desirable?

Leaders need to be compensated in order to participate. Tying organizational advancement to the creation of excellent content can motivate employees but still would not tear down barriers between diverse organizations and independent persons. A collaborative environment should also encourage recursively breaking down the units of contribution and compensation. Ultimately, individuals should not be dependent upon institutions or salaries.

Despite the importance of ensuring that content is free to be modified, there are no good ways to separate this critical freedom from the meaning of "'free' as in free beer" to quote from the apostle of free software, Richard Stallman. The intractability of this problem suggests that the pendulum of "open source" thought will swing right. For the foreseeable future, human content creators will need ownership rights to control access and demand payment. As long as the system allows competition and freedom to modify, very good content that is costless, or at least very affordable, will diffuse (co-author, bbx) quickly. Restricting the duration of copyright and setting low tolls will encourage others to build upon a gateway and thereby increase its value. The system must ensure that one can always create links to disputes, restatements and questions. Communities of thought should always be permitted to develop unless they pose threats to personal safety. Content which is already free in both senses of the word will be improved by recognizing ownership rights.

So authors need to be able to own copyrighted pieces and there needs be an integral system of micro-payments to motivate even very small contributions. Authors (including people with questions) might pay for editing. Editors might pay to take over a copyright. There may or may not be charges, or such tolls could be guaranteed to be low or of limited duration. This would encourage the development of dominant views yet these will always remain assailable. A preponderance of evidence accumulated by individuals who labor and speculate on the prevailing order may deconstruct it from within. They could also build a competing view. If an author charges excessive rent, others will re-write it and lower the price.

Challenges will always be allowed because dissenters will be able to create markup tags which become prominent according to the merit recognized by the community. This ensures that there will be freedom to modify. The original author will often negotiate to incorporate the changes that the tags suggest. Frequently, the original author will lose interest and be bought out by the owners of derivative content. They may make the original work costless in order to draw traffic into more economically vigorous properties. Thus older contributions would become trailheads that feed traffic to the budding branches where most growth and economic exchange occurs.

Of course, an original contributor whose property has been developed mostly by others into an attractive destination could charge unfair rents. The more they are overpriced, the more quickly such portals would be replaced by rewriting to circumvent copyright. In general, contributors would only be able to earn income by continuously forging ahead and keeping the knowledge base consistent.

Thus significant investments will be required to reach the developing parts of the open mind. However, the cost will surely be less than universities charge today because there will be vastly less overhead. The cost will usually be quite modest compared with the value of one's time and the entry points will be accessible from anywhere to anyone.

One might think of the tolls as "pay to play". Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, there would naturally arise equity and options markets. One could wager that a dissident view will rise and that a dominant one will be discredited. There would necessarily be people who spread falsehoods, knowingly and not. The untruths will be highly vulnerable if others can bet on exposing them. This will not prevent mass delusions from persisting sometimes for long periods. It may be unappealing that those with greatest access will remain those with the greatest wealth, but it has ever been thus. Fools will be quickly parted from their money and wiser for it. The man of economic needs cannot be divorced from the man of intellectual aspirations. The closer the marriage, the better it will be for both.

Software engineers interested in helping to specify or implement a major revision of wikis are encouraged to contact the author.

State of Collaboration in Software (2005)

GNU.org