17.1 Content is infrastructure  (Page 6/10)

8. david wiley - october 6th, 2007 at 11:02 am

Ken, great questions! Let’s see what I can make of them…

To help ensure that “content” infrastructure is of high quality, functioning to enable rather than constrain education and innovation, how might we think about resourcing “content infrastructure” in a sustainable manner?

I think your discussion of taxes, tolls, and volunteers is quite interesting! I’m not sure that tolls will be possible in the open content world, however. To implement a toll on a road, you generally either (a) forbid traffic unless they pay the toll (this amounts to commercial content) or you (b) levy a toll on certain kinds of traffic like big trucks (this amounts to discrimination against certain users or uses of content). While discrimination is prevalent today in the open content world (e.g., use of the CC-NC clause), we should be planning for a future in which this discrimination doesn’t occur. So perhaps our long-term sustainability strategy should focus mostly on taxes and volunteers.

In reality, taxes pay for the development and heavy maintenance of roads. Volunteers keep in-tact roads looking neat and tidy, but volunteers neither build new roads nor fix major structural problems (e.g., fill potholes). I think that for sufficient quality, quantity, and coverage of roads to exist, we will likely need to depend on a common recognition that educational infrastructure is just as critical as transportation infrastructure, and tax money being put to this purpose. Volunteers can be wiki-gardners who pull the inevitable weeds and keep things clean, and they will play an important role, but I don’t know if I believe that we can depend on volunteers to build out ~and maintain~ this critical infrastructure.

Here is another question. Are there things that we can do that will change the way we think about resourcing content (work processes, licensing, the nature of education&education providers, our identities as educators, etc.)?

Yes! And the primary thing is thinking about content as infrastructure. Once we realize how critical this infrastructure is to enabling progress and competitiveness in our current world, we will be willing to invest in it.

9. redsevenone - october 6th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

David, Ken and All – I have introduced this notion in a couple of other venues and perhaps the time is right to do it here. Open Access is seen somewhat a a thorn in is side of the status quo except what we see as the said quo today is not as it always has been. There was a time when Science in all its iterations was practiced for the sake of Science, when people on the streets would hear the sound of ‘Eureka’ shouted from the window of a dingy cell in a musty pile and another discovery born. It has only been since the notion of profit was introduced to the whole area of the dissemination of knowledge has the issue of paying to read about the discoveries, in many cases the public has payed to create, has the issue of how it is paid for become an issue.