Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/42



The power of open source code and open source development communities is now legendary. Open source actually includes three complementary dimensions: (1) intellectual property policy, (2) virtual distributed collaboration, and (3) community governance models. These practices and methods that have given us Linux, the Apache Webserver (70 percent of the server market), and the FireFox (2nd most used) web browser can be generalized so they can be used for the creation and community-based iterative enhancement of more broadly defined digital objects. This is being explored, for example, in the Connexions project. Closely related are the concepts of mashup and remix. Mashup refers to producing digital applications or media through rather straightforward linking of other building blocks such as Google mapMaps [sic] or Google Earth. The approach empowers people without good programming skills to tailor and innovate. Remix is processing an existing object, for example a song, to create an alternate from the original model. Another virtuous cycle in all this is that open source software is increasingly providing effective infrastructure for access to open content and participation. Plone and Zope are open source community platforms for building web services, and Truphone, Rebtel, and Jajah are open source codes supporting free voice over IP.

We need not dwell on the fact that the high-quality open courseware movement is part of a bigger movement in web-based open content of extreme variable quality. A sign of the times is that the CIO Council of the federal government is now pushing a transition from need to know to need to share. Perhaps most relevant is the movement toward more open forms of scholarly communication—the authoring, review, publication, and access of academic works. This movement is prompted by several factors including: a backlash against escalating pricing and restricted terms of use of scholarly journals, the need for academic libraries to steward the growing digital content assets of their community, a belief that knowledge created with public funds should be freely available to the public, and interpretations of the fundamental mission of university to be sharing knowledge with the world.

Less well understood but potentially of huge relevance to the OER movement are the processes whereby resources are contributed, mixed, enhanced, and redistributed—in which less-than-high-quality materials are revised and improved and become part of something much better. The Web 2.0