Sharing Nicely

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is launched – “Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materials Online”

Champagne and Appletizer all around! We soft-launched a few weeks ago and there have been a number of interesting and useful responses and comments, some critical, many positive and supportive.

What did the critics say?

North America bias: I’ll start with this one, because it comes from Stephen Downes whose voice and opinion deservedly carry a lot of weight in this space, and also because I find it relatively easy to respond to. Stephen said:

“… written by a group of mostly American academics and advocates invited by a foundation to a private meeting in South Africa …”

Regardless of how I categorize the participants in the original group of drafters (country of origin, country of residence, country of work), I can’t find such a North America bias.

Call it libre/free/open/all of the above: This is a discussion that has moved from the open source community into the open education world, with little progress in finding more common ground. Ahrash spells it out (emphasis mine) although many will disagree again:

“The whole debate about “libre” versus “open” lends itself to an empirical question: are we better off using the broader (but potentially more confounding) “open” term, or using the narrower (but potentially obtuse and confusing) “libre” term if one of the primary intents of the Declaration is to raise awareness and expand the activity levels in open education? I don’t know the answer, nor does anyone else.“

Top-down vs. community education: Further, some people felt the declaration still focused on the top-down delivery model of education, and was too concerned with copyright:

Leigh Blackall writes: “There is too much standard thinking about the ‘delivery’ of education, and the near neurotic obsessing over copyright seemingly at the expense of more important issues to do with learning.”

The declaration mirrors the difference in opinion on the first issue. Some in the original group of drafters (including me) are developing educational models in which the institution disappears almost entirely, others are much more interested in slow incremental change of the practices they are used to. I think both is fine and there is enough text in the declaration to let me push strongly towards the learner-centric education model that Stephen and others (and myself) are advocating.

Now, how do we deal with these divergent opinions and statements. Whereto from here?

In my opinion, Brendan Barrett from UNU’s Media Studio set’s the tone for the way forward (on the UNESCO OER mailing list):

“Hmmm, instead of a battle about who is right and who is wrong, why not look for a creative way forward. Make your own declaration! Edit the one of wikieducator. Sign the Cape Town one, and make clear your reservations. Write a poem. Celebrate small steps forward.”

And Ken Udas adds a quote from the FAQ:

“… it is explicitly the hope of the community that grappled with the original drafts of the Declaration for other people and communities to create alternative or companion drafts of documents like this one (see “Can I ‘remix’ the Declaration? here .)”

The lively debate and discussion (more links here) that was a result of publishing the draft declaration shows that we(?) are becoming a constructive and critical community of practice that moves towards a broad common goal – even if we often can’t agree on how to describe that goal or how to get there.

Open/libre/free knowledge hooray!

Here is the press release:

Cape Town, January 22nd, 2008—A coalition of educators, foundations, and internet pioneers today urged governments and publishers to make publicly-funded educational materials available freely over the internet.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, launched today, is part of a dynamic effort to make learning and teaching materials available to everyone online, regardless of income or geographic location. It encourages teachers and students around the world to join a growing movement and use the web to share, remix and translate classroom materials to make education more accessible, effective, and flexible.

“Open education allows every person on earth to access and contribute to the vast pool of knowledge on the web,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia and one of the authors of the Declaration. “Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.”

According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.

Open education makes the link between teaching, learning and the collaborative culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together. These new practices promise to provide students with educational materials that are individually tailored to their learning style. There are already over 100,000 such open educational resources available on the Internet.

The Declaration is the result of a meeting of thirty open education leaders in Cape Town, South Africa, organized late last year by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. Participants identified key strategies for developing open education. They encourage others to join and sign the Declaration.

“Open sourcing education doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes it more collaborative, flexible and locally relevant,” said Linux Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who also recorded a video press briefing (http://capetowndeclaration.blip.tv/). “Linux is succeeding exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open education.”

Open education is of particular relevance in developing and emerging economies, creating the potential for affordable textbooks and learning materials. It opens the door to small scale, local content producers likely to create more diverse offerings than large multinational publishing houses.

“Cultural diversity and local knowledge are a critical part of open education,” said Eve Gray of the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town. “Countries like South Africa need to start producing and sharing educational materials built on their own diverse cultural heritage. Open education promises to make this kind of diverse publishing possible.”

The Declaration has already been translated into over a dozen languages and the growing list of signatories includes: Jimmy Wales; Mark Shuttleworth; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Sir John Daniel, President of Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and former Provost, University of Michigan; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; Andrey Kortunov, President of the New Eurasia Foundation; and Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central European University. Organizations endorsing the Declaration include: Wikimedia Foundation; Public Library of Science; Commonwealth of Learning; Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; Canonical Ltd.; Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning; Open Society Institute; and Shuttleworth Foundation.

To read or sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, please visit: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org.