I teach open because I believe that I have a responsibility to model in the classroom the kind of hospitality-based, collectivist, transparent society in which I want to live. In my pedagogical approach, open means rejecting a gatekeeping educational environment in favor of one characterized by participant pedagogy, a community-based, collaborative method in which all members take active responsibility for the learning process. For me, teaching open also means making course materials available to the public, codesigning project evaluation guidelines with students, and teaching content from — as well as communicating the cultural urgency of — open access sources.
Open access, as defined by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, refers to “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” I would like to extend this definition of open access to consider how an ethos of open unlocks not just sources of knowledge but also the generative beauty of remix.
Although the academic publishing industry has been slow to embrace open access, the impulse to privatize and monetize the spaces and places of a commons existed centuries before academic publishers and educational institutions became touchstones in the controversy about open access. The British Enclosure Acts codified the fear of depletion recognized in the tragedy of the commons; namely, that erecting fences and privatizing previously common land would safeguard against individuals acting according to their own self-interests and depleting a resource in detriment to the commons.
But knowledge is not depleted the more we use and share it; indeed, it’s natural habitat is generative reuse. Fields may be rivalrous and excludable, but knowledge is not. In Knowledge as a Public Good, Peter Suber explains that a public good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable; something is non-rivalrous if we can all use it without becoming rivals or depleting the good; something is non-excludable if it is impossible to keep individuals from using it.
If fences are both the physical and symbolic manifestation of an ethos of exclusion, the creative commons copyright sign signifies the culture of open. Noting that its mission is to “help you share your knowledge and creativity with the world,” Creative Commons“develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.” Creative Commons seeks to create a world in which there is universal access to knowledge and educational resources.
Despite the institutional, disciplinary, and other myriad systems and cultures of academic enclosure, some teachers are using Creative Commons licensing to develop open educational resources that promote remix culture in both material form and pedagogical imperative. In one of the most innovative examples, Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing recently published Kris Shaffer’s Open Music Theory, an online, open-source, interactive “text book” for college-level music theory courses. Teachers and students are encouraged to “hack” the book: “supplement it, reword it, add examples, drop chapters, mash it up with another one. Not only will that mean a greater diversity of material available, but if you improve your version of this work with your hacks, we can use those improvements to make this resource better, too.”
Teachers and open-knowledge activists and advocates are not the only people fighting for more universal access to knowledge. The student-led Right to Research Coalition, an organization working to ensure that all students have access to research information, is issuing a call for us to act. How should we answer that call?
Because I teach open, I frequently ask students to add their voices to the public conversation. Here are some of the responses students tweeted to the recent prompt, “As a citizen, open access is important to me because …”
“closed databases compromise core American principles like freedom & forward thinking”
“everyone should have the same level playing field to expand their knowledge”
“it allows me to access knowledge & information that has the ability to help others”
“it creates a society where progress can be shared and built upon by everyone”
“access to knowledge is a human right not a privilege we have to pay for”
These tweets speak to the idea that access to information does not deplete that information but rather extends it forward in new ways. Decades before the advent of the World Wide Web, Roland Barthes argued in “The Death of the Author” that a text’s meaning derives from the text’s multiple readers and not from its single author. We should build upon Barthes’ prescient notion that communal reuse is always already at the heart of meaning and teach open to model the generative beauty of remix.
First published on October 29th, 2014 with Duke University’s Language, Arts + Media Lab.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by steinchen is licensed under CC0 Public Domain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Aria F. Chernik is an open knowledge activist and works to restructure educational models for 21st century teaching and learning. She is the Director of Open Knowledge | Innovation & Technology Policy Lab at Duke University. Find her on Twitter @ariachernik.
