Additional Thoughts on Remixing

One of the posts at the openeducation.us site led to the mediaatschool site and the entry Open content, and, is everything a remix. http://mediaatbrooks.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/open-content-and-is-everything-a-remix/ 

At this site there are three parts to a video series produced by Kirby Ferguson titled Everything is a Remix,  I found the three videos interesting in explaining remixing as part of the journey of learning and creating.  The videos used illustrations from music and movies to show how remixing is the frequent strategy used by artists in these creative genres.  The third video added the creation of the personal computer and how Apple transformed and combined ideas from Xerox to create the first truly functional personal computer. 

I was really impressed by the thoughts expressed in part three on the three elements of creativity.  The three elements of creativity that Ferguson identified are:

1. Copying (emulation) – learning your domain and how it “ticks.”  Grounding ourselves in the fundamentals of the domain. 
2. Transforming – working within the domain to make improvements.  It is taking existing ideas and tinkering with them.  This is time consuming but eventually may produce a breakthrough. 
3. Combining – By connecting ideas together great leaps can be made.  Some examples include:

a.      The Gutenberg Printing Press (1440 A.D.) used ideas that existed before

                                                    i.     Moveable type (1040 A.D.)

                                                   ii.     Screw press (1 A.D.)

                                                  iii.     Ink (180 B.C.)

                                                  iv.     Paper (1800 B.C.)

b.      Henry Ford - Mass Market Production of Automobiles (1908)

                                                    i.     Assembly line (1867)

                                                   ii.     Interchangeable parts (1801)

                                                  iii.     Automobile (1885)

The ideas that are expressed in this third video ring true.  There is an epilogue where Ferguson asks if these inventors, credited with such creative advances had not pursued these inventions, would they have happened?  He answers that it is amazing how many things were proposed or invented by more than one man or woman at the same time.  Some of these ideas/inventions he mentioned were the step forward in mathematics that resulted in calculus, the invention of the light bulb, and the patent for the telephone.  All of these great creative advances were being worked on and "discovered" by more than one scientist or inventor at the time they were proposed or patented.

When you consider the points that Dr. Wiley has made that all knowledge is free and nonrivalrous then you can see how restricting access can disrupt these processes of creation and invention.  If any of those whose work these great inventors combined or added to were to have pursued financial damages for the transformation and combining of their ideas, then it may have made the new invention financially unsustainable, or at least delayed the new invention until the patent or copyright had expired.

We see today that many inventions and patents are licensed to manufacturers and producers in order to bring that product to market for the benefit of the community.  If those license fees are to high, then the market to consume that product will be greatly reduced.  However, if the fees are minimal and the cost of production marginal, then the invention can be of great benefit to a much larger segment of the population.

I think this is readily apparent in the textbook marketplace right now.  The only reason that there is such support for the open text movement is because the publishers and authors lost sight of the nonrivalrous nature of the content and greedily overcharged what they perceived to be a captured market.  This greed and short-term focus led them to gradually price the product far beyond the cost of production and distribution and incentivized an entire movement to cut them out of the market altogether.

I particularly liked the quote from Henry Ford in part three of the series.  He said:

I invented nothing new.

I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.  Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed.

So it is with every new thing.  Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable.

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

Henry Ford

A thought on the "Four Rs" of the OPL

Dr. Wiley commented on my previous post about open content and asked a question about the "Four Rs."  He asked:

The thing that is most frequently overlooked by people when they first learn about OER is the difference / nuance between revise and remix. After our class discussions and what you've read is it clear why there are 4Rs and not just 3? In other words, why aren't revise and remix both contained in a category with one name or the other?

I have thought about this question as I have reviewed the materials a third time.  My best answer to his question about the difference between revise and remix is that I think the main difference is in the content that exists following the completion of the revision or remixing. 

 It is my understanding that the revision is taking the same content and revising it for communication through a different language or medium. The content is exactly the same, it is just revised to be effectively communicated through the means that required its revision.

Remixing on the other hand, results in a product at the end of the activity that adds additional content, incorporating the original content into some new aggregated product. So the content after remixing differs from the original content.

Open Content Summary

For the OER class we watched a brief video from Dr. Wiley on Open Content licensing and the moral foundations for making learning artifacts open and available to learners.  The history of the OCL license developed by Dr. Wiley, and then the subsequent revisions of the licenses showed the growth and acceptance of the concept of openness in education.  The emergence of Nupedia which was the forerunner of Wikipedia followed the concept of open licensing educational content.

I asked Dr. Wiley what he felt was most important to take away from the open content discussion and he said that understanding the "four Rs" in the OPL was important.  The four Rs define different layers of licensing rights that the rights holder can use when licensing the content. The four Rs are reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.  Each of the Rs allow increasing rights to licensees to modify and distribute the licensed content.

The first R, reuse, allows the user to make copies of the licensed content and allows reuse in its unaltered, verbatim form..

The second R, revise, allows the user to make revisions by adapting. adjusting, modifying, or altering the content (such as translation to another language).

The third R, remix, allows the user to mix the original content with other content to create something new (like a mashup).

The fourth R, redistribute, allows the user to share copies of the content with revisions and remixes with others.

My feeling is that there is a moral foundation that would promote the use of open publication licenses so that learning is made available to students around the world.  This foundation is supported by the limited costs to publish and provide access to the publications with today's technology.  It is further supported by the fact that knowledge is nonrivalrous which allows the content creator to share that content, or knowledge, without losing the knowledge that I have gained.  The sharing of content that results in learning is a noble effort that advances all mankind.

Open Community Participants

I am linking an article I found in the Information & Management journal (Okoli & Oh, 2007).  The article discusses the motivations for participants in the open community (using participants in Wikipedia) and considers the social capital that they obtain through that participation.  See the link here.

The article points out that those not familiar with the community, who are more familiar with the traditional economic models and motivations are often puzzled by those willingly participating in the open source community.  They surveyed 465 active Wikipedia participants to assess their motivations using social capital theory for perspective.  

Discussing the principles of motivation that appear to be prevalent in the literature the authors wrote:

One notable motivation is the participants’ desire to be recognized in their virtual community of open source participants. This occurs when a participant receives informal praise and acknowledgment from their fellows, and also by tangible tokens such as recognition in the open source communities by the granting of administrative, or “insider”, rights that permit high-quality contributors to add their changes directly with minimal prior review, and to have an important role in deciding the direction of the project. Thus the action is equivalent to promoting an employee to manager status in a traditional organization and thus is a recognition of achievements.

The literature further identifies incentives for participants in open source communities that included: 

• pragmatic motivations to improve an application that they were using
• social motivations to support the work of other volunteers
• hedonic, or intrinsic motivations

As one considers the development of an effective open community effort, the article states that 

. . . since most are volunteers with individual motivations for participation. Aligning performance measures with motivations would be helpful to organizers and evaluators of OSS projects [19]. According to the resource-based model of social structure sustainability, online social structures should provide members with positive benefits, such as the opportunity to be influential [55], to affiliate or champion [37], and the ability to disseminate ideas rapidly [27]. While not absolutely necessary for participation, it is very important for open source participants to be recognized for their contributions [48]; thus they gain status and respect in the community. To better encourage participation in open source projects, research is needed to understand the dynamics of recognition as an incentive, and how the attainment of this motivation serves as an indication of a participant's performance, in the sense that they have achieved a desired individual goal. (footnote links will take you to the footnote in the article)

I found the consideration of these motivations enlightening.  I also think that these descriptions could be applied to those creating content that they intend to publish as open resources.  That may be why the Creative Commons licenses all require attribution.  This allows the egalitarian goals of sharing to match with the motivational goals of recognition.

This article discusses two "types" of social capital: that which comes within a closed network (or network closure) and that which comes and that which comes from open or loosely-structured networks (or structural holes).  The "closed, dense or cohesive network view, such as [proposed by] Coleman and Walker et al. [54], . . . argued that closure or density of social relations is the primary ingredient for the generation of social capital."

Counter to this view, proposed by Granovetter and Burt is

the structural hole view, assert that “true” social capital can be efficiently produced and maintained under open or loosely coupled networks, in which members can access the resources available in heterogeneous sub-networks. They have stated that loosely developed networks rich in structural holes allow the individuals to access and mobilize social resources and that bridges, structural holes or weaker ties are the building blocks necessary to construct or configure the network and thus produce “fresh” information while “social redundancies” are minimized. Thus the diversity and uniqueness of information become the crucial aspects of social capital, and they require a network rich in structural holes.

Both of these views have validity in the previous research.  The research in this study tried to assess which view was most effective at motivating participant performance.  Their findings showed that the network closure type of social capital (direct and indirect ties within the network) "had a significant positive effect on increasing participants’ recognition-based performance."  The structural holes type of social capital (loosely structured or more open networks) "had mixed effects on participants’ status, but were generally a source of social capital."

Reflecting on the findings of this study I wonder about it's application to the OER community.  The findings from this study seem intuitive to me.  When you participate in a community motivated towards a shared goal, with participants known to you, and with whom you communicate, there is an energy to keep the momentum going.  We read the Cathedral and the Bazaar earlier in the OER course and Raymond shared the experience of the torch for his popmail/fetchmail application and noted that were he not there to accept the role of championing additional development, the application may have stalled at the point where he took it over.  I believe that a closed network would be more likely to keep its subject maturing and developing than a loose network would.  I believe that any substantial effort to advance anything requires a committed and dedicated group that feeds off of itself and enhances motivation and performance. 

From my outsider perspective I have seen this in the OER movements.  There is a group of champions who are evangelical in their zeal to motivate positive change in society.  I do not use evangelical or zeal in the negative ways that they are sometimes terms of mockery in our society.  I believe that the efforts, based on strong moral convictions of the need to bless our fellowmen, have enabled this collection of individuals and growing network to motivate each other as they call for change.  We see evidence of their success in initiatives being advanced in institutions of learning and the halls of governments.

Open Content/Open Courseware

I have performed a couple of searches using "open content" as the search term.  I am sure that there may have been some more publications purely limited open content licensing and the open content movement if the search were to have been performed back in time closer to 1998 when Dr. Wiley first announced the open content license.  But the movement has matured so rapidly in the last decade that most of the publication has expanded to cover the open movement in its broader terms.

I did find a couple of thoughts in the article by Caswell, Henson, Jensen & Wiley (2008) See IRRODL Vol. 9, Number 1, February 2008..  One quote that I found meaningful is from Dr. Wiley.  He said:

We believe that all human beings are endowed with a capacity to learn, improve, and progress. Educational opportunity is the mechanism by which we fulfill that capacity. Therefore, free and open access to educational opportunity is a basic human right. When educational materials can be electronically copied and transferred around the world at almost no cost, we have a greater ethical obligation than ever before to increase the reach of opportunity. When people can connect with others nearby or in distant lands at almost no cost to ask questions, give answers, and exchange ideas, the moral imperative to meaningfully enable these opportunities weighs profoundly. We cannot in good conscience allow this poverty of educational opportunity to continue when educational provisions are so plentiful, and when their duplication and distribution costs so little.

While the main focus of this article seems to be on Open CourseWare, I believe that this quote from Dr. Wiley concisely explains the moral foundation for the whole open movement in education.  Translating the openness from software to education serves a different purpose in many aspects.  The open software movement attempts to improve a tool that will benefit people and society using that tool.  The application of openness in education actually improves people rather than their use of a tool.

 The Caswell article points out that the open movement removes limits on the number of people that could be served through distance education.  The reduced costs to transmit that knowledge and the increased accessibility available for access means that content that is available to be shared can affect more people, in more places, for minimal marginal cost.

Openness in Management Strategies

Although I am studying Instructional Psychology and Technology, most of my professional career has been spent in executive management in different business and education organizations.  One common concern that all business strategies need to address is the need for innovation and continuous improvement.  There are myriads of books, seminars, webcasts, podcasts, consultants, and firms who make a generous living selling their ideas (in publication and in person) to business leaders who are always wrestling with strategies to keep their business at the front of the market and their organization at the state of the art.

Most strategies die when they encounter the human nature that the employees, managers, and shareholders exhibit.  Change is never welcome, and ownership of product, market segment, or bureaucratic kingdom position are defended by those who perceive that they are the owner.  Innovation and change are threats to the status that people have obtained.  That threat is felt from the level of responsibility of the senior executive in the scope of the business, products, and marketplace to the level of responsibility of the clerical assistant concerning the processes and tasks that are the majority of their assignment and most of their daily work.  Change and innovation are always threatening.

As I have reviewed all of these materials on the "open" and "free" movements I have been struck by some thoughts these past two days.  We are wrestling with innovation initiatives in my current organization and we have had meetings, visits from outside consultants, and spent countless hours considering the changes that we might make to nurture more innovation.  We have failed to make great progress in anything other than talking about it.  Taking something from the theoretical (where everyone wants to talk about it) to the tangible implementation (where no one wants to DO IT) is the pattern that we see.  As Dr. Wiley highlights in his presentation on open educational resources (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Rb0syrgsH6M) policy protects the status quo.  Most policies in any organization, at any level, are largely designed to preserve things as they are because that is what they were meant to be.  Violating or changing policies changes the design of the thing to make it something else.

I have considered the patterns that I have encountered in nearly every place I have worked that have stifled innovation.  These last three weeks have given a voice to my analysis and synthesis of these observations.  The emergence of an open approach to improving things (software, education, etc.) that allows a larger community of developers to view and suggest improvement in the "thing" that is yours is the shortest, and likely the most successful, path to improving and innovating and making your "thing" better.  Too many managers become territorial and possessive of the thing that is theirs to manage.  Defensiveness and protection (copyright?) where change and improvement must be theirs to consider, design, and implement is a standard practice.  Their livelihood could be negatively impacted if they give control to someone else by seeking or (heaven forbid) implementing someone elses' idea about our "thing."

An open approach, where we seek the input from others, seems to be the best approach to making things better.  All that we have read and watched these last three weeks has caused me to believe that truly successful and timely innovation must be from openness and collaboration.  I am convinced that the impending threat and fear that openness brings to the creators (or the "owners") of things is that they will lose their specialness related to these things.  In our modern times it is that specialness that we believe put the food on the table and the roof over the head.  Everything that is uniquely mine to own and maintain, mine to control, is mine to exploit and to provide the necessities that will keep me secure.  

This is true not just of the creative works that we have been talking about in the oer class, but it is also true of the products we design, manufacture, and sell.  It is true of our positions in organization and the work that we do in those organizations.  It is true of our community and the position we hold in that community.  The more input or control we extend to others, the less special we are the greater the threat to our security.  That is the human nature that I believe plays into concerns about openness.  That is also the human nature that kills many of the greatest creative and innovative endeavors in the cradle, particularly if we are not it's parent.  Eastman Kodak invented digital camera technology in the 1970s, but they had the reputation for the best film.  What to do?

A community that shares with a common goal of improving the community will be the most innovative.  Such a community will only endure and thrive if that community is more concerned that the innovation needed is for the good of the community rather than the good needed for themselves.  Our survival instinct is very powerful.  Our ability to do something that makes us different than others seems to imbue us with a stronger feeling of a position of power.  If there is something vitally different and special about us then that makes our survival more critical than that of others.  If we lose that specialness, then we have no greater claim to power and survivability.  We become just like everyone else.  And at least in our human natures that seems to be threatening.  It is just safer to stay where we are and protect what we have then to try something new, even if there is greater benefit to all of us in doing so.  And particularly if it was someone else's idea.

Do we call it Linux?  Or is it GNU/Linux?  Perhaps it depends on who needs to retain that sense of "specialness."

One Last Post on Judicial Support of CC Licenses

One other link that I found in my search of rulings supporting Creative Commons license protections for the holder of copyrights is at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Law.  This is a wiki page that shows case law supporting the licenses.

Those reading my blog from my first post on this subject have had the opportunity to go on a research adventure with me.  I apologize to those who were already aware of these rulings and the web pages that provided quick access.  But thanks for playing.

The case law that is listed on this wiki seems fairly scant for such an important legal protection, at least as it seems to be of such concern to most creators of copyrightable works.  But I believe that they are critically important to showing that the use of this license does not degrade the ability to protect the creative work from infringement as the creator would define it. 

I believe these rulings are sufficient to convince concerned creators that their rights are protected when they share their creations.  I also believe that most creators will value the evolution of their creations, both in terms of the improvements that sharing will provide, and the value that will be derived from society through that evolution.

Other Creative Commons Rulings

In my last post I talked about rulings in the U.S. that upheld the copyright privileges of a rights holder when the terms of the creative commons license were violated.  I found two other cases (I cheated on these and went to the Creative Commons website) where international jurisdictions upheld the rights of a copyright when the license terms were violated.  The first case is from the District Court in Amsterdam from 2006 and is summarized at http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5822. 

The second case is from Spain (also from 2006) and is summarized at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5830.

In the document at this link, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823, the author was amused by the questions that she was getting about whether the Creative Commons license had been supported judicially. The author, Mia Garlick wirtes:

Many people have asked us over the years whether any court had held that CC licenses were enforceable. I have always found this question to be amusing. In my many years as a lawyer in private practice, if the licenses I had drafted were *not* litigated, then I was considered to have done my job well. But for some, it seems that keeping people out of court is not an indication of CC’s success; the legitimacy of the CC licensing system depended on some judicial validation.

While I am sure that this is humorous, it seems important to me that we can rely upon some of these judicial rulings supporting the license's protection of rights when explaining the benefits of sharing their copyrightable works while still protecting their rights.  I believe that there are large numbers of people creating content that would be beneficially shared who are not familiar with licensing to allow sharing who might be willing to share if they understood it.  The courts in most countries are the final arbiter of protecting the use of creative works as the creator intends.  I think the ability to point to ruling supporting the rights of the creator to insure that the manner and outcome of sharing can be monitored to comply with their wishes they might be more willing to "give up" some of the perceived rights that traditional copyright protection enjoys.

Jacobsen v Katzer and Open Licensing

In my last post I mentioned my curiosity about whether the rights of a person holding a copyright would be recognized judicially as a protection of that copyright.  I researched this and found the case of Jacobsen v Katzer in the U.S. where the Appeals Court ruled that the license did protect the copyright of the licensor.  In writing about this case, Fitzgerald and Olwan (2008) http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15148/1/15148.pdf write:

"This a landmark decision because it confirms that free and open source software copyright licences and by analogy open content licences that are similar in style to the Artistic Licence are:

1)copyright licences
2) which impose licence conditions which if not satisfied can found an action in and the grant of remedies for copyright infringement and
3) are legally enforceable

This in turn provides individuals, businesses, universities and governments that use these types of licenses to distribute and acquire code and content with a greater degree of confidence in their legality."

This case was remanded to the circuit court for that court to hold a trial to determine if the facts supported the specific claims that were required to preserve the copyright under the license.  But the important fact was that the license was upheld as legitimately protecting the copyright of the rights holder.

In addition to the Fitzgerald and Olwan link above, I also link you to http://www.mmmlaw.com/assets/files/article_368.pdf which is another good summation of the ruling by Paul H. Arne at mmmlaw.com.

Open Education Licensing

This past week for the open ed class we reviewed several documents and a video regarding issues related to copyrights, fair use, and the creative commons licensing that rights holders can use to share their innovations without relinquishing their rights.  I asked Dr. Wiley if there were any circumstances where a creative commons license had been violated and the courts had supported that license in ruling against the violator.  He replied that there was some case law and cited an example.  I hope sometime during the next week or two to identify a case, particularly in the U.S., and see the basis for the ruling.

I personally agree that a society that innovates needs to find a way to share intellectual property in such a way that the personal financial and ownership value that is derivable by the rights holder is not lost while allowing that property to be usable by other innovators.  I am sure that there is, or shortly will be, some circumstance where court will have to rule on some type of damage claim made by a creative commons licensor when another person uses the license in an inappropriate way and derives some income or recognition through that inappropriate use of the license.  Since I am new to this area this information may be commonly known to those who have had an interest in these ideas for some time.  I am eager to seek these cases out and see how the judges justified the ruling protecting the rights holder and the basis for damages assessed.