IT

As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. The medium is far from done.

The experience with OpenCourseWare illustrates the promise and the pitfalls of open online education. Heralded as making all MIT courses “open” to the world, much remains to be achieved if that promise is to be fully realized. A big surprise to those who conceived the program was that professors routinely distribute proprietary materials which have to be laboriously duplicated or scrubbed out of the web version. This causes the public OpenCouseWare view to be different from the internal one used by MIT students.

OCW does little to serve the needs of professors or students enrolled at MIT. How could it do better? Advancement at all levels, including even of students towards graduation, might be linked to achievements in the OCW domain. For example, every student could be required to tutor a student not enrolled at MIT and improve the course materials as needed. Teaching a subject develops mastery which is usually much more satisfying and enduring than sampling from an endless intellectual buffet. Faculty promotion could be based on the success of courses as measured by the use and participation in their open materials.

However, greatly improving the quality of free education would eventually threaten the academy. The advancement and compensation its faculty is based on publication in fee based journals. While making those articles costless and easily to adapt could greatly increase access and the vigor of research, it would so at the expense of those who have long labored to climb up and heap upon the pinnacles of their domain. Those who materially benefit from providing views from intellectual summits are negatively motivated to make the views less costly.

So there is little reason to hope that change will come from within the existing institutions. It is technology that defines the art and technology which has changed and will change the status quo. The software for collaborative work is still primitive. (OCW publishes to .PDF files which are particularly inappropriate for collaboration because they need to be converted into a freely modifiable form before even one small improvement can be made.)

What is still missing? Public wikis have only a very rough mechanism to prevent changes that degrade articles. They do not directly compensate professionals to participate in an freely modifiable collaborative setting where peers compete fairly to create views accessible to all. This shortcoming preserves the role of the faculty guide but holds back the development of a “global mind”. There need to be much better processes to structure and weigh evidence.

The great amount of manual labor required need be compensated in order to attract leaders in the field. Tying organizational advancement to the creation of excellent content can motivate employees but would not help to break down barriers between organizations and encourage independent persons to participate. A universally accessible collaborative environment should also break down the units of contribution and compensation so that individuals need not be tethered to institutions in order to be recognized and rewarded.

Despite the importance of ensuring that content is free to be modified, there are no good ways to separate this critical freedom from the meaning of "'free' as in free beer", quoting from the apostle of free software, Richard Stallman. The intractability of this problem suggests that the pendulum of politically correct thought will swing back toward the right. Content creators need ownership with attendant rights to control access and demand payment after all. If the environment still allows competition and freedom to modify, very good content that is costless, or at least very affordable, will trickle down over time. Authors could restrict the period of their copyrights in order to encourage others to build upon their work. They might also guarantee a low toll until their copyright expires. The system must ensure that authors cannot prevent others creating links from their content to disputes, restatements and questions. The community may cause such pointers to grow prominent independent of the author's wishes.

Because this approach provides private incentives but only for a limited time and in a competitive environment, the value provided to consumers should be at least as good as that found at Wikipedia and the GPL open source repositories. Content which is already costless can only be improved by this approach.

So authors need to be able to own copyrighted pieces and there needs be an integral system of micro-payments to motivate even very small contributions. Authors (including people with questions) might pay for editing. Editors might pay to take over a copyright. There may or may not be charges, or such tolls could be guaranteed to be low or of limited duration. This would encourage the development of dominant views yet these will always remain assailable. A preponderance of evidence accumulated by individuals who labor and speculate on the prevailing order may deconstruct it from within. They could also build a competing view. If an author charges excessive rent, others will re-write it and lower the price.

Challenges will always be allowed because dissenters will be able to create markup tags which become prominent according to the merit recognized by the community. This ensures that there will be freedom to modify. The original author will often negotiate to incorporate the changes that the tags suggest. Frequently, the original author will lose interest and be bought out by the owners of derivative content. They may make the original work costless in order to draw traffic into more economically vigorous properties. Thus older contributions would become trailheads that feed traffic to the budding branches where most growth and economic exchange occurs.

Of course, an original contributor whose property has been developed mostly by others into an attractive destination could charge unfair rents. The more they are overpriced, the more quickly such portals would be replaced by rewriting to circumvent copyright. In general, contributors would only be able to earn income by continuously forging ahead and keeping the knowledge base consistent.

Thus significant investments will be required to reach the developing parts of the open mind. However, the cost will surely be less than universities charge today because there will be vastly less overhead. The cost will usually be quite modest compared with the value of one's time and the entry points will be accessible from anywhere to anyone.

One might think of the tolls as "pay to play". Since ownership leads to expectations of future revenues, there would naturally arise equity and options markets. One could wager that a dissident view will rise and that a dominant one will be discredited. There would necessarily be people who spread falsehoods, knowingly and not. The untruths will be highly vulnerable if others can bet on exposing them. This will not prevent mass delusions from persisting sometimes for long periods. It may be unappealing that those with greatest access will remain those with the greatest wealth, but it has ever been thus. Fools will be quickly parted from their money and wiser for it. The man of economic needs cannot be divorced from the man of intellectual aspirations. The closer the marriage, the better it will be for both.