Open: Sustainability

This week I focused on Yochai Benkler's Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials (http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf)

One thing that impresses me about Benkler is his commitment to open publishing because it is the right thing to do. The fact that he personally releases books free and openly say a lot about his commitment to open education.

With regards to sustainability it is interesting to note how he describes the power of free time. He says, "A billion people in advanced economies have between two and six billion spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness two to six billion hours, the entire workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!"

With that kind of free time every day it seems like there are few problems that could not be solved! Indeed this surplus time is one of the reasons that Wikipedia has been able to be so successful. So some might wonder, why haven't Wikipedia style textbooks taken off?

Benkler states, "The main problem with even a successful project seems to be that textbooks that look and feel like textbooks, and, more importantly, that comply with education department requirements, are not quite as susceptible to modularization as an encyclopedia or a newsletter like Slashdot. The most successful book on Wikibooks, for example, is the cookbook. But the cookbook had 1301 “chapters” as of July of 2005. In other words, each module was effectively a single recipe."

So are there sustainable solutions for textbooks? Particularly in fields that are not changing rapidly? I am involved in a project right now concerning Flatworld Knowledge, a company that is creating and distributing open textbooks. There business model is such that profit can be gained even by books that they are allowing free (and open) access to (more on this later).

As I was researching open textbooks and looking at sustainability issues I stumbled across an article that talks about motives people have for creating free textbooks. I believe that sustainbility is important, but not necessarily financial sustainability. I am persuaded by the volunteer hour count that Benkler cites and believe that incentives can be set forth to harness the power of this leisure time.

Below are other excerpts from Benkler's work that I found to be particularly important:

[all of the below are quotations--I'm not trying to integrate them, just quoting them because I want to save these excerpts.]

The problem of quality is best exemplified by the K-12 textbook market.i Significant consolidation in the past decade has left four major textbook publishers in the United States. At the same time, statewide adoption practices have meant that decisions by government officials in California, Texas, and Florida control the demand in roughly a quarter of the K-12 textbook markets. The combination has led to the content of most textbooks being determined through intense lobbying in the three state capitals. Because of the benefits of economies of scale in not producing different texts for these states, and then for others, textbooks have become relatively homogenized and aimed at some lowest common denominator—which may be challenging for states with cultures as different as those of Texas and California.

Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more, rather than less, likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience.

This leads to the more general statement of the problem of motivation. Our standard economic models for productive human action tend to assume that motivation is more or less homogenous, capable of aggregation, and reflects a utility value capable of summing within a single individual, even if not for purposes of interpersonal utility comparisons. This simple model was useful for economic modeling, but is wrong. There is now significant literature on the diversity of human motivation, on the availability of different forms of social, psychological, and material gain, and on the fact that there can be “motivation crowding out:” that is, that adding money to an activity will not necessarily increase the activity.iv Intuitively, this is hardly news to anyone who has not been indoctrinated in economics. That is, sometimes we do things for money.
Sometimes, however, we do not. Ranging from trivial acts like responding truthfully and with diligence to a stranger’s request for directions on the street, to quite substantial efforts we go to in order to help friends and family, or pursue a fun hobby, or do what we believe we ought to do as well adjusted members of society.

In the mid-1990s firm-centric views competed as strategies for searching and indexing the newly growing Web. The first were search engines like Altavista or Lycos. The second was Yahoo. The theory behind the search engines was that smart software developers would write the best possible algorithm to extract human meaning and relevance from a mechanical analysis of text and metatags in webpages. Yahoo’s innovation was to add human beings—its employees would look at websites, decide on their meaning and quality, and include and index them in a directory of the Web. In both cases the idea was that firms would pay smart employees to map the web, each in its own way. Both were largely wrong, and each in its own way lost to a competitor that used peer production instead. Google’s search algorithm, we have already seen, is aimed at the best possible capture of the opinions of website authors about which sites are good and relevant, rather than aiming at having the software itself be good enough to make that judgment mechanically. As for Yahoo, its peer produced alternative was the Open Directory Project. While Yahoo continues to be a successful company, it has done so by moving in very different directions. Its staff of paid employees could not effectively compete with sixty thousand volunteers, each monitoring one or two areas of particular interest to them, including and excluding sites as they spent small increments of time reading and surfing things they might well have spent time on anyway, but adding their knowledge in small increments to a volunteer run and peopled directory.

...Horner, for example, is considering a new system based on xWiki that would allow the implementation of a system with much smaller chunks, that would not be posted into a text, but into a database for peer review moderation. These, in turn, would be moderated, accepted, edited and or included. Such a system would also require integration of a reputation system, through which authors who contribute regularly and at high quality can be recognized by the system and given a greater role in moderating and editing the text so as to smooth it out. The trouble with such controls, however, is that they make it harder to capture the power of very large numbers of contributors. Indeed, the question of the extent to which Wikipedia would be and remain free for anyone to edit, with or without logging in, and without hierarchical preference for “authorized” and authoritative users was a critical, self-conscious, and contentious decision at the early stages of Wikipedia. It led Larry Page, who had been originally employed by Jimmy Wales to edit and set up the encyclopedia, to leave and vociferously criticize Wikipedia from the outside. But it turned out to have been a critically successful organizational choice. Whether greater modularization does indeed require tighter technical controls on contribution to maintain consistency, or whether in fact, the greater the modularization the lower the barriers necessary because no single contributor is likely to make a very large mistake, and because the contributions of many are required to move the project forward in these newly-smaller chunks, is a critical design question for the next phase of open textbook development.

This brings us to the second question, of whether or not, given such an open engine, educational materials, learning objects and contexts will in fact be authored, by whom, and with what degree of openness to further extension.