In a recent post http://francesbell.com/2009/11/23/what-is-that-groups-and-networks-argument-all-about/ I looked at openness (and other attributes) as something to which we might aspire but not necessarily an absolute. The example I used was privacy of communication and the role of (semi-) private communication in moving towards more open discourse. Your article has made me a thinkabout a paradox that OERs (and traditional publishing) raises. We (or at least I) want knowledge to be interpreted, provisional, flexible and yet the act of ‘publication’ freezes knowledge in a frame. Much has been written about authority and power and how these are created and exercised in traditional scholarly domains (perhaps what you call 20th century knowledge.
So what is 21st Century knowledge, and perhaps more importantly, what can it be? Is it fragmented snippets of ideas expressed in blog posts and comments, linked by read counts and recognition systems. Or is it more like a dialogue where participants enter a process willing to change their minds in response to what others say? So is it better that I express my ideas here as a comment to your blog that you can easily find? or as my own blog post that appears as a pingback? (In fact I often repost longer comments I have made on my own blog so I can find them later).
We all have to filter information that bombards us through RSS, email, Twitter, and all the other channels we add to our information sources. The really interesting questions are around why we filter and to whom we listen. Questions of power, gender, culture haven’t gone away – the network has not completely democratised communication. There is a natural tendency in OER to focus on technologies and provider-centric models. It’s difficult to show RoI if you don’t have frozen clunky resources for which read counts and accesses make sense. How would you count the development and spread of an idea, morphing as it flows? My plea is for rich qualitative research (with numbers thrown in as appropriate) that helps us understand how people do and could contribute to and use knowledge that emerges from networked communication and interaction. Cultural change (even when it seems radical) is bound to be incremental. Let’s try to understand it and shape it, and don’t let’s throw too many babies out with bathwaters. Sometimes, beneath the glove of bold, radical change is the cold, hard, hand of domination by commerce, elites or other entrenched power bases.