The Next Wave: Liberation Technology
In everything from course management to big enterprise systems,
universities must choose between monopolies and the open approach
BY JOHN M. UNSWORTH
If the nineties were the e-decade (e-com-merce,
e-business, e-publishing, eBay, E*Trade, etc.), the aughties
are the o-decade (open source, open systems, open standards, open access, open
archives, open everything). This trend, now unfolding with special force in
higher education, reasserts an ideology, a meme, that has a continuous
tradition traceable all the way back to the beginning of networked computing
(in fact, as far back as Thomas Jefferson's famous defense of the principle
that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over the
globe"). Call this meme Liberation Technology. It has recently been
adopted by some venerable institutions -- not only by some of the great
public and private universities, but also by major private foundations
-- and it means business.
Since the beginning of Internet time and before, Liberation Technology has been
intertwined with and opposed to another ideology. Call it Command and Control.
You see Command and Control at work in the military roots of the Internet, in
the Recording Industry Association of America's prosecution of file-sharing
college students, and in Microsoft's doubly possessive and oddly revealing
slogan ("your potential, our passion"). Liberation Technology wants
to keep information free; Command and Control wants to make the Internet safe
for private property.
To be sure, not all proprietary operations oppose open inquiry, but the key to
the business success of open-source products like Linux is that they allow
people to make money by selling them, without allowing the seller exclusive
control. Especially with information goods, the notion of nonexclusive
commercial rights is key.
In the Early Days of the Web, Public Good vs. Property Rights
By the early 1990s, the Internet was expanding rapidly, going from one thousand
hosts in 1984 to one million in 1992, and new, more sophisticated applications
were appearing, like Gopher (1991) and the World Wide Web (the first Web server
in the United States was set up in 1991, with Mosaic, the first graphical Web
browser for personal computers, coming along in 1993). Throughout the 1990s,
university faculty members and students outside of computer science were
gradually becoming aware of the existence of the Internet, largely because of
the Web; so was the rest of the world, for the same reason.
In retrospect, it's difficult to comprehend the rapidity with which the Web
went from an obscure science experiment to a fact of daily life, but it took
only about three years. By late 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was founded
to take over managing Web protocols and their development and to ensure that
the Web would remain a nonproprietary public good. In 1996, the consortium
presented the first draft of XML (Extensible Markup Language, the encoding
format that is now used for exchanging text and many other kinds of data on the
Web); the official draft of XML 1.0 was presented in 1998.
In distinct contrast to that ethos, with its focus on the public good, an
aggressive campaign began in the late 1990s to expand the property rights of
"content providers," in legislation like the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (both passed in
1998) and in case law arising out of the Recording Industry Association of
America's suit against Napster in 2000. Mixed in there was the Microsoft antitrust
case, initiated in 1998 under the Clinton administration, first decided against
Microsoft, overturned on appeal, and eventually settled, quite favorably for
Microsoft, by the Bush administration in 2001.
Against that backdrop, during the 1990s all over the United States universities
became big IT consumers, not just in computer science or in the sciences, but
increasingly in all disciplines, on every part of campus, for all kinds of
services. As they came to rely more, and more broadly, on networked information
in teaching, research, and administration, universities turned away from the
strategy of meeting their own specialized needs with homegrown software and
began to license more commercial products.
They also began to be seen, for the first time, as a profitable market for
commercial IT products and services. WebCT and
Blackboard, for example, both appeared on the scene in 1997 and over the next
few years they signed up hundreds of university clients for "e
learning" systems to put courses online, do grading online, accept
homework assignments online, etc. On the administrative side, beginning in the
mid-1990s, enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) systems from vendors like
PeopleSoft and Oracle -- for managing payroll, student records, human resources,
purchasing, etc. -- began to find a market in universities, partly built
on the fear that Y2K would wreak havoc on older, usually homegrown, systems
that had hitherto been performing those functions, often successfully, often
for years.
Universities also got caught up in the Internet bubble -- that combination
of greed, optimism, and willful ignorance of history that led us to believe
that information technology would create a permanent bull market. In the heady
days at the turn of the millennium, Columbia University, to take only one of
many possible examples, plowed millions into launching Fathom, a for-profit
online content provider for e-learning, confident that such a foray into the
commercial sector would turn a handsome profit for the stakeholders, which
included not just Columbia, but the London School of Economics and Political
Science, the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago, the University
of Michigan, and others.
Some time in 2000, though, the pendulum started swinging the other way,
beginning, perhaps, in reaction to failures such as Fathom's. In his annual
report for 2000-2001, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Charles M. Vest, succinctly articulated a return to the original
ideology of the Net when he announced MIT's OpenCourseWare project to make primary materials of its courses available online -- free. As
he noted, "inherent to the Internet and the Web is a force for openness
and opportunity that should be the bedrock of its use by universities."
Vest's report is not the source of the trend that is now unfolding, but it is
certainly a document that crystallizes a historical moment. It is significant
for another reason, too: It is emblematic of what's changed in this iteration
of Liberation Technology.
Course Management, Portals, and Enterprise Systems
This time around, the ideas are being advanced not by ragtag communitarians,
but by major institutions, with substantial backing not just from MIT, but from
a number of other universities as well, and not just from universities, but
from corporations, foundations, and government agencies at home and abroad.
In MIT's case, support comes from the institution itself and also from two
major private foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. On a first visit, the MIT site for OCW looks a
little longer on structure than substance. If you dip at random into courses, you
may see mostly syllabi, perhaps some exercises, and a list of assigned
readings, but not the readings themselves (leading you to wonder how the effort
is going to provide new educational opportunities in the developing world, as
claimed). But on further investigation, you'll find that some courses have the
complete text of every lecture (in PDF), and others have full-length videos of
every lecture (at three different resolutions for slow, medium, and fast
connections). At that point, MIT's claim to be the first open-source university
begins to seem more plausible.
MIT can't give away the readings in its courses -- in most cases,
textbooks and articles that come from commercial publishers -- but it can
give away the intellectual property created by its own faculty members, and
that's what it's doing. As with the open-source-software movement from which it
drew inspiration, it permits the reuse, modification, and redistribution of
content. Unlike open-source software, however, it prohibits doing any of those
things for commercial purposes.
That distinction is important, and it is key to
understanding the doctrinal differences among open-source sects. Beginning in
the early '80s, the innovation of the open-source-software movement was to
argue that users should have the freedom to modify source code, but could sell
the results, as long as the source code for the modified version was available
for modification. Those terms are codified in the GNU Public License.
Since then, other variants of open-source licensing have emerged. MIT's
materials in OCW are covered by a different, newer copyright, developed by the Creative Commons project, an effort led by Lawrence Lessig, who set up
Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, with support from
Hewlett, Stanford and Harvard Universities' law schools, and others (including
the philanthropic group Center for the Public Domain). The Creative Commons
license allows copying and redistribution, but also allows the content creator
a set of options with respect to attribution, commercial use, and modification
of the work. The Creative Commons license is inspired by GNU, but also informed
by a somewhat broader perspective, in that it is intended to cover creative
work other than software.
Though legal variants of open-source licenses do exist, at a technical level,
open systems require that everyone who designs or modifies the systems does so
under the same set of rules. In the case of online courseware, content, and
tools, the IMS Global Learning Consortium is providing some important common ground on which to coordinate a very broad
range of specifications. One of the partners in that effort is another
"open" entity, called the Open Knowledge Initiative, or OKI. That
effort, financed by the Mellon foundation, is based at MIT with Stanford as a
principal partner and supported by a number of major universities. It describes
itself as "an open and
extensible architecture that specifies how the components of an educational
software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise
systems." The goal is to liberate universities from having to choose a
single software solution for managing online instruction and/or online
components of classroom instruction. The result would be greater portability of
content, greater flexibility in choosing and assembling elements of a
learning-management system, and a shift in the balance of power between the
client (the university) and the software vendor, in favor of the client.
Universities -- or open-source developers at large -- could choose to
produce and share their own modules for things like calendars, gradebooks, etc. Commercial vendors could also continue to
build and sell proprietary solutions that adhered to the architectural
specification (and that, therefore, allowed users to unplug some of the
vendor's modules and plug in some of their own, or some from another vendor).
That speaks directly to the practice of monopolistic "bundling" that
was at the heart of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
As with any standard, success will depend on whether both vendors and users buy
into it. That is not yet a certainty with OKI, but in May 2002 Blackboard
announced its intention to adopt the OKI architecture. In October 2002 OKI
announced that it had joined in an informal consortium with other "leading
organizations developing specifications for e-learning technology in higher
education ... to coordinate strategy and conduct common activities."
While the OKI project aims at specifying an architecture
for online learning systems, and MIT's OCW is focused on content for such
systems, another open-source effort, the Sakai Project, focuses on educational
software tools. According to the Sakai Web site, the project hopes to "demonstrate the compelling economics of
'software code mobility' for higher education, and it will provide a clear road
map for others to become part of an open-source community." Sakai is a collaboration among Indiana University, MIT, Michigan, and
Stanford, which will begin using its tools in 2004.
Another partner in Sakai is the open-source project uPortal. A number of other universities (in the United States and abroad) and
for-profit companies (Sun Microsystems, SCT, Interactive Business Solutions)
are involved in developing uPortal. Once again, the
Mellon foundation is helping to support the project.
Portals can do more than integrate news and weather, or library and course
information. They can also integrate the administrative-computing functions of
the university, such as student records, payroll and human resources, and
purchasing. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, one of the corporate
sponsors of uPortal is SCT, a company whose interests
could be threatened, or at least significantly reoriented, if uPortal achieves the success for which it seems destined.
SCT provides a "solution" called Banner, one of those
enterprise-resource-planning products mentioned above.
Over the past few years, universities have spent hundreds of millions of
dollars to acquire, customize, and make the transition to such systems, often
with very mixed results. The university that now employs me, and the one I
worked at last, are both in the throes of such a transition, probably too far in
to get out, but probably wishing they could.
Admittedly, it's a huge undertaking to retool an entire university's
administrative-computing infrastructure and workflow, and it requires
long-range planning and commitments. An institution makes those plans and
commitments based on the best choices available at the time: Several years ago,
when decisions were being made at the Universities of Illinois and Virginia,
there were no plausible open-source/open-standards ERP alternatives, so the
universities bought into monolithic proprietary systems. Now alternatives are
beginning to come into view. It will be years before the current generation of
university ERP adopters can switch to open-source alternatives, but their
experience will certainly help to make the case for such alternatives as they
emerge.
Toward a New Model of Scholarly Communication
There are a number of other pressing IT challenges facing higher education, and
at or near the top of the list are digital libraries (or, more generally, data
repositories). Those could include data held in an institution's library
(licensed or locally produced scholarly information), data held outside the
library (by an office of management information, for example), and/or data
published by a university press.
The case for institutional repositories is laid out convincingly in an article by Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information, published in the February 2003 newsletter of the Association of
Research Libraries. Lynch argues that "an institutional repository is a
recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship of our universities will
increasingly be represented, documented, and shared in digital form, and that a
primary responsibility of our universities is to exercise stewardship over
these riches: both to make them available and to preserve them."
There are a number of noteworthy "open" initiatives in this area as well, and familiar institutions and financial supporters.
Four very different, possibly complementary, open-source frameworks for
institutional repositories and/or digital libraries are MIT's
DSpace (supported by
Hewlett-Packard), the Cornell/Virginia Fedora Project (supported by the Mellon foundation), EPrints (supported by the National Science Foundation and Britain's Joint
Information Systems Committee), and Greenstone (produced
by the University of Waikato, in New Zealand, and developed and distributed in
cooperation with Unesco and Human Info NGO).
Beyond the individual repository, there is the problem of federated
collections, and how to search across repositories, a dream long held in
digital libraries. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is a
project aimed at achieving that goal, by developing and maintaining standards
to facilitate sharing information. Currently, there are 134 registered OAI
repositories, and you can see a nice working example of sample searches across
many of them on the Web site for the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.
The EPrints software mentioned above is the
self-archiving component of a larger project on open access, supported by the
Soros Foundation and marching under the banner of the Budapest Open Access
Initiative, whose purpose is "to make research articles in all academic
fields freely available on the Internet" -- either by institutional
self-archiving of articles that also appear in for-fee journals, or by authors
publishing in open-access (free) journals.
In the American Scientist Open Access Forum (moderated by Southampton University's Stevan Harnard), there is a lively, long-running, and unresolved
debate on what open access means. That debate has been attracting considerable
attention around the world, both within and beyond the academy.
The efforts to promote open access to scholarly research, to build
interoperable digital libraries, and to create institutional repositories
coincide with the broadening university revolt against the monopolistic
bundling strategy of Elsevier, in which university libraries are required to
subscribe to packages of titles and are locked into multiyear subscriptions.
Faculty members and libraries at Cornell University, Harvard, North Carolina
State University, the University of California system, and the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill have all rejected those tactics in the last year.
University-press publishers have a golden opportunity here to distinguish
themselves from commercial publishers and join with libraries and scholars to
create a new model of scholarly communication. To seize the opportunity,
though, university presses will require more capital, cooperation, and
creativity than they seem to be able to muster.
The Battle for the Desktop
Journals, repositories, portals, and ERP systems are the macro end of IT in
higher education; at the micro end is the individual user's desktop environment.
The desktop has been Microsoft territory for years, but open-source projects
are cropping up here as well. In September 2003 25 universities joined with
Mellon to provide funds for Chandler, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's
Outlook. Chandler is (or will be) a desktop application for Linux, Mac OS X,
and Windows, combining e-mail, calendars, address books, instant messaging, and
file sharing. It's being produced by Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation, and it has two subtypes: a personal version called Canoga, due out in the
fall of 2004, and a version called Westwood that is specifically aimed at
higher education, due out in the fall of 2005.
What Chandler brings into focus is the battle for the desktop between Microsoft
and the open-source community. Microsoft has already seen a serious challenge
to its server market from Linux, but it still has a lock on the desktop, in
spite of a much-improved Macintosh operating system and the persistence of
efforts like OpenOffice, which provide an open-source
alternative to Microsoft's word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation
software. Kapor estimates that it will be 2007 before
Linux makes significant inroads here. Still, Microsoft is clearly already
worried about its dominance, as one can see from a series of leaked Microsoft
memos on how to combat Linux, available in annotated form on the open-source Web site.
More immediately, there are some noteworthy open-source developments in the
collaborative creation of content. One is a courseware project from Rice
University called Connexions, which converts "raw knowledge" into self-contained modules of
information and places them in commons, to be used, reused, updated, and
adapted. It is designed to highlight the nonlinear "connexions"
among concepts both within the same course and, more important, across courses
and disciplines. It is open source and based on open standards (XML), and has
support from the Hewlett foundation.
Another, simpler and more general-purpose collaborative tool that's become
quite popular in the last couple of years is Wiki, a Web-based platform for
collaboration that comes in a variety of open-source incarnations. Perhaps the
most robust and widely used is TWiki. Using any Web browser, you can directly edit any Wiki page, add links
automatically, group pages, search pages, attach files, track revisions,
control access at the individual or group level, and so on. TWiki,
which is just one type of Wiki, has hundreds, probably thousands, of
installations, not only in higher education, but in corporate intranets at
places like Disney, British Telecom, Motorola, SAP, and others.
Combined with something like LionShare, Wikis could provide a powerful tool for collaboration in academe, one
that could change teaching, project management, the work of professional
societies, and many other activities. LionShare
(another Mellon-financed project) is essentially peer-to-peer networking with
authentication. Peer-to-peer networking is the technology underlying demonized
post-Napster software like KaZaA, but it also has
less well-known applications in things like videoconferencing. LionShare's addition of authentication makes it legitimate
for a broad range of applications in institutional settings.
Choice and Compatibility With Commercial Software
The university-based open-source projects described here have in common two key
characteristics: unbundling and interoperability. Those strategies are inherent
to open-source software development, but have also proved compatible with
commercial software development. They are hostile only to monopolistic
practices.
Unbundling and interoperability are important because they provide choice and
flexibility. Instead of being locked into a single application or suite of
applications from a single vendor, you can choose to mix different applications
to achieve the best performance for your particular purposes, at the best
price. For the end user, that means that you can use a word processor from one
place, a collaboration tool from another, an e-mail client and an address book
from somewhere else, and exchange data among all of them using open standards
to which all adhere.
At the other end of the spectrum, in administrative computing or digital
libraries, it means that you can use a database engine from one vendor, a
portal kit from someone else, a Wiki for managing projects and discussions.
When something better comes along for one of those functions, you can swap out
that piece, rather than waiting until the whole system is intolerably outdated,
and then undergoing vast, enterprisewide transition
from one monolithic system to another.
On a broader level, what's noteworthy in the various threads of the trend
assembled here is the concerted efforts of a handful of private foundations,
working with public (and some private) universities, to promote
self-determination in higher education's use and development of information
technology. Most of the examples I've cited have been supported by two
foundations, Hewlett and Mellon. Both foundations give to things other than
higher education and, within higher education, both give to things other than
IT projects. Yet they clearly are having substantial impact on the information
infrastructure of the 21st-century university, and the projects they are
helping get under way will liberate it from Information Property monopolies and
IT monocultures. They've achieved those results by emphasizing long-term
sustainability of projects and by adopting and promoting the open-source ethos
of shared goals, shared work, and shared results.
Open-source methodology has already spread well beyond software development: In
the world at large, the Human Genome Project is a famous example. Over the
coming decade we're certain to see this new mode of production locked in mortal
combat with older methods and the legal and ideological commitments that they
entail. It will be interesting to see whether, at this critical juncture, the
university comes down on the side of freely shared ideas.
With a little help from its friends, it just might.
John M. Unsworth is dean of the Graduate School of
Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He is departing president of the Association for Computers
and the Humanities and is chairman of the American Council of Learned
Societies' 2004 Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for
the Humanities and Social Sciences.
OPEN EVERYTHING: ONLINE RESOURCES
The following projects, articles, and other electronic sources are listed in
the order in which they are discussed in the accompanying article.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Home page: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
GNU General Public License
Home page: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Creative Commons
Home page: http://creativecommons.org
IMS Global Learning Consortium
Home page: http://imsglobal.org
Open Knowledge Initiative
Home page: http://web.mit.edu/oki
The Sakai Project
Home page: http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakaiproject
uPortal
Home page: http://www.uportal.org
DSpace Federation
Home page: http://www.dspace.org
The Fedora Project
Home page: http://www.fedora.info
EPrints.org
Home page: http://www.eprints.org
Greenstone Digital Library Software
Home page: http://greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library
Open Archives Initiative
Home page: http://www.openarchives.org
The Perseus Digital Library
Home page: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Sample search of Open Archive Initiative repositories:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/oai.ann.html
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Home page: http://soros.org/openaccess
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Moderated discussion: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci
Open Source Applications Foundation
Home page: http://www.osafoundation.org
Open Source Initiative
Locked Microsoft documents available: http://www.opensource.org/halloween
Connexions
Home page: http://cnx.rice.edu
TWiki
Home page: http://twiki.org
LionShare
Home page: http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 21, Page B16
Last
Modified: 4 / 11 / 2008
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle
of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i21/21b01601.htm
Information
taken from: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/liberation.html
[Comedy
of Knowledge] [Orchestrating Reception] [Postmodern Culture:
Publishing in the Electronic Medium] [Practicing Postmodernism]
[Networked Academic Publishing and the
Rhetorics of Its Reception] [Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of
Failure] [What is Humanities Computing and
what is not?] [The Next Wave: Liberation Technology] [Back to
First Paper]
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente
Forés López
© Diana Descalzo Conde
diades@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press