OLDaily

Open access versus the commons, or steps towards developing commons to sustain open access
Heather Morrison, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, 2019/04/25

Good post applying the principles outlined by Elonto Ostrom in Governing the Commons to the management of a knowledge commons. Now a knowledge commons, Heather Morrison takes pains to make clear, is not the same as open access. It is a common pool resource (CPR), that is, "a resource that is collaboratively managed by a group of people who benefit from the resource who develop, monitor and enforce rules for collective management of the resource." From such a definition it is not surprising to see that a set of types of rules is required for an effective CPR. It seems to me that part f the distinction between a CPR and, say, open access as imagined by (say) libertarians, is that in the latter there is no management (see, eg., Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace). I think it is preferable but impossible to have an unmanaged commons - preferable, because management creates power which creates inequity, but impossible, because there is (so far) no purely technical system that will not be subverted by bad actors.

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On the Creative Commons Certificate Course
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2019/04/25

A week ago, by way of a post in the Creative Commons Open Education Platform discussion list, I became aware of the Creative Commons Certificate course, "an in-depth course about CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of the Commons." I did't know that it had been offered previously, but no matter. What really caught my attention was the $500 USD price tag. That's a lot of money for an open online course generally, let alone a very short introductory course taught by a non-accredited institution.

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Where is the ‘theory’ within the field of educational technology research?
Khe Foon Hew, Ying Tang, Chengyuan Jia, Chung Kwan Lo, Min Lan, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2019/04/25

I'm left scratching my head at this one. If there is any discipline in which there is a proliferation of 'theory', it is education. You want theories, look here (and this list doesn't even include connectivism). Anyhow, here's the concern, according to the authors. There is "persistent criticism that there is little explicit use of theory to conceptualise research." From where I sit, this paper (and education research generally) has it backwards. A theory is the outcome of research. It offers an explanation of the evidence. From my perspective, that's what connectivism is - it's an explanation of what we observe in our research, not some sort of 'frame' or 'filter' or 'lens'. These are ways of distorting the evidence, rather than explaining it. P.S. see also this shorter blog post, which will be all that's left after this article disappears behind a paywall.

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