Emily Durham Bradshaw

In his keynote talk for RailsConf2021, David Hansson criticized the scarcity model of open sourcing. This is the model of both Gates and Stallman (Hansson, 2021) which operates on the idea that code must be licensed in order to protect the general coding world against freeloaders or stolen code.  This model is a scarcity model, and Hansson pointed out that there is no such thing as scarcity with open sourcing.  There is no limited amount of code, no boundaries for its use.  The tragedy of the commons is a misappropriated metaphor because in the commons, there is a scarcity of resources so there must be limitations and regulations in order to guide public use.  But this is not the case with open sourcing.  In fact, the result of this misapplication is that those engaged in start-ups who are working overtime for a decade to develop and guard code suffer from burnout, lose a sense of freedom and creativity, and give over their quality of life to extrinsic motivation. The Rails project, Ha

Although the internet has changed the publishing world, including academic publishing, standards for rank advancement for professors have not changed much since pre-internet days.  The Journal Impact Factor is a major metric for measuring success, quantifying professors’ involvement in academic journal publication, conference participation, and citation counts.  It leaves out newer forms of impact, such as open scholarship, community service, and new publication types and alt metrics (McKiernan et al, 2019). I was looking for a university model showing how some colleges set up rank advancement to include a broader, more modern view of rank advancement. Instead, I found a declaration of independence from the current system of research assessment.  The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is a science-discipline declaration with thousands of signatures joining to protest the use of unfair, manipulable journal publishing matrices.  They call for a focus on the actual qu

Academic echo chambers “Twitter makes smart people dumb,” tweeted George Siemens.  Siemens is reflecting on the fact that algorithms based on retweets make our networks more and more homogenous, and our language is limited to 140 characters and conversation bytes.  He is also throwing out argument bait to elicit counter-discourse, in my opinion. Or he is just privileged and arrogant calling his colleagues dumb, some of whom find a voice and self-positioning with social media that they would not find otherwise.  Sherrie Spelic took the bait, indicating that she was annoyed by both his baiting and his apparent arrogance.  She replied on her blog that Twitter does not have that kind of control over us, and that she is “nobody’s version of dumb.”  Spelic is making the point that with some amount of effort and a general mindset of growth, we need not dismiss the forum altogether.  An article from Science in conjunction with Facebook shows that users actually cull their feeds to match their

"Sunrise Acrobatics"  by  Zach Dischner  is licensed under  CC BY-SA 2.0 I was sitting in Zoom class with OER-expert Dr. David Wiley, who teaches one class every other year in the Master’s program I am enrolled in, along with eight other students, when I got caught up in OER-phoria.  The realization that copyright was straight jacketing contemporary culture and creativity and that open licenses could democratize education globally was mind-blowing.  Now, David Wiley was in no way encouraging any band-wagon hopping. There were no drums, but I felt ready to march.  There was no flag, but I was ready to wave one high in the air.  In fact, I may or may not have handed in a creative assignment where I wrote a song about the benefits and challenges of OER through the years set to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Though it was meant to be funny, I had forgotten during the pandemic that I was not a gifted singer.  I fear it registered somewhere in the area of “memorable but

Scholars writing about Open Educational Resources (OER), including myself, use expansive vocabulary about the potential for the democratization of learning.  For instance, this "lockbox" statement from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2013) regarding the OER movement provides an example of such liberal democratic sentiment:   "These digital materials have the potential to give people everywhere equal access to our collective knowledge and provide many more people around the world with access to quality education by making lectures, books, and curricula widely available on the Internet for little or no cost. By enabling virtually anyone to tap into, translate, and tailor educational materials previously reserved only for students at elite universities, OER has the potential to jump start careers and economic development in communities that lag behind. Millions worldwide have already opened this educational lockbox, but if OER is going to democratize learning and

The Practice of Receiving    I am actually a huge proponent of sharing, and I believe deeply in the words I have heard from OER researcher, David Wiley: "Knowledge worth knowing is worth sharing."  In a recent article by Stephen Downes (2022), he writes about the "Seven Habits of Highly Connected People."  One of these is to "Share."  He advises readers not to pull back from sharing because they might be worried about someone else benefitting from their hard work.  "The way to function in a connected world is to share without thinking about what you will get in return. It is to share without worrying about so-called “free-riders” or people taking advantage of your work."  Your good work in sharing will come back around to benefit you, according to Downes.  But I am just a little bit hesitant.   Many of my higher education colleagues come from ethnic and cultural groups that have been marginalized.  "Erasure" is a real thing.  The "