My notes from James Boyle's keynote at UMW's Faculty Academy, "Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know about our bias against openness"
Pick between two networks:
Network 1: Users can perform a set of white listed functions. Only certain respectable entities can distribute information: a few universities, some newspapers, governments. Dumb terminals. functioning happens in the network center.
Network 2: Distributed, dumb network. Intelligence at the ends. We don't know what stuff is traveling on the network (text, sounds, video, maps).
network 2 will lead to porn, spam, idiots, ranting, stupid rumors, piracy. Anyone can connect to this. Whose gonna do commerce on this thing?
No one would have voted for network 2 in 1992.
Two models for encyclopedia to have information on anything and become an authoritative source:
Encyclopedia 1: Need best experts. going to have to be paid a lot. need peer reviewers. edit for style and consistency. enormous investment. strong copyrights to protect this investment. trademarks for logo to say this is the authoritative source.
encyclopedia 2: we'll create a site and people can put stuff up.
The difference between these two models relates to property rights, corporate organization.
Two software models:
Software model 1: machine code, drm, sold through license. Software model 2: open source.
Both worked. IBM makes twice from open source, than from paid portfolio.
West point:if you want a secure system you need an open system. Anyone is smart enough to come up with an algorithm that they can't break.
No one would think this 17 years ago. We are always wrong in one direction. In each time, the open version appeared that it was not going to work.
not claiming that open is always better. Sometimes we need closed systems for privacy or property rights.
There are reasons to believe that cognitively we skew to see more dangers and few benefits of open systems, and skew to see more benefits and less dangers of closed systems. This is the cultural agoraphobia.
behavioral economics: people don't think the way economists think that we think. We buy warranties even though they are not a good deal.
We are not risk neutral, we are strong risk adverse, the risk makes us feel disproportionate regret.
As a teacher you took methods, tricks, exam formats of other teachers and made them your own.
open materials aren't just free to copy, but are free to adapt, version, customize, just as with open source software.
We have flourishing open software, open encyclopedia, open network, but education is behind.
Academic presses: Tons of stuff. You can't buy book anymore. So clearly they are all available online? The daily show puts their stuff online for free. .
Empirical evidence that having books online for free drives sells up
In academia we have a blindness towards openness.
openness can cure openness: google pagerank. follow whre animals go to the water to find waterhole.
we (the audience) make decisions: Your instinct will be to clamp down on the side of control.
Other people will think of better stuff to do with our materials than we can. There are billion people wired out there.
Higher Education is being more timid than viacom. yes, there are risks. But there are concerns about losing audiences. With every type of literacy, there is point where there are conerns about opening up the franchise. Letting women vote, large scale reading of the bible in your native language, scribal conventioans that made it very hard to write, deliberately difficult - not a bug but a feature. lawyers: we have our own language. you need to pay us to speak it for you. "Law French"
design principles: default should be open. if not, burden of proof is on person seeking closed solution. Some items, like students social security numbers, will be easy to meet. Others like ed resources, will not be as easy.
Tech systems: make them open so users can modify with their behavior. Huge repositories with tons of meta data, costs millions of dollars. No one uses them. Not designed where user behavior modifies the system. (like google).
In pilot training you are trained not to trust your perceptions. We need to learn to distrust our cultral agoraphobia.
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