GEORGE SIEMENS: So with openness in education being around for--
I guess we're approaching close to 20 years as a domain
where people have been actively working on trying
to increase the scope and the access of open education resources,
open pedagogy just openness in general.
So from your perspective, why is it important
that we're focusing on openness?
Why is openness in education a relevant or even an imperative issue for us
to deal with?
DAVID WILEY: So for me, that becomes a question
about why is education something we should care about?
Why is there an imperative around education?
If openness is about increasing access, increasing affordability, increasing
the effectiveness, or the vibrancy, or the engagement of people in education.
Why do we care about education?
So for me, it comes down to--
when you think about both big global issues of poverty,
of hunger, of war, of whatever those kinds of things might be--
climate-- and local things, the things that
happen in individual people's lives that keep them from having the kind of life
that they wish they had, it seems like education
is the single piece that unlocks answers to all of those things.
And if selfishly if you only have one life to work on one problem,
and you look ahead and you think, gee, I've
got maybe 25, 30 productive years left, what am I going to spend my time on.
If education is the one thing that potentially
can start to knock down multiple dominoes at once,
then how do we increase access to educational opportunity for people?
How do we make that more engaging, how do we
get people more involved and interested in that?
And to me, for a very long time now felt like openness
is the biggest lever to move that in the direction of more people having
access and being able to participate.
GEORGE SIEMENS: Now how is it-- so is one of the challenges with a course
like this, you'll have people from around the world--
being involved in the course.
So the US has a unique dynamic, and I'm at the University of Texas Arlington,
I'm crossing point with Athabasca University in Canada,
and there's very, very different cultures.
And then you go to places, say, Germany or even any
of the Scandinavian countries, where education is often free.
There is zero cost to individuals, so the issue of access and cost
is really pronounced in a country like the US.
What if you're in a region like Germany, why is openness important in a country
where education is essentially free?
DAVID WILEY: So there are a couple of pieces.
To me, when I think about open--
in the context of openness and education,
there's a couple of pieces to that definition,
and that cost piece is certainly part of it.
But this starts to drift now into a conversation about permissions
and what we're able to do and what we're allowed to do.
And I'm sure I'll say this a couple of times before are done with this course,
but it becomes a five part formula for me.
The first is if we learn by the things that we do,
and I think we learned by doing, and if the function of copyright
is to restrictive or prescribe the things we're able to do,
then that means that copyright prohibits us from learning in some ways
we might otherwise be able to learn.
We learn by doing--
copyright prohibits us from doing certain things, therefore.
So as openness comes in and starts to remove some of those barriers that
permits us to do things we weren't able to do before,
and if we learned by doing, now that means
that we ought to be able to learn in ways
we haven't been able to learn before.
And that notion is really fascinating to me.
So that's beyond the cost argument.
I think it unlocks new forms of pedagogy, new ways of engaging,
and interacting with one another.
And so even in a context where tuition is free
or there's not other costs associated with it,
I think there's still a lot of power in open for people to explore.
GEORGE SIEMENS: So then if you were to take a look back
at how open education has evolved and how it's developed,
what does that look like?
How did we get to where you first started working with an open content
license to eventually MIT comes along and does open course ware
and gives a big boost to a movement that's been around for a while,
to eventually we have open online courses, to eventually you'd be BYU
and end up setting up a company to particularly advance
the needs of the field.
Explain that history to me.
How did we get pre David Wiley's open content license to where we are today?
DAVID WILEY: Yeah.
For me personally, it all hinged around open source.
GEORGE SIEMENS: And you mean open source or free software?
DAVID WILEY: I mean open source actually.
I've been involved with the free software--
I should say I've been peripherally involved as a benefactor of
and an interested observer of the free software movement during the 90s
when I was working as a webmaster and running a little internet startup
and doing some things like that.
But I can remember very clearly in early 98 when this group of people
came together and said, the free and free software is causing us--
it's causing us trouble, it's causing us trouble
with the kind of commercial adoption of this sort of approach
to developing and working with software.
And a group of people sat down and said, this label
and some of the personalities affiliated with this label
are harming the movement going forward.
Let's pick another name, and let's pick another focus.
GEORGE SIEMENS: The Stallman was nowhere in that conversation.
DAVID WILEY: Stallman was not in that conversation.
This would be Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond and people like that.
And that came out of that sit down saying, let's call this open source,
and let's focus on the pragmatic benefits of this approach,
rather than saying the word free and talking about principles of freedom,
that if you don't accept, you're a lesser human being.
GEORGE SIEMENS: I think you're making a really important point with that.
So with some of the reading that we'll have in the course,
and we certainly get into Eric's--
the cathedral and the bazaar, this broad idea
of how openness can change the relationship
that we have between who produce and the mediating agents and so on.
But it probably is worth at least emphasizing or giving a nod to--
and more than a nod, really-- but if you look
at a personality like Stallman, very consequential,
and yet by sheer brute force of will, made a pronounced change
in the development of commercialization of software.
I know there were others at the time, but he really put a stake in the ground
and became an electrifying personality that did turn some people off from it.
But the idea of openness as a philosophical ideal
versus the pragmatism that people like Raymond and Parens and others
came along and utilized-- can you talk a little bit about that distinction,
because I think that's important especially in a course
like this where we're talking openness.
Because there are idealistic attributes, and there's pragmatic--
let's get stuff done and have an impact.
DAVID WILEY: Yeah and I think that very much comes down
to the personality of the individual.
And as you look across people participating in the field,
you can see there are people who are clearly
idealists, who really feel strongly about the principals, who
are unhappy by notions of compromise, or made unhappy by notions of compromise.
And then there are people who are just trying to get the work done
and whatever kind of steps you have to take.
And I think there's room for both of those players in the space.
There's a really productive tension between those two--
I fall much more on the pragmatist side than on the pure idealist side,
but I get pulled that direction and I have
to have arguments with people there that benefit and enrich the pragmatic work
that I'm trying to do.
And I think at the same time, I pull on some
of the people who maybe are at 30,000 feet
and can't quite see what's happening on the ground.
I think that tension is really productive.
If the whole field tilted one direction or the other,
they'd be a really bad thing for the field.
GEORGE SIEMENS: Well, it's derailed that original conversation,
but we can turn-- so we got Stallman, the original free software.
We have Raymond and others that started developing with the open source
software movement.
You were going to lead into how that related to you educationally, the work
that you started doing, and then where we got to here.
DAVID WILEY: Yeah, so I was a grad student at BYU.
And I remember-- I have these moments in life
I can look back and see where I was and what was going on at the time.
I was cutting the grass at the little triplex where
I lived when I realized this open source model of licensing,
the way of thinking about that and co-development and things like that,
could actually be applied to things that aren't software.
They could be applied to textbooks, or to journal articles,
or any non-software thing.
And I remember thinking, this is important.
Somebody should try to take those principles, that licensing approach,
and we should try to roll that over into what's happening in education.
And it just so happened that I was the first one
to get something published online.
There is very much a zeitgeist at the time.
Rich Baraniuk at Rice within a year had independently
arrived at the same conclusion.
You have MIT OpenCourseWare and Creative Commons
both starting within a couple of years of that, without knowing about the work
that I had done or that had gone in other places.
So it was very much in the air in the late 90s, early 2000s
that this idea of open could be applied in other places.
GEORGE SIEMENS: And so, open course ware comes out.
You at that point--
I think you were at University of Utah?
DAVID WILEY: I was at Utah State.
GEORGE SIEMENS: That's right.
So you're at Utah State, and you started with some open education work or a lab
that you actually had set up, moved to BYU.
And what was going on around your work and openness at that time?
I know at some point, you took open education or the open content license
and you folded it into Creative Commons or basically deprecated it,
if that's the right term to use, and said, hey, go here and do this stuff.
So I'm just trying to get this trajectory of thought between openness
as the broader trends that were going on, because there is a--
open education layers on top of and influences to a degree
a number of other patterns.
Obviously the open source software movement, the open licensing,
and other schemes, they are an impact to what we do educationally.
And we'll get it through that in the course where
we start to see how publishers are responding to open content
and in some ways, being willing to acquiesce the battle,
but focus on the war, so to speak.
The bigger issue is they've shifted their focus on content.