XplanaZine

Christmas was always a fun time at my house. It was about opening presents, sharing a warm fire with family and, well, opening presents.

Now, for anyone out there who’s ever participated in a grand present-opening event like that, you understand that the purpose of the whole gig is really to open every single one of the gifts. Your job isn’t to open just a couple of packages and then go get something to eat. Your task is to take a deep breath, dive into the wrapping and packaging, and not come up for air until every single item has been opened.

And, if we’re being honest, most of us would admit that we prefer a present-opening holiday like Christmas over a simple birthday. Think about it. At a birthday party, only one person gets to do all the unwrapping. At Christmas, everybody gets lots of presents and everybody gets to share in the pure, unadulterated joy of opening them.

When I think about open source projects, I liken them to Christmas and birthdays and unwrapping all those presents. Some open source projects are one-way jobs, like birthdays, that are the product of a single developer who has a good idea and wants to share the results with others. These are extremely important projects and provide lots of useful tools. They are limited, however, in that the lone developer is ultimately the final and only arbiter of what features get added. Other than writing e-mail and participating in forums, there’s nothing any of us can do as individual users to change the product.

The other type of open source project, the Christmas version, is a true community effort. Whether we’re talking about Moodle or Wikipedia, these projects rely on community participation and empower community members to be actively involved in product constructions (each according to his or her ability or skills). In this type of open source project, community members actually make many of the decisions about product features and there are avenues for building customized versions of the product to suit individual community member needs.

If I haven’t already shown my hand, I have some personal biases regarding open source projects. First, while I think they’re all valuable, I tend to be more interested in the community or Christmas version. Second, it’s my personal belief that some projects necessarily fit one open source model better than another.

In particular, I think the project size, the potential value derived from collaboration, and the desired diffusion of a product are key factors to deciding whether it should be an individual or community-based open source project. Open source online courses and curriculum are examples of projects that, in my opinion, are much better suited for community-based open source development.

To date, open source course initiatives, like those at MIT or Tufts, have been institutional projects that utilize the teaching content of individual instructors. While this is a good start — believe me, I’m not nay saying these important efforts — the next evolution of open source course and curriculum development will necessarily be community-based. Instructors, students, and others will collaborate on discipline-specific courses and textbooks that, through the community effort, will represent a broad range of interests and needs, and will exceed the quality level of proprietary products currently offered.

How is that possible? It’s possible because: 1) interoperability among learning technologies will finally allow us to create content one time in a collaborative fashion and then distribute it in many directions; 2) courses and curricula are necessarily community endeavors from the outset. Creating them from scratch with a community vision will bring us much closer to our ideal of what they should and can be; 3) the current market — proprietary and open source — has not adequately provided for the needs of the majority; 4) there’s a growing precedent for collaborative open source work in education; and 5) because free is good.

These collaborative projects, on a broader scale, are just around the corner. Within a year, we’ll be able to start using some free courses (pieces of the curriculum) on multiple platforms, that have been developed by the community, and that are flexible enough to meet each user’s individual needs.

Personally, I can’t wait.

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