Some of you may recall last fall I organized a Peer 2 Peer University course on “Collaborative Lesson Planning” [CLP] along with Dr. King. Courses started again at the beginning of January and Dr. King are once again offering our course. Besides us there are 9 members in the course this time, up from 4 last, and as organizer’s we have a much better sense of what’s going on.

Heading in to week 1 I outlined the expected work from members in the syllabus, basically: start a journal & introduce yourself, respond to someone else’s journal, write a plagiarism statement and do the weekly reading. We had 3 people start journals & introduce themselves: Joe, Erich & Celaina. In her intro Celaina did the plagiarism statement and slightly later Joe did his as well. The reading was about hacking, which perhaps was a little too abstract (side note I linked to the same article in my writings about Public Domain Education scroll down on the linked-2 post). I feel some people might’ve seen it and wondered what the hell it had to do with CLP, thinking of the popular conception of the term hacking: breaking into someone else’s computer and messing s&*t up. I tried to contextualize it with a Stallman article about hacking, but my suspicion is more people were still thinking about like Julian Assange in a bad way (not how I think of him) when they heard hacker. As I expected however, Joe did respond to the readings with this intriguing book idea he’s had ruminating.

Heading into week 2 I am a little behind. Week 2 began on Wednesday and I didn’t give out the weekly reading assignment till Thursday, nor write this recap till Friday. I still haven’t done personal e-mails/contacts to everyone, something I found to be very important in the last cycle.

Do you have any ideas about how any of this? Please share them in the comments.

image: “School Boy” by, gustavorezende, 2011, dedicated to the public domain. Pub’d in the Open Clipart Library.

I joined CC two years ago this January, and since then my views about CC’s role in culture and education have evolved. Back then, I was pretty much a novice to this space, though sharing in education sounded like a no brainer to me. But I’ve had time to grow with my program (CC Learn), and develop my own views. That said, what follows is an exploration into how I personally draw parallels between the arts and education, two areas in which I take a vested interest. I am in no way representing any entity other than myself.

Basically, I started out thinking CC was cool—that on the whole, it made sense. But I never thought it could change the world or anything. I thought it gave creators more choices, especially ‘cause this crazy copyright system of ours was so confusing to the average person. It seemed to make especial sense in education, since that’s what people do—they share to teach and they share to learn. Duh. But that was the whole of it really. I didn’t think much further than that two years ago. I thought promoting the CC licenses to people who wanted to use them and people who probably should use them was what I was in the business of doing.

But as I work further in this space, I talk to a lot more people and I observe a lot more people. I observe the different effects that Creative Commons, as the legal and technical infrastructure of open education and open culture generally, has had on a generation. I also see potential for future generations, not just mine. And I have come to realize that CC can do more than facilitate a culture of sharing in the arts and education. CC can really change the social landscape of things, and it has already effected this social change in the arts. I think it can do the same in education. But what do I mean by social change?

Imagine the world of OER without CC. The term “open educational resource” would be a vacuous or redundant term at best. “Open” would simply mean freely accessible. Without CC, individuals or organizations would continue to offer their resources under custom terms (aka a custom license*) or under no terms at all. Custom licenses would give certain people/entities permission to freely access and maybe to freely do other things with the content, depending on who they were and what they wanted to do. But these types of custom permissions have always existed in education, even before the internet came into being. In nonvirtual life, there are always special exceptions for education—such as student discounts, libraries, professors and teachers who rely on fair use to make copies of publications for use in their classrooms. Custom licenses with exceptions for education would merely migrate these types of activities online.

Custom licenses currently exist*, all over the internet in fact. But as we have seen with the arts, the internet enables so much more than that. Relying only on existing copyright laws to continue regulating educational activities is to continue with a status quo that does a huge disservice to what is possible. Because it doesn’t take you long to realize that the status quo in education is mediocre. The old systems are comfortable, but they are also inefficient, and hugely debilitating when educators and learners want to share and collaborate outside of their institutions. Freely available educational resources under standard copyright law are either all-rights-reserved or custom licensed. The ability to sort out copyright law and the various custom licenses is no easy task, even for lawyers. Teams of lawyers often take years to work out details in policy that will allow individuals from separate institutions to collaborate, and there is similar red tape even between departments within the same institution. I don’t even want to go into what it’s like for different countries. What user/educator/learner is going to go through the trouble of reading all the different terms everything is under to synthesizing and concluding what can be used with what? Not many. And even if they did, their attempt would be an interpretation.

Granted, there are many working towards copyright reform, and pushing reliance on copyright exceptions and limitations, such as fair use. This side of things is important too. But CC is more than just a temporary fix to the copyright problem.

What is so revolutionary about CC licenses in the arts is not that they made possible or somehow engendered a sharing culture that never before existed. The sharing culture already existed, just as amateur creators—creators who love making art for the sake of art—already existed. Certainly, CC made legal that sharing culture, gave them a way to move their activities online and across timezones, but that is only one of CC’s contributions. Other obvious contributions were making that sharing easy with human-readable deeds, and making that sharing discoverable with RDFa. CC licenses continue to cultivate and help sustain the sharing culture in the arts, but it did not originate that sharing culture.

You know that saying, the world is your oyster? Well, what is so revolutionary about CC licenses in the arts is that it transformed artists’ level of engagement with each other over the internet. The internet was useful for many things before CC, but now the internet has become a veritable farm for oysters, with each artist contributing to find, grow, or cultivate art. And the most amazing thing is that many of them do it for free. Which brings us to the second revolutionary outcome of CC licenses—it has made the world realize that there is this community of artists who love to create for the sake of creating. It has brought to the surface a community that used to be underground and guerrilla-organized, and it has provided that community with an open space in which to work, collaborate, and create. Now that community is very much a movement, connected not only by their passion for making art but by their passion for sharing it. For the first time, artists have the upper hand over institutions, galleries and recording companies. Artists no longer have to go through a middleman to support and sustain themselves. Artists can freely leverage the internet to continue doing what they have always loved doing, and as with anything where the scope becomes bigger than it once was, artists have discovered many, many more possibilities for creativity and collaboration in art-making than ever before. These are the social changes that CC licenses enabled in the arts. And these are the social changes that CC licenses can enable in education.

Because we can do better than the status quo. OER without CC is not OER; it is old educational practices migrated online under the guise of “open.” Access to free materials is not revolutionary; you had libraries and public schools before the internet. What is revolutionary: transforming educators’ and learners’ level of engagement with each other over the internet—in a sense making the internet their oyster. What is revolutionary: bringing to the surface the community of educators and learners who already share and collaborate in guerrilla fashion and providing them with an open space to continue that collaboration and innovation. What is revolutionary: giving educators and learners the upper hand over institutions, academic journals, and textbook companies. What is revolutionary: changing the social landscape of education through copyright.

I think we have to stop viewing education itself as a silo, giving it a special status or exception because it’s “education.” The world of education is the world of culture and creativity. What people often don’t realize or recognize is that teaching and learning are creative processes. What is a creative process in the arts (remix) is also very much present in education. Educators and learners remix all the time; that is the nature of teaching and learning. (Good) teaching is to synthesize concepts with materials and to relay that synthesis in scholarship or living form with learners. Learning is to pull apart and put together the same concepts and materials to produce something “original” that is the result of this remix. But most importantly, the creative process occurs in the interaction between both groups when the lines between the roles are blurred.

It’s not just about sharing for free. I can share for free without CC, that’s plain enough. All I have to do is slap on a notice that says “free to take”, much like when people leave their stuff behind in boxes on the sidewalk. But that doesn’t really do much more than shift ownership of crap you don’t want to someone who wants it. There’s no interaction there, no exchange that results in more than what I started with. What CC facilitates is that interaction and exchange that results in more than “free to take.” Innovation results. Creativity results. Change, the social kind, results. People start sharing differently, purposefully. We start rethinking old systems, old ways of seeing education. And that’s when we start using CC to help us achieve ends beyond “free to take.” Like in the arts—for some, CC became a tool to make money, bring fame, create awareness. In education, similar and greater outcomes can be achieved by leveraging open standards.

Because in the end, CC’s role in education is different from its role in the arts. In the arts, CC gives creators (namely, artists, musicians) a choice–it’s an opt-in system. In education, the system does not depend on commercial values so much to keep it alive. A lot of artists make their living being artists, and yet they freely share and collaborate regardless. But in education, most people don’t make a living selling their lesson plans and writing papers. People make a living sharing their expertise with others, building on their work with others, thereby building their reputation and improving their teaching and learning outcomes. So you start thinking about all the stuff that’s possible when you change the system from “opt-in to open”, to “opt-out of open”. You start rethinking the default of all-rights-reserved and how that would look if it was some-rights reserved, or even no-rights-reserved. What, after all, do we value in the field of education more than in the field of the arts? And how can we reflect those values in new and better ways of doing things?

The open education community today is only a small subsection of those involved in education worldwide, but some great initiatives and projects have already come out of it. An initiative like Peer 2 Peer University is a prime example of the social change that can happen in education when you start building on the concepts of open. P2PU is teaching and learning by peers for peers, and it is organized learning that is taking place outside of any institution. It’s what can happen when the default changes, when open educational resources scale. CC helps make that scale possible, which is what will ultimately transform the social landscape of education.

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*Of course there are caveats, ie. CC BY-NC-SA is not compatible with CC BY-SA, nor is CC BY-NC compatible with CC BY-SA, etc. (See Remixing OER: A Guide to License Compatibility.) This is why CC Learn recommends CC BY for OER (Why CC BY?), the only license that requires only attribution to reuse, redistribute, and remix a work.

*Custom licenses contain text that declares “free for ____ and ____”; the blanks are usually filled with a type of use and type of group or entity, ie. for “educational” / “noncommercial” / “personal” use by “individuals” / “schools” / “nonprofits”.

*See “What status for “open”? An examination of the licensing policies of open educational organizations and projects”

A Peer 2 Peer University co-founder recently posed this question to our tight knit community of volunteers: “Where are we in terms of P2PU’s evolution (one guy with his shirt off, or three people falling over themselves?)” Of course, this question was in reference to this infamous YouTube video of the Sasquatch music festival where, if you haven’t seen it, one lone naked dude starts an awesome dance party. I have to say, that after our inaugural workshop last week in Berlin, I think we’re past the point of three people falling over themselves. We were probably (definitely) in that phase during the pilot, where we stumbled through our courses, attempting to cohere and make sense of things, but without the glue to pull it all together. Even after the pilot and before the workshop, we sort of looked back and saw the different pieces and couldn’t quite put it together in our heads. For one thing, we didn’t know each other. Instead of a face without a name, it was more like an email without a face, anonymous @ placeholders populating our inboxes. Secondly, we knew we were scattered around the globe, which somehow deepened the mental disconnect. And finally, though we all had different reasons for volunteering, I suspect most of us had joined thinking it would simply be a fun experiment. Sure, why not organize a course online? It’s only six weeks of my time. An online book club? Sounds fun, and most importantly, noncommittal. If the pilot tanks (or even if it doesn’t), we can always pull out. We’re only volunteers after all. At least, that’s how I felt.

Then the P2PU workshop transpired. But before I dive into that, let me give newbies some background into what P2PU is, and what it’s all about (or at least, has become). I think Larry hit the nail on the head when he said that, “P2PU is the social learning wrapper around OER.” More elaborately stated, “The mission of P2PU is to leverage the power of the Internet and social software to enable communities of people to support learning for each other. P2PU combines open educational resources, structured courses, and recognition of knowledge/learning in order to offer high-quality low-cost education opportunities. It is run and governed by volunteers.” It’s an idea that was dreamed up and shaped by five founders a year or so ago, that materialized into an initiative called Peer 2 Peer University, manifesting itself in both virtual (p2pu.org) and physical (p2pu.org/Team) forms. We launched the pilot with seven courses (seven+ volunteer course organizers, plus volunteers around tech and admin issues) on 09.09.09. The pilot ran for six weeks, during which time we saw a good number of participants drop off like flies. The majority of our participants had full time jobs, were full time moms or dads, or were otherwise engaged with non-virtual life. There was also the issue of multiple tech platforms (blogs, wikis, etc.) which not all of us or our participants were fully familiar or comfortable with. Basically, it was a true pilot, from start to finish.

So we learned a lot about what didn’t work, but how to transform that knowledge into progress?

Well, with one awesome facilitator to keep us on target and another one to keep us moving forward, we put our heads together and brainstormed our way through four intense days of workshop. We set the agenda on the first day in post-its–the Wall of Ideas–and then proceeded to take the wall apart piece by piece in break-out sessions in the days ensuing. Personally leery of group work, I was at first skeptical about these group sessions, where we were split off into three groups of four–how much could we really accomplish with three disparate group resolutions? How much consensus could we really reach? And wouldn’t we end up hating each other in the end having to work, live, and play with each other? (Especially me with my penchant for disliking most people upon first meeting?)

First impressions, even if they are unpleasant (which they weren’t), don’t last long when you have a group of truly genuine, intelligent, and like-minded people together in one space for four days. Maybe it was Berlin, or the uber hip design space we were working in, or the fact that we all cared about the basic innovative idea of P2PU (peers learning from peers outside the ivy walls of tradition)–whatever it was, and as cheesy as it may sound, we truly connected. There was not one person who came out of that workshop who was skeptical of what we had accomplished or where we were headed. Some of us may have started out that way, myself included, but by the end we were ready to change the world, or at least the unbounded universe of education.

It was amazing how much consensus we reached after the hours of discussion in groups and report-backs to the group at large, how much concrete progress we made in terms of objectives and volunteered tasks to achieve those objectives. I think the moment when I knew I was part of one of the most functional groups of people I have ever worked with was near the end on Saturday during the tech session. John got up after our report-backs for what we’d like to see created (because the idea of casual changes to an existing platform did not even cross our minds) and laid out a schedule of deadlines and feedback dates where this was all going to be implemented. My jaw dropped–really? Since when did developers ever set deadlines like this, and since when did those deadlines ever come to mean anything? Especially volunteer developers? I was floored. I think we all were, not to mention incredibly humbled by this collective vision that had somehow coalesced from our individual ambitions and presented itself to us unawares.

I may sound like a giant cheese ball, but I really, truly appreciated the presence of every single person I met in Berlin. Throughout the group discussions and individual conversations I had with people, not to forget the dinners and yes, not entirely sober dance sessions, I really got to know each and every P2PU volunteer as more than just an @ placeholder, and as someone who was contributing to some larger effort just like me, on an entirely voluntary basis. I think in the end that is the crux of P2PU, that it’s made up of and run by volunteers–people who are willing to risk their time and effort to realize a vision that may not be realizable.

There are various theories as to why this happens in groups, one of which we discussed over our last dinner–that a part of a person’s brain shuts off when she or he feels part of a larger group effort, essentially positing that some part of her nature is satisfied that was previously working to be satisfied (maybe?)–but theorizing aside, P2PU is a lot more concrete and unidirectional than it once was. We have a real agenda and a community vision, and we’re headed towards it. I’d say that makes us more than three people falling over themselves. We’re somewhere in between three people and the awesome dance party that erupts at the end. We’re in the growing stages, and I’m willing to stick around ’til the end, if there is such a thing.

Current textbook initiatives give the impression that educational quality will suffer without textbooks. In response to economic crises, these initiatives focus on saving the textbook, by either reducing its cost or digitizing many of its components. However, this public perception, that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, begs the question. It assumes that the textbook enhances the quality of education and furthermore, that teachers and students know how to use the textbook effectively. But all evidence strongly suggests that the textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource and does not enhance educational quality. So if educational quality is not harmed, and may even improve sans textbooks, do textbooks still need saving? Or are there other resources that may better serve K-12 education?

Do textbooks enhance the quality of education?

Evidence strongly suggests that the average textbook, as currently constructed, is not a high quality resource. Several studies, beginning in the 1980’s, have elaborated on this evidence, concluding that the textbook is a hopelessly low quality educational resource. Low quality because of the way textbooks are written and processed; hopelessly low quality because the existing process of textbook creation is enforced by state policies. This process is known as the state textbook adoption process.

K-12 textbooks are not generally written by experts or even teachers; rather, they are written by teams of anonymous writers from development houses. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, textbooks are “hurriedly put together by teams of hack writers from ‘development houses,’ known as ‘chop shops’.”  The identities of the writers remain largely undisclosed, and they are not the university professors often cited as contributors. In fact, several professors who have been cited as contributors to popular textbooks deny ever having read or seen the textbooks.   Experts are also not involved in reviewing the quality of textbooks, such as checking for accuracy of facts. This is because there is no review process for quality.

Instead, the review process is grounded in the textbook adoption process that is mandated in twenty-one plus states. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute defines it as, “The process, in place in twenty-one states, of reviewing textbooks according to state guidelines and then mandating specific books that schools must use, or lists of approved textbooks that schools must choose from.” Due to conflicting political and ideological views, state guidelines are fashioned to please a wide spectrum of demands regarding inclusion and exclusion of content. These demands result in a second set of guidelines from textbook publishing companies, who preempt the adoption process with their own checklists to speed things along. These checklists are not checking for quality; they are checking for politically correct representation of content and groups of people, in addition to checking for “morally questionable” facts, regardless of whether such inclusions or exclusions are accurate portrayals of the subject matter. Furthermore, California and Texas, as the most populous states, are the two major players in textbook adoption, which means their guidelines affect the majority of textbooks in America, as the market depends on their approval. Four publishing companies constitute 70% of this market, having built long-standing partnerships with the states. This makes it incredibly difficult for alternative textbook companies with a focus on quality to break in to the market.

The U.S. History textbook is a prime example and outcome of the textbook adoption process. The U.S. History textbook is subject to two major problems. In a testimony to the Senate in 2003, the American Textbook Council  summed up these problems as “dumbing down” and “increasing content bias and distortion.” According to the council, current history textbooks are more concerned with capturing and sustaining short attention spans than with relaying accurate and compelling history. They have become “picture and activity books instead”, with the actual text as the supplemental component. The language of the text itself is grossly simplistic, catering to all reading levels, rather than relaying events in compelling narrative. Instead, “states often apply “readability” formulas to ensure that textbooks use simpler words and phrases, resulting in a lowest-common-denominator approach.” The second problem is that history textbooks are censored with “increasing content bias and distortion.” Content bias and distortion refers to the differing political ideologies competing for inclusion and exclusion of facts. Since different people and groups have different ideas about what should or shouldn’t be included as relevant to U.S. or world history, the contents of history textbooks are screened and then screened again to appease all parties. This process not only produces mediocre results, but a politically crafted history of the United States, which often glosses over or even entirely omits relevant facts while elaborating on inoffensive details. However, since “one person’s distortion is another’s correction,” the details actually included in history textbooks are either highly insignificant or so generalized that they fail to deliver the meanings of those details in context.

None of this is evidence that textbooks enhance the quality of education. On the contrary, all evidence affirms that the majority of textbooks are low to mediocre quality resources. Such resources run the risk of decreasing, rather than increasing, the quality of education. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in math and reading were found to be generally lower in textbook adoption states.

Do teachers and students know how to use the textbook?

If we believe that educational quality will suffer without textbooks, we are also assuming that teachers and students know to use textbooks. In other words, we are assuming that teachers know how to effectively leverage textbooks as teaching resources and students know how to learn from them as learning resources. For teachers, effectively leveraging textbooks requires more than simply assigning reading and lecturing on that reading during class–it means using the textbooks as a starting point for other perspectives and educational resources. For students, learning from textbooks requires more than just reading the textbooks–it means understanding and retaining what they have read. The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning reports that,

“For centuries educators asumed that student learning consisted of rote memorization of new knowledge–students listened to lectures and read books, their progress measured by their ability to recite what they had heard and read. But research in the past 20 years demonstrates that another form of learning is also important–the learning that occurs when instruction is inquiry-oriented, encouraging learners to actively think about and try out new ideas in light of their prior knowledge, to personally transform the knowledge for their own use, and to apply it in other situations.”

Teachers effectively leverage textbooks when they use them as starting points, subsequently utilizing other educational resources (which include materials, tools, media, and techniques) that instigate inquiry, activity, and creativity. “Mere regurgitation of facts and figures… is not sufficient for in-depth understanding” (How Teachers Learn to Engage Students in Active Learning). On the other hand, actively engaging students while exposing them to other perspectives helps them to fully grasp and retain what they have read.

Unfortunately, most teachers and students do not know how to use textbooks in this manner. Most teachers do little more than assign reading, only to lecture later on the same reading, and as a result, most students do not retain what they have read, if they have read at all. According to The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, “Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered. History and social studies teachers, for example, often rely almost exclusively on textbooks, instead of requiring students to review primary sources and read trade books by top historians.”

Further evidence suggests that this misuse of textbooks is affecting students’ performance. In a study on the impact of curriculum on achievement in twenty-five countries, Professor William Schmidt found that “textbook content in different nations correlated closely to what their children learned–and how they fared on tests.” Even though U.S. textbooks were hundreds of pages longer than other countries, U.S. students were still learning less. In History, especially, one of the most “textbook-heavy” subjects, “half of high school seniors scored “below basic”–the lowest outcome possible–on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History.” (Too Little Too Late: American High Schools in an International Context)

But isn’t the California Digital Textbooks Initiative improving textbooks?

Among the plethora of new initiatives surrounding textbooks, the Free Digital Textbook Initiative in California is the most notable because of its ties to both state policy and alternative textbook publishing models. It is a plan heralded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in response to the state’s economic crisis. The initiative provides for free digital textbooks for high school math and science, and lays out a set of state standards for those subjects. Content developers submit digital textbooks that are reviewed by teachers and experts in math and science to align to those standards.

The initiative’s appeal is that it purports to use a process different from traditional textbook adoption. Its initial phase boasts of alternative content developers, consisting of non-profits, such as the CK-12 Foundation, Connexions, Curriki, and individual authors. Content review to meet state standards is facilitated by the California Learning Resource Network (CLRN). In California’s press release on August 11, 2009, ten of the sixteen textbooks submitted were found to be acceptable, meeting 90% of the state’s standards.

The intent behind the initiative is a positive one, and the process thus described seems headed in the right direction. However, as it stands the initiative puts no real dent in California’s textbook adoption policy, as it becomes clear that none of these textbooks are required for districts to purchase and use. In order for materials to become a required text, they must meet every standard, including California’s social content standards, which none have been reviewed for.  For this review to occur, creators of the textbooks must go through the social content standard review process, which is not only costly and time consuming, but runs the risk of dumbing down their textbooks to the same level as currently required textbooks.

Even if we assume that somehow these textbooks will survive the reviews unscathed and maintain their existing levels of quality, nothing ensures their proper use in the classroom. With cut funding in the state, districts may be expected to access the texts only online, even when they don’t have computers for every student or the teacher/student training necessary to help them work with texts in digital formats. The initiative does not call for additional funding for hardware, training, or supplemental resources. Additionally, only textbooks go through the review process, which means that only textbooks can be required for use in districts. Other educational resources, such as digital materials and software, are never required statewide. Requiring only the digital textbooks and not the means to leverage them leaves teachers and students in pretty much the same boat as before, only this time without funding for the hard copies. Though the quality of textbooks may improve via this initiative, there is no guarantee that they will be used, or used properly. After all, the quality of instruction depends on more than just the textbook.

“Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors. Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students.” –Eric Frank, Flatworld Knowledge

Conclusion

In conclusion, efforts are better spent building upon what we have learned about textbooks in the past few decades, instead of trying to save a dying resource. Textbooks may not need saving. Textbooks, as they currently stand, do not enhance the quality of education. They are outdated resources that have been enforced by outdated policies. Most teachers and students use the textbook as a crutch rather than a tool, and as studies show, this linear way of teaching has resulted in less learning and lower student performance. Though some current textbook initiatives may alleviate symptoms temporarily, they are essentially flogging the same tired mule. The future of education does not hold textbooks, at least in the traditional sense of textbooks; it holds the plethora of other resources that better serve it. We should focus on prioritizing the creation and adoption of these resources so that they are accessible, adaptable, and don’t fall into the same mediocre traps of the textbook.

I like Boston; it’s unassuming. The city doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is, namely, a smallish town with high rises in some directions and green, trimmed shrubbery in others. Granted, I have not seen much of the city; having wandered to the Commons after my talk, I managed to surprise only Paul Revere at his grave site in Granary Cemetery. But I gathered this much—that the city, along with its neighboring harbors, is quietly humming with genius. The number of bookish looking people one runs into on the street compete with the number of hipsters one runs into in Brooklyn’s Park Slope—not quite overwhelming, but steadily undercurrent nonetheless, a healthy overflow from those districts that cannot quite contain them all at the same time.

The conference itself was teeming with a variety of a different sort; the make-up of the audience (or perhaps the auditorium itself) strangely reminded me of a theater I attended back in Orange County. The crowd was a tad older, and certainly more formally dressed than the usual canvas sneaker and jean combo I am used to. And not entirely opposed to free culture folk, but certainly unlike, they were the paradigm of decorum.

WhippleHill services high schools in their online communication needs, and mainly because its founder, Travis Warren, went to one, it specifically targets private schools. WhippleHill is a for-profit, but like a lot of for-profits who offer services around next generation web technologies, pushing out open content and tools to their community only helps them. WhippleHill is a great example of the service model that is growing around open content and open tools, and I think it’s a model others should be taking note of, especially in this belly-up economy.

If anyone can work up a crowd, I should have guessed it would be Clay Shirky (or someone like him). Shirky elicited much laughter, and I definitely recognized anecdotes from his book whereupon I had LOL-ed. The one that got the crowd in particular was involving high school students’ myspace or blog postings, which usually revolved around such “banal” subjects (Shirky’s words not mine) like the thumb fishing app for the iPhone (personally, I did not know such an app existed and so found this post rather interesting). The title of the one student’s blog post was “Gone fishin’ ” and displayed an image of the iPhone with the app in the background. Underneath, it read, “I have been spending way too much time on this” or something akin to it. Now why would she (it was a she, and a fashion student in this case with a (not-so-curious to me anyway) fascination with Hello Kitty phone covers) post something so banal? Shirky asked. It’s simple; she’s not talking to you.

This, he continued, is what high school students discuss at the food court in the mall. If you’ve ever listened in on one of their conversations, it is filled with banal subjects like Hello Kitty phones. But you are obviously the weird one in this case, for what are you doing at the mall listening in?

Funny, and hilarious by some standards, but I had read it before. So what piqued my interest was his pizza-by-the-slice analogy (if it was in his book, I missed it). Maybe I’m just a foodie, but I found it a very apt example of what can happen when you get large groups of people together. Basically, Shirky grew up in the Midwest, where he worked at a pizza joint that only sold whole pies. (Myself having worked at a pizza chain in the OC recognized and sympathized with this situation.) Upon a visit when he was 16 to New York City, he was astonished that their pizza places not only sold pizza by the pie, but by the slice, and he wondered how this was sustainable. Well it turns out that NYC pizza joints have the pizza baked ahead of time, a novel concept, and simply reheat each slice when sold. From this he gleaned that the city has enough people willing to purchase pizza by the slice, which is what makes this type of marketing strategy sustainable. “When you get really large amounts of people involved, improbable events become certainties,” he concluded. “You can’t predict in advance how things will happen, so you have to provide tools to allow things to happen.” Baking the pizza prior to purchase was this sort of tool for pizza joints; it not only saved time but gave people more options. In turn, it allowed a kind of business (pizza-by-the-slice) to flourish that would not have otherwise done so.

Shirky is the master at anecdotes, and dropped a few more gems into the bucket before retiring to answer questions from the audience. I won’t go into detail about them here, for risk of running too long like my last post, but I would urge any and everyone to read his book, Here Comes Everybody. It puts the world into enlightening anecdotal perspective, and you are bound to catch yourself uttering a lot of “Mmmhmms” throughout. Anyway, now that I’ve done my part in promoting book sales, I wonder how long it will take before he decides to make it available online under a Creative Commons license…

“Loss of control is already in the past.”

This was the response Shirky gave to an audience member who asked how he should deal with parental and faculty concerns about the use of new media tools. It was also, coincidentally, the meme I went with for my own presentation, where I emphasized that it is up to us to educate our youth with a different approach to copyright law, because kids are going to keep doing what they are doing anyway—namely, what the Recording Industry Association of America calls “piracy”. The world is changing has already changed and we need to do our part in dealing with it rather than flogging a dead horse.

I presented to a full room, and even spied people lingering in the doorway while I was giving my talk. I thought my voice would give (I did croak a few times, and friends have told me I have an “adorable” little lisp…), or that my Macbook would suddenly shut down (as punishment for using proprietary software), but other than a little projector-laptop miscommunication in the beginning, things went pretty smoothly. Surprisingly, I ended with fifteen minutes to spare for questions, which were not all filled up. It’s always hard to gauge an audience who doesn’t respond with wild exclamations of support, so I wasn’t sure if they “got it” or not. But after the session, I had quite a few people come up to me, and there were general smiles and thank you’s all around. Jen, who deals with the WH communications end of things, told me it was all the rage on Twitter, and that one fellow had even mentioned how he was going to integrate Creative Commons education at his school. This made me happy. Teaching kids about CC is probably one of the best ideas in terms of copyright education. I only wish I was the one who came up with it. But as the sentiment goes, what does it matter, if you can build upon that idea and make it better. My favorite session member was one woman who sat smiling with attention at the very front. After I had finished packing up my things, she thanked me and remarked, “I have so much to learn!” I wanted to tell her—so do I!

In retrospect, I think Travis’ suggestion over a phone call some months prior is what helped with preparing for this crowd. By this crowd, I mean members of the majority of the education population who know almost nothing about copyright law, much less Creative Commons. He told me to “start at the beginning”, and I really took that advice to heart. Having started in the middle of things myself, when the open movement was already in full swing, I was really grasping at straws for a while. A lot of talks on CC will gloss over its origins and the history of copyright law—but WHUC 09 made me realize how important it is to linger on these details. Showing people the history behind Creative Commons, namely what led to its necessity, is pretty much identical to showing them the importance of “open”.