Response to Kim
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate the links you have provided and the questions that you have posed. Together we are generating a lot of questions, and I would like to focus on a small group of them that flowed from a question that I asked in my first comment, in which I asked:
Would it help to generate a culture that supports and actively promotes peer development, investmentin technologies that support collaborative creation, law that favors (reduces barriers and creates incentives)community production, etc?
And you followed up with these other questions:
Kim: Would it help what? (reduce inequalities of access to knowledge/learning?).
Yes, it seems that complex problems are not well suited to centralized and authoritarian solution generation and decision-making. Traditional “top of the pyramid” oriented decision making tends to disproportionably (sometimes exclusively) respect and reflect the values of the decision maker or the group that he or she represents. This will frequently result in marginalizing, to varying degrees (sometimes extremely), the values held by other less powerful groups. By definition, the decision maker is in some sort of local power position, which might extend to a global scale depending on the nature of the political and economic organization that the decision-maker is representing. I see commons-based peer development as a method to normatively balance concentration of power with the investment of communal decision-making. I was really pointing to commons-based peer development as a way of seeding values in organizations. Education is an important area because of its impact on the development and transmission of values. These values are then imbued, ala Freire, in the cultural artifacts that are created, which could include learning materials, technologies, organizational structure, governance, etc. There is a positively reinforcing cycle that starts with applying principles of commons-based peer development to OER and FLOSS, including the methods in teacher education, and the general curriculum, keeping in mind that curriculum extend outside of the
“schoolhouse”.
Kim: Whom would it help in what way? (those that are ahead already may simply move further aheadtogether at a faster rate).
I might have at least partially responded to this question above, while also perhaps exposing a certain naivety and idyllic notion of how things work, or at least might work. A culture that supported the underlying values of commons-based peer development would benefit everybody because it would, I think, lead to a sustainable society. This of course assumes that as individual and societies we never really have enough resources to meet everybody's appetites. That is, if left to market forces we will always have unlimited wants and needs and limited resources. On a societal scale wealth and resources are concentrated creating inequity, which is not a humane or sustainable way to manage a society or planet. Everybody feels the consequences eventually. This obviously is not only about social change, it is also about effective teaching and learning and basic access to quality and locally relevant educational resources, but if we can move mountains in the process, why not?
Kim: When? (only after people have physical access to computers and the Internet?).
Great question, no, I do not think that this starts only after everybody has access to computers and the Internet. I will follow your and Wayne's lead on this. Commons-based peer development, OER, FLOSS, CIT, education, crime, economic development, etc. are all part of an ecosystem that that will develop together, systemically, and holistically. Investment in developing paper-based OER using commons-based peer development will create demand for CIT, and CIT will become more impactful when they are made available if a process and culture of commons-based peer development is already in place. This will be particularly true if commons-based peer development is already being taught as part of the curriculum and being modeled in educational environments including schools
Kim: Why do we think this is important? (will it lead to a sustainable planet and world peace?).
Oops, I responded to this above.
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