Hi folks, apologies for not having made much of a contribution yesterday. I came down with a flu or something, and as I have a 29 hour journey ahead of me today, I spent much of it trying to rest and recuperate. Now I have to head off to the airport in a few minutes, and will check back in sometime on Sunday from Michigan.
But I wanted to pick up on the notion that Leigh raised about there being people who refuse to use any content that is not totally copyleft.
We have to admit that FLOSS and similar inspired movements has its fare share of zealots andpurists who will not accept engagement with anything but a free and open economy
While this is perhaps a common perception, I am not sure it is true or even could be true if people live on the same planet that I do. To live to those standards with respect to software, you would have to:
1. Not purchase any goods from a store unless you moved to Extramadura in Spain;
2. Never use a bank;
3. Not use a car or travel in a car;
4. Not use a cellular phone (thought that is perhaps partly changing);
5. Not listen to music in CD, DVD or MP3 format
6. Not use electricity
etc. etc.
But even the most zealous admit that there are times when you need to use a computer or CPU powered device where there is no Free Software then you can do so.
To be a copyleft zealot in the content arena, and to interact only with Free Content, you would have to:
1. Never read a magazine, newspaper or book
2. Avoid looking at billboards by the roadside
3. Not watch television or listen to radio
4. Never look at a painting or any other work of art
Clearly, there is room in the world for copyright and protected works. But the issue is not use, but REUSE. The fully copyrighted works are not reusable. You have to consume them as they are, whole, and while you may display them via embed tags on other sites, that does not make you a content developer any more than selling televisions makes you a TV producer.
So, to be effective as tools in a constructivist learning approach, the content has to permit REUSE, that is it should be decomposable, remixable, and distributable usable without the need to load the original source. It is this reusability that gives F/OER the edge.
Regards, derek
- 735 reads
