Putting the Classroom in the Computer:The Rhetoric of the Open Courseware

Movement

Elizabeth LoshUniversity of California, Irvine

1) tensions between regulation and content-creation

in institutions such as government agencies, universities, and corporations

failurefailureand more failure

2) tensions between a culture of knowledge and a culture of information

updating the “two cultures argument”not just about “print culture” vs. “digital culture”

epistemological issues:

appearance and reality vs. contingency and probability

3) tensions between “openness” and “reputation”

as institutions seek to promote their “brands”

risk to institutional ethos and the law of unintended consequences:unplanned audiences and purposes

the case of videorecorded lectures posted online

rethinking the digital divide:no longer just computers in classrooms

open research and scholarship

looking at language:a rhetoric of openness

open pedagogy: participatory culture, P2P education, and

personalized intelligent tutoring

looking at the gap between open information and open education

how is “open courseware” different from “open source software”?

what are the ideologies of “openness”? how are they different from the ideologies of “freedom”

and “honesty” we already have when we talk about “academic freedom” or “academic honesty”?

what are the rhetorics opposing “openness”? “commercial interest”? “security”? “exclusivity”? “stability”? “selectivity”? “privacy”? “constraint”?

does it really avoid the double meanings of “free”?

why not “shared”?

where are words like “labor” and “consumption”?

institutional rhetorics:MIT as a non-”lovemark” campus

institutional rhetorics:the Harvard response

a pre-history of cathedrals and bazaars

a shared pedagogical initiative

resisting being trapped in the web

anxieties about ownership of intellectual property

anxieties about the leveling effect

anxieties about how public a public intellectual should be

anxieties about the privacy of students

anxieties about the alienation of labor

anxieties about the colonization of lifeworld by system

a rhetoric of disclaimers: what it is not

distance learning agendas

corporate competition and derivative works:arguments against the public domain

how will this affect the Googlization of universities?

can we have open access without open search?

costs to the public spherecreating more shut-ins

the afterlife of SPIDERthe reputation economy of open courses