Re: [WikiEducator] An Ethical Dilemma -- Feeling torn...Commitment to OER versus prior commitments

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:02:20 -0700

Very insightful comments.   I think that we have a good topic here.   You are right on many points.   At this stage of my life (60+) I just want to get my life experiences and hopefully wisdom out to as many people as possible.   At the time I began this publishing venture, Allyn and Bacon seemed the best way to do it (remember I had never even heard of OER until 2009 and I began the book and my relationship with Allyn and Bacon in 2006).   At this point, I have had so much help and encouragement from my editor that I am unwilling to back out...in some ways it is like they say of soldiers...you don't fight for the government, you fight for the friend/buddy sharing your foxhole.  In some ways my editor and I are sharing the same foxhole...we are both working for a large impersonal company, but we believe in one another and in our mutual desire to get important community organizing information out to as many students and community activists as possible in a way that the students will find usable, pleasing, and reasonably inexpensive.  

In the 1940's  Rheinhold Neibuhr wrote a book Moral Man and Immoral Society in which he stated that individual human beings tend to be moral but as bureaucracies (and societies) grow the tendency to immorality increases.   I think this is true.   My experience with a large publisher has led me to several very moral people who are dedicated to social justice...but I am not naive enough to think that the corporation as a whole is a paragon of morality.   At any rate, thanks for this conversation.  J.

[email protected] wrote: -----
To: [email protected]
From: kirby urner
Sent by: [email protected]
Date: 10/06/2010 05:36PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEducator] An Ethical Dilemma -- Feeling sad :-)- When publishers don't do what they say they intend to do

I was just having lunch with my uncle, who self-published a book on
pre-WW1 submarine construction in the North Pacific region of the USA
(Seattle etc.).  He shared about his dealings with Amazon, but more
generally with publishers witnessing the digital revolution.  I did
his website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060505050706/beneaththesurface.biz/front.html

For those who don't know, Amazon now has a huge printing press and any
book that goes out of copyright is fair game to mass produce and sell
as new i.e. hot off the press, on demand with your order (no need to
build inventory, the hardcopy is custom generated, and in such a way
as to still make a profit at $10 a pop -- most traditional publishers
can't compete at these prices).

I come from the software world, where open source licenses flourished
because software defines working machines, and people are always
wanting to add bells and whistles.  With other authored works, such as
novels, it's not the same situation, as you do *not* necessarily want
other authors interleaving their thoughts and characters in your work
of art.  That'd be defacement, like spray-painting a Picasso with
Marvin the Martian (criminal -- though you could do it on a digital
copy).

I know the Oz books underwent a transition, but the new author didn't
rewrite any of the original Frank Baum stuff did he?  Likewise the
Disney characters progress through generations of artist, but it's not
like you wanna go back and "deface" the originals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books (re Oz as the
prototypical Open Source world)

In software, it's maybe a little different.  We have version control,
so might keep the old stuff around indefinitely, but few are
interested in reading it.  The most-in-demand stuff is usually cutting
edge, sporting the latest new features.

Engineer-artists of software actually expect (aim, hope) to have their
work included in derivative works.  That's the intention.  You write
hoping your stuff will be absorbed, as your currency in the software
meritocracy is your reputation as an author.  You want your name
associated with your "text" but it's not like you expect royalty
payments.  More, you expect to be granted the privileges (such as
deferential respect) of royalty by your peers and the lay public, as
it's clear in the accounts that you're a person of merit (or a "jolly
good fellow" as they said in Queen Victoria's era).

Academia is already like this.  It's not how much you sold out for, so
much as how much of your academic integrity remains after X presumably
profitable publications.  Edwin Black (the historian) comes to mind,
as a successful academic who nevertheless insists on telling it as he
finds it, upsetting a lot of carefully guarded apple carts in the
process.  His books continue to sell because he's still a trusted
source of scholarship by enough accounts to keep him in the game as a
bestselling author.

Publishing is essentially free via the Internet, but then distribution
matters.  How will the right people hear of your work?  Twitter?

There's always the "visibility problem" of gaining a following, what
some might call "marketing" though in academia there's a somewhat
cynical attitude towards either "selling oneself" or "self promotion"
although I'd say ethics have changed, and now some professors engage
in "self branding", creating such personalities as Dr. Ruth, and Dr.
Chuck (a Python guy, whom I've worked with) also even Dr. Phil (the
guy Britney made a fool of).

Anyway, what's interesting to me is to see more academic professorial
types (vs code wrangler geeks) grapple with the challenges of the
loaves and the fishes, i.e. the miracle technology makes makes
possible, of spreading of communications extremely efficient at almost
no marginal cost per copy.

So what business models are based on artificially creating scarcity
where their needn't be any?

Those are the ones most worried about what to do next, and I
empathize.  Putting a floor form of tenure under the meritocracy, a
safety net, would make it all more like Finland (of Finlandia fame).

A geek encampment, known for great code, might compensate all its
people with room and board, kitchen access, wifi, days for fishing and
goofing off, and yet not all of them have a commit bit on every
project (some are not committing code at all, such as when busy
learning new languages), some of which projects may have quite low bus
numbers indeed (using the geek shop talk, sorry if it sounds opaque
**).

On the other hand, many resources remain scarce.  Not every science
fiction writer is as good as every other.

Not everyone is as good a writer, period.  Same in software.  Same in
the visual arts.

They say the most productive coders are freakishly more productive, by
orders of magnitude.  What's that about?

I'm just pointing out that good (sometimes technical, sometimes
professional) writing is not always easy to come by.

Creating scarcity artificially (where it's technologically
unnecessary) is different from simply accepting the fact of only so
much gold and silver in "them thar hills" (noting in passing that many
precious metals are recycled, not mined anew).

Kirby

** "bus number" is the number of people that'd need to be hit by the
proverbial bus before a project would seem pretty much unintelligible
to the other geeks, i.e. there'd be no one left to pass the torch.
"Low bus numbers" mean only a few people understand and work with a
given project or code repository.

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 10:55 AM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thank you.  I think that it is important that we work on these issues
> together as cordially as possible.   Big publishers don't particularly like
> OER either as my editor reminded me just this morning...I don't want to be
> caught in the middle but I have been a mediator many times in my
> life...perhaps there is a place for such skills here.   Joyce
>

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