Where is the I in Open Content?

On the way to work this morning, whilst I was supposed to be writing a paper for JISC SMT (oops), I instead found myself thinking about a question that I posed to David Kernohan on Twitter a while ago – how does the Open Education Resources initiative impact on identity management? This in itself was not an unusual question – I tend to ask it about all of the initiatives in JISC as access and identity management are only important in the way that we embed them in to the practises put in place by other activities. At the time, I didn’t have much of an answer. Having attended UKSG, I think some thoughts on that area have started to infiltrate my brain!

I started by asking myself what is different about Open Educational Resources to the Open Access agenda. There are of course lots of answers to this question – but I focused on the medium. OER is very much a part of the social software / social networking / web 2.0 world that encourages people to make their stuff as widely available as possible, and encourages others to comment, annotate, reuse and repurpose that stuff. It is about changing the nature of the way we perceive content. The Open Access agenda does not as a whole look to change the concept of the published article; instead it wishes to change the business model by which the article is made available to its target audience.

This is important with regards to identity management. Open Access retains the fundamental link between author and object (published article) – allowing the author to be tracked across multiple articles and to build up a sense of identity across their publications. There is still a lot of work to be done in this space; author identifiers have still not been widely established and much of the association of author to subject area and the human relationship that author has with their institution, their subject, and the publication peer review process. Name is still the primary identifier – in the same manner as the equity system.

As we know, in the world of social networking, name is not a reliable identifier. I blogged a while back about the faux celebrity twitter accounts and the need for a better way of gaining assurance that the person talking is the person you think it is. The use of twitter raises an interesting question in relation to preservation and association of content in the social networking age. How will history capture Stephen Fry’s tweets alongside his blog posts, as compared to his books, plays, films, appearances on QI and other activities? Many of these have a preservation strategy and standard ways of associating the work with the identity in question. Open content, or content created in social spaces does not have such a strategy in place. How can I ensure that my identity remains linked to my content, that my content remains ‘published’ wherever it is created, that my history online can be traced and connected as part of my identity, and how important are all of these factors in the open content arena? Is it important that I remain identified with my content, even if I am happy to make it publicly available?

I think these will be interesting questions for the OER programme to look at alongside the challenge of making content available and encouraging uptake and usage in the educational community. As a starter, I have created a quick (and definitely not exhaustive or particularly well informed) review of the traditional publishing model against the use of open content – I hope it is useful!

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tag: ukoer