Richard, et. al.

I think the points you raise are critically important and worthy of
much discussion and debate. More so, I am delighted to so engage and
want to encourage others to share their thoughts about the issues
involved. So first I will share what MIT succinctly states on their
open courseware site and then I will respond from my own narrow, though
loquacious view... Of course my ideas may change in the process of free
flowing appraisal and challenge by others. Of course, that is really
the intent of the nurse-educator project, so in a way - I can't
possibly lose. The only thing people can freely choose to do is 'not
participate' by not opening emails or not sharing their thoughts...

MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/about-ocw.htm

MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative
funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.

MIT OCW's goals are to:

* Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for
educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
* Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware"
concept.

MIT OCW would not be possible without the support and generosity of the
MIT faculty who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge
to benefit others. We expect MIT OCW to reach a steady - though never
static - state by 2008. Between now and then, we will publish the
materials from virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate
courses.

We will be continually evaluating the Access, Use, and Impact of MIT
OCW over the course of the next five years. With 900 courses published
as of September 2004, we are still in a learning stage of this MIT
initiative and we will benefit enormously from your feedback, as we
strive to make MIT OCW as rich and useful as possible for our users.

Bear's positions:

I understand the tendency for some institutions to try to commoditize
knowledge - I just don't respect it very much. I see it as an
anachronistic and retrogressive development in higher education and I
see the nurse-educator project as an alternative to it. I think that
the development of open source software has been, in part, a reclaiming
by computer programmers of the love for computer programming that the
commodification of software had significantly damaged. I think the
parallels between Open Source and proprietary software and what you
suggest is happening at your own university and to alternative
opportunity of the nurse-educator initiative are unmistakable. So let's
consider the analogy.

Long before Bill Gates took the labors of others who had long preceded
him in the development of computer hardware and software and turned
their work and a little of his own into copyright protected software,
tens of thousands of computer scientists, researchers, programmers,
systems analysts, and users had contributed their love and labor to the
sharing of better ways of using computers, writing programs, and
tweaking hardware and software to make it work better. Bill Gates did
not develop the DOS operating system out of nothing - he used the
knowledge that had been developed over hundreds of years of
mathematical, mechanical, and electronic computational research and
development, put a copyright on it, and then shut everyone else out
from the underlying code. Gates will often suggest that proprietary
software spurs innovation, efficiency, and quality but there is
precious little evidence for that and an awful lot of evidence that the
real spur to innovation, efficiency, and quality can be seen in the
GNU/Linux world - the Free Open Source Software movement. I genuinely
do not begrudge Gates his money – I actually think he has been pretty
generous with his wealth. How many of us can say there was ever a day
when we contributed 10 – 25% of our personal wealth to charitable
endeavors?

What I begrudge is Gates’ somewhat hypocritical appropriation of the
work of his predecessors and the taking of the fruits of their labors
and then hiding his relatively modest contributions to the development
of software from the community that built the launch pad for his very
modest contributions.

The commodification of intellectual property, such as is occurring in
many universities, serves not to improve the quality of academic
environments but to diminish it. The prevention of openness and the
stifling of the sharing of ideas are quite a bit different than the
commodification of material products. Ideas do not develop on a time
clock schedule. Faculty members are employed to do a great many things
- but thinking, innovating, creating, expressing, and sharing their
ideas with others is not something that is done in a 40 hour work-week
or even a 60 hour work-week or an 80 or 100 hour work-week. None of us
emerged from a Platonic cave and invented language, mathematics,
caring, and compassion on our own. We are constantly surrounded by
ideas, our own and other people’s and for those of us lucky enough to
benefit from (or be cursed by) them we know that we cannot stop them
from coming, nor can we make them arrive when we are “at work.” Ideas
have histories, births, lifetimes, and deaths of their own. Ideas
turned into commodities are not tested against the ideas of others.
Ideas hidden or protected behind institutional barriers, whether those
barriers are mechanical, legal, electronic, or social, are ideas that
never live to the fullness of their potential. They are closed off to
most and what is worse, the opportunity is lessened that those who
believe these ideas will correct their beliefs, when they are wrong,
through sharing their ideas and seeing the mettle of their ideas
tested, challenged, debated, corrected, and improved upon by others who
see the world through different lenses.

Far from what I personally believe universities ought to be doing, the
commodification of ideas, of intellectual work products, and the
efforts to assert ownership over the tiny fragments of innovation every
new scholar adds, is the very antithesis of intellectual, social, and
cultural development. We might ask where we would be if Galileo's ideas
had successfully been claimed as proprietary property in the Middle
Ages rather than merely be determined to be biblically errant and
morally objectionable.

There are a great many of us who either do not seek or do not succeed
in commodifying the ideas we have. As you look around the web you see
millions of people sharing their ideas freely. Universities can either
follow in the footsteps of MIT by sharing their knowledge with humanity
or they can retreat into a Dark Ages mentality, trying to preserve the
illusion that preserving the right to charge for academic credits and
degrees is somehow equivalent to competing successfully in the
educational process, market place, or maintaining “Academic Freedom.”
MIT it appears is not afraid that they will lose student revenues
because they put their course materials online so that anyone can
learn. Just a guess here - but who do you (and others) think will still
have willing students 20 years from now - MIT or institutions that hide
their potential contributions to humanity behind electronic walls
crafted by Blackboard and WebCT?

At best, I think, the claims being made by universities that they are
the rightful owners of intellectual property are probably based on the
discredited assumptions of, but actually little like, and nowhere near
as credible, as the claims of plantation owners to the work products of
slaves and indentured servants or sweat shop owner’s claims to the work
products of piece workers. Universities do not create the climates in
which ideas develop – they merely provide space for activities that
suit their purposes – like attending meetings, counseling and advising
students, and working on university projects. Universities don’t
control our participation on listservers and cannot prevent our sharing
our ideas in letters, on the phone, in journals, or in emails. If we
accept that universities own our intellectual products than we ought,
to be consistent, ask for permission to publish our work in any venue
at all. Once seen through that particular lens, I think most of us are
unwilling to extend to some bureaucrat with no disciplinary knowledge
whatsoever, the right to control where we publish our work. Why should
an article be any different than a presentation for class? If we accept
that the university owns our work products and we have a duty to convey
those work products upon our departure, which among us can carry on
with our work? Which of our ideas are we entitled to use in the future?
If I consult as a statistician as part of my university work – am I
obliged to never do statistics again once I leave that university
because doing so may trample on their rights to appropriate my
knowledge?

Now, to more directly discuss the specific issue you raise and to offer
what I believe to be a viable alternative to allowing our work products
to be controlled by petty university bureaucrats. Make no mistake about
it – the calls for commodification of intellectual property are not
being made by creative and independent thinkers, they are being made by
poorly socialized, inadequately educated, and narrow-minded,
bureaucrats using an idea as old as humankind – appropriate someone
else’s work as your own to make yourself look as though you were a
contributor.

First, let’s address some of the issues that these bureaucrats think
entitles them to press such claims. If your ideas are, in fact,
developed solely in your university office, on university owned
equipment, and stored on university owned computers they may have a
limited, a very limited, claim that their participation was significant
in the genesis and development of those ideas. That, for example, is
why ALL my writing, course material development, presentations, and
intellectual products are created on my own equipment with my own
software, and in my own home. I simply refuse to use university owned
and delegated equipment or software for my use when developing my
intellectual work products. I would still argue that any claims by any
university that they provided the tools for intellectual property
development are, at best, flimsy and weak. But using your own resources
exclusively for development and the university’s resources for nothing
more than presentation of ‘finished’ intellectual property is certainly
an appropriate response.

Second, how can the open source nurse-educator project help
academicians caught in this jam? The first thing to understand is that
the nurse-educator project is the antithesis of university ownership of
intellectual property. The GNU Public License states very clearly that
nobody has the right to appropriate the materials donated. Everyone has
an unquestioned right to use and modify the materials that would be
housed on site. Once donated, the materials are available for everyone
to look at, examine, use in their own teaching, and they are free to
re-distribute that material as long as their efforts to redistribute it
do not lead to commodification or claims of ownership by any party. The
GPL has been getting tested in the courts and it has fared quite well
against claims by proprietary entities seeking to convert Open Source
software to private ownership.

So, let’s assume that you access materials from the nurse-educator
site, add additional materials to them, and use them in class. By
having any of the original nurse-educator site materials in those
materials, both you, and your university, are bound by the GPL not to
attempt to assert ownership over them. The university has an
interesting choice: They can assert that they have a claim over
copyrighted, but freely distributed material from the nurse-educator
site, or they can have their faculty spinning their wheels replicating
materials that are already available to enhance the quality of their
students’ educational experiences and the quality of their faculty’s
teaching, or they can preclude the use of state of the art teaching
materials that come without cost and with no intellectual restrictions
as well.

As to our own contributions – remember that we are, first and foremost,
collaborators not totally independent creators. In my earlier example,
one person does a PowerPoint, another adds some sound files in WAV
format, and another converts the WAV sound files to mp3 sound files.
Does the university have a legitimate claim to the WAV files? Does
another university have a legitimate claim to the mp3 files? Does the
university have the right to tell the collaborating faculty members to
never use these materials again? Does the university have the right or
the power to stifle collaboration between thinkers? I do not believe
that universities have any such rights at all. More to the point,
should a university have such an anachronistic philosophy and policy
the path is clear – many people who contribute to Open Source software
projects work in similar environments – they simply contribute their
work anonymously and benefit by having their work and refinements made
to it by other collaborators be freely available to them in their
regular work activities and in their freely donated activities on Open
Source software projects.

If your concern is that you feel that there is a danger that your
life’s work may be appropriated by any specific university, the very
best defense would be to freely donate your work to the nurse-educator
project so that no university bureaucrat will ever be able to claim it
and attempt to restrict your access to, or use of, your intellectual
work products.

One last point. On the level of leaving things behind for the next
faculty member - I simply believe that should be done. I agree that
materials printed at university expense and distributed to students
ought to be available to the university and other faculty. In fact, the
accreditation process for nursing programs demands precisely such
accountability though compliance with these requirements is all too
lacking. I once taught a class, for which, the former teacher left
virtually no trace. A two-page syllabus was all that remained after
several versions of the course were completed. The teacher stated that
all the files were thrown away. Apparently this included handouts,
reading assignments, student projects, and policies and manuals for
clinical experiences. Nothing I have said above should be taken to
condone selfishness, nor do I think you were encouraging selfishness in
your comments below. I think that all of us bring far more to the
classroom and our interactions with students, than the things that
appear on paper, in PowerPoint’s, or in books and articles. But we
ought to leave a trail behind for others to follow. We cannot, of
course, leave ourselves behind which is, quite likely, what the new
faculty would really like...

bear

--- Richard Cowling/FS/VCU <wcowling@...> wrote:
> Bear:
>
> How does this square with the recent tendency for universities to
> claim
> that what faculty produce for courses belongs to that university
> because
> they are paying for the time and effort? This is similar to what
> happens
> in industry. We have recently had discussions in the school and
> university where I work regarding ownership of course materials and
> it has
> been made abundantly clear that when we leave, we leave all the
> materials
> that we used for a course - that we created - for the next person
> because
> the university owns this material. In addition, our University has
> created policies around this that institutionalize this perspective.
> Having said this, please understand, that I am in total support of
> more
> open ways of sharing information - I understand that Mother Jones has
> an
> article out about ownership and ownership society in USA - they make
> the
> claim that taxpayers pay university professors to produce materials
> that
> universities then sell to industries/corporations - they argue that
> this
> material really belongs to the taxpayer (interesting dialogue about
> this I
> heard on radio but have not seen the article).
>
> At any rate, I just wanted to bring this to the conversation because
> for
> me I would feel totally uncomfortable with sharing any of my course
> materials from where I work but I would hope that people would not
> view it
> as not wanting to share but the limitations of the restrictions we
> have
> within our institution.
>
> Thanks - Richard
>
> "In reclaiming the mystical, we take back our whole selves."
> Marianne
> Williamson
>
> W. Richard Cowling, III, RN, PhD
> Associate Professor
> Virginia Commonwealth University
> School of Nursing
> 1220 East Broad Street
> Richmond, VA 23298-0567
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>