Biography: Paul Downey is a member of Osmosoft, a team of Open Source innovators at BT, where he acts as their fervid exponent of all things Web.I was pretty intrigued by the idea of "open learning", in particular the creation of an environment for sharing ideas, transferring knowledge and sharing resources at the BBC. This prompted a few thoughts on learning from my perspective as a BBC outsider, and Open Source developer.
At its heart learning is a process of sharing information and although we live in a world of free access to knowledge, this hasn't always been the case. In the past an apprentice could expect to pay for the privilege of years spent practicing the mundane with the most valuable skills only revealed at the end of an indenture. Trade secrets were more formally enshrined in guilds where keeping knowledge buried inside a society indeed proved to be powerful both politically and economically. Whilst seeming strange now, this culture was close to my experience as a novice software developer in the 1980s where we compiled human readable secret "source" into machine readable "code", baking programs into chips or other media not easily copied or decrypted. Whilst skills were shared amongst peers, gaining knowledge of new products came at a cost of expensive and restrictive licensing, academic books or enrolling on training courses run by those privileged enough to be "in the know". The state of the computing art as a consequence, moved relatively slowly. The Internet enabled developers frustrated at not being able to afford the tools they used at work for hobby projects to collaborate and reinvent those tools for themselves. Such projects heralded the Web culture of "view source", where it is expected to be able to learn by peer inspection of each other's works. Whilst the 80s programming culture may still exist, notably in gaming and some large monopolistic vendors, the software industry has been transformed by numerous innovations arising from Open Source.
Ironically, the modern systems of intellectual property set up to protect ideas and information in the open and which in part led to the end of the guilds, have become obstacles in a digital age of collaboration. As a result, organisations such as Free Software Foundation formulated "copyleft" licenses, explicitly designed to enable the freedom to copy, adapt and republish computer software. When it comes to educational materials, we have the concept of fair use allowing legitimate inclusion of excepts in new works without prior permission. These default freedoms don't apply to media such as music, images or video. Fortunately the openness pioneered by Free Software has been emulated for other media allowing projects such as the Flickr Commons where images from public archives are being put into the public domain and Al Jazeera publishing video news footage under the Creative Commons By Attribution license to enable rival broadcasters, documentary makers, bloggers, teachers and students reuse without seeking permission. Freedom to quote, repurpose and republish are essential for learning in an Open Source sense, and I personally believe the success of the Learning Open Lab project will depend largely on such freedoms to engender contributions. I for one am looking forward to watching its progression!