Open Documents, a way to go

If we read documents as information in general -since it needn’t be a file on paper and will typically be understood as an electronic document these days-, I could, from the title of this blog, be understood as a fighter for free information. Knowledge is power and power to the people. I will not go into that now.

What I do mean with this title, is that information should be available and readable by as many people as possible. This can be seen on both a world-wide scale as well as on a small scale in creating software (environments) for learning. In other words: we shouldn’t make assumptions in which context or for which purpose the content will be used. Content (documents) should be self-contained and open to integrate with various (software) environments and contexts of use.

A future sketch

It is often heard that we live in an information society and I guess that nobody would deny that. The cost-effective new ways of sharing information via computers, digital media and the Internet or private networks, have made the world of information huge and more diverse.

Still, there is a great deal of publishers and educational institutes that would like to stick to the old model of having one information source (a book for example) that the learner is obliged to use. Of course large investments made in creating educational material should be earned back. But the possibilities promised by multimedia and fast Internet are tempting and the use of Internet is still growing.

In my opinion eventually there will be other models used based on smaller reusable units of learning that are easily redistributed (resold maybe) since it is not likely that people will download complete books. These smaller units might have an increasing quality because of online feedback.

The results of a future scenario exercise presented by Teemu Arina at the conference in march 2005 directed to networks of knowledge interchange. These would be feed by infoware, social networking, social software, blogs, collaborative tagging and/or data storage and so on. A growing number of initiatives on the Internet like eduforge.org, http://www.opencontent.org/ (mainly for the OpenCourseWare of MIT), opencourse.org and many others make it more likely that learning in the future makes a shift from classroom- or book-based learning to gaining knowledge via various knowledge communities on the Internet.

The problem is that there is so much out there, that you don’t know where to start. Moreover, even if we know where to get the knowledge, we might not have the proper rights to access or use it. So there are three issues to tackle to enhance innovation in future learning:

• the ability to find educational material;
• the right to use the material;
• the ability to open and (re-)use the material.

Where to find Open Content?

If one is looking for open content on the Internet, finding good material might be a problem since there is so much out there and there is not just one website to go to. One might use a search robot like Google, but since it has such a wide coverage, the number of hits in a search can be large and therefore it might be hard to find the right information. Communities forming their own portal offer both a social network and a source of information with their own searching engine. By starting a new community and bundling the knowledge and judging skills (of other information resources of interest) of the members, soon an interesting website of information can develop itself.

I believe that judging information is such a complex task, that human skills are necessary next to the work machines can do. A group of users together is very powerful to create a useful information source by selecting, rating, adding and commenting to, information. By facilitating new groups of users that create open content, such communities can prove themselves or not. In time the most useful or valuable information resources will remain and enrich themselves to grow out to content providers (for specific target groups perhaps).

May we use it?

As a learner finds information on the net, he/she may read it, but copyright issues might prevent teachers from using information in their classroom or online course. If the reuse of educational material by teachers is blocked for some reason, the information wealth is more likely to grow in quantity than in quality since everytime material is written anew. But these days the right to use material can be dealt with, by means of a special license mechanism called Creative Commons Licensing which I have been talking about in an earlier blog (An alternative to copyright to enhance sharing educational material). The idea is that the maker of the material can offer in an attached legal document a broader range of preset rights than the standard copyright laws permits.

What is open about Open Documents?

Since we share documents, there should be an agreement on how to read them technically. I will not have a plea for Open Source Software here, but what is important is that documents follow an open standard or at least have the document format publicly available. A simple concept like xml to structure information has been used to make translations between documents possible. The use of open standards makes it worthwhile to invest in the development of new tools that can be made available online such that users can read and modify their downloaded documents.

Open means also that we have the legal rights to use the software and that it does not remains behind walls. Apart from that it means that the document is self-contained by which I mean that it has meta-information that not only describes the document for insiders, but in comprehensible standards to enable a fit in several contexts. Html-documents are a good example of open documents. Anyone understanding the (available) standards can peek into the document and reuse and/or change (parts of) the document.

Last but not least, open means easy to use with little effort to integrate in the existing tooling a person has got. The document format should at least be easy to translate to existing document formats of common available tools and readable by (Open Source) software that is freely available. I think that html became so widely used, apart from its powerful concept of linking locations, because of the fact that translating html to a readable text-file is a matter of omitting the tags (mainly) and the availability of free browsers did the rest.

How to share documents?

Again, as in the beginning of this blog, if we interpret the word document as the broader concept information, a website where you can browse information and download files, might do. I found on our own Bazaar project blog an interesting link posted by George Bekiaridis in his article An alternative way to share our data online about a company called synology offering (for money) a way to quickly set up a website with loads of possibilities. The thing is, that files or information like html-texts alone are not enough. To be able to find and judge information items quickly we like to do two things: label them and group them.

Labelling information can be done by giving an url a tag in a tagging system, giving it a useful name or by providing meta-information. For the latter a number of standards have been developed (specific for learning material) like SCORM, IMS Learning Design. By means of providing and refining meta-information the chance that a piece of information is indeed shared between users, gets higher. The specific purpose of sharing determines the kind of needed meta information and the tools around it. Either we have a lot of different open standards or we have several big ones that are inevitably quite complex and extensive standards (which are not likely to be used manually by individuals). This would ask for new tooling. Preferably, we would have these tools online available instead of downloading them per individual.

Grouping documents can be done on several levels. One of the most important ones is having a website or a network held up by a community. The administrator or the members in the latter case are responsible for the quality and judging the (a)propriateness of the documents within. This means that uploading a document to a specific website or network of websites, is meta-information itself. The users will find a restricted set of documents in their community, all with the type of meta-information of their interest.

Therefore it will be interesting to form new communities around repositories of information or possibly a website with blogs, mailing-lists, tags or rss-feeds of links and other services. It will be interesting to have such services available online since various communities of practice are likely to evolve outside of the settled institutions that have the server space, full rights and fund, to maintain websites of knowledge and interaction.

In the light of this, it is interesting to mention two initiatives with more or less the same philosophy. At web.opendock.net you will find a free downloadable set of tools (interpretable text-files) based on Open Source technology like MySQL and PHP that are available at almost every server (even hired ones). So setting up your own community means uploading a bunch of files at some server address and changing a few settings. Although the installing documentation is mainly in Italian, setting up a new website, should not take long I suspect. What you get is the common social network website functionality like blogging, mail and so on.

At OpenDocument.net that will be launched soon, there will be software available that is based on PHP and MySQL too that will offer you a way to group documents in a repository (rather than information in general as for opendock.net). The way the metadata is organised is so flexible that new modules for different metadata formats can be added to the repository. In the blogs Sharing is a joy for all and What we want from a FLOSS repository it is argued how a repository for educational material should look like in our opinion. It supports IMS Learning Design and Creative Commons and allows the units that are stored to have a structure of their own. They comprise all the (meta) information and files or references that belong to their context. We believe that we can combine the benefits of having a flexible metadata system and a lightweight Internet repository service as to both group and tag information in a flexible way to facilitate new communities of practice.

Add comment October 10th, 2006