From the issue dated January 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i21/21b01601.htm
The Next Wave: Liberation Technology
In everything from course management to big enterprise systems,
universities must choose between monopolies and the open approach
BY JOHN M. UNSWORTH
If the nineties were the e-decade (e-com-merce, e-business,
e-publishing, eBay, E*Trade, etc.), the aughties are the o-decade (open
source, open systems, open standards, open access, open archives, open
everything). This trend, now unfolding with special force in higher
education, reasserts an ideology, a meme, that has a continuous
tradition traceable all the way back to the beginning of networked
computing (in fact, as far back as Thomas Jefferson's famous defense of
the principle that "ideas should freely spread from one to another over
the globe"). Call this meme Liberation Technology. It has recently been
adopted by some venerable institutions -- not only by some of the great
public and private universities, but also by major private foundations
-- and it means business.
Since the beginning of Internet time and before, Liberation Technology
has been intertwined with and opposed to another ideology. Call it
Command and Control. You see Command and Control at work in the
military roots of the Internet, in the Recording Industry Association
of America's prosecution of file-sharing college students, and in
Microsoft's doubly possessive and oddly revealing slogan ("your
potential, our passion"). Liberation Technology wants to keep
information free; Command and Control wants to make the Internet safe
for private property.
To be sure, not all proprietary operations oppose open inquiry, but the
key to the business success of open-source products like Linux is that
they allow people to make money by selling them, without allowing the
seller exclusive control. Especially with information goods, the notion
of nonexclusive commercial rights is key.
In the Early Days of the Web, Public Good vs. Property Rights
By the early 1990s, the Internet was expanding rapidly, going from one
thousand hosts in 1984 to one million in 1992, and new, more
sophisticated applications were appearing, like Gopher (1991) and the
World Wide Web (the first Web server in the United States was set up in
1991, with Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser for personal
computers, coming along in 1993). Throughout the 1990s, university
faculty members and students outside of computer science were gradually
becoming aware of the existence of the Internet, largely because of the
Web; so was the rest of the world, for the same reason.
In retrospect, it's difficult to comprehend the rapidity with which the
Web went from an obscure science experiment to a fact of daily life,
but it took only about three years. By late 1994, the World Wide Web
Consortium was founded to take over managing Web protocols and their
development and to ensure that the Web would remain a nonproprietary
public good. In 1996, the consortium presented the first draft of XML
(Extensible Markup Language, the encoding format that is now used for
exchanging text and many other kinds of data on the Web); the official
draft of XML 1.0 was presented in 1998.
In distinct contrast to that ethos, with its focus on the public good,
an aggressive campaign began in the late 1990s to expand the property
rights of "content providers," in legislation like the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act (both passed in 1998) and in case law arising out of the Recording
Industry Association of America's suit against Napster in 2000. Mixed
in there was the Microsoft antitrust case, initiated in 1998 under the
Clinton administration, first decided against Microsoft, overturned on
appeal, and eventually settled, quite favorably for Microsoft, by the
Bush administration in 2001.
Against that backdrop, during the 1990s all over the United States
universities became big IT consumers, not just in computer science or
in the sciences, but increasingly in all disciplines, on every part of
campus, for all kinds of services. As they came to rely more, and more
broadly, on networked information in teaching, research, and
administration, universities turned away from the strategy of meeting
their own specialized needs with homegrown software and began to
license more commercial products.
They also began to be seen, for the first time, as a profitable market
for commercial IT products and services. WebCT and Blackboard, for
example, both appeared on the scene in 1997 and over the next few years
they signed up hundreds of university clients for "e learning" systems
to put courses online, do grading online, accept homework assignments
online, etc. On the administrative side, beginning in the mid-1990s,
enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) systems from vendors like PeopleSoft
and Oracle -- for managing payroll, student records, human resources,
purchasing, etc. -- began to find a market in universities, partly
built on the fear that Y2K would wreak havoc on older, usually
homegrown, systems that had hitherto been performing those functions,
often successfully, often for years.
Universities also got caught up in the Internet bubble -- that
combination of greed, optimism, and willful ignorance of history that
led us to believe that information technology would create a permanent
bull market. In the heady days at the turn of the millennium, Columbia
University, to take only one of many possible examples, plowed millions
into launching Fathom, a for-profit online content provider for
e-learning, confident that such a foray into the commercial sector
would turn a handsome profit for the stakeholders, which included not
just Columbia, but the London School of Economics and Political
Science, the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago, the
University of Michigan, and others.
Some time in 2000, though, the pendulum started swinging the other way,
beginning, perhaps, in reaction to failures such as Fathom's. In his
annual report for 2000-2001, the president of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Charles M. Vest, succinctly articulated a
return to the original ideology of the Net when he announced MIT's OpenCourseWare project
to make primary materials of its courses available online -- free. As
he noted, "inherent to the Internet and the Web is a force for openness
and opportunity that should be the bedrock of its use by universities."
Vest's report is not the source of the trend that is now unfolding, but
it is certainly a document that crystallizes a historical moment. It is
significant for another reason, too: It is emblematic of what's changed
in this iteration of Liberation Technology.
Course Management, Portals, and Enterprise Systems
This time around, the ideas are being advanced not by ragtag
communitarians, but by major institutions, with substantial backing not
just from MIT, but from a number of other universities as well, and not
just from universities, but from corporations, foundations, and
government agencies at home and abroad.
In MIT's case, support comes from the institution itself and also from
two major private foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. On a first visit, the MIT site for OCW
looks a little longer on structure than substance. If you dip at random
into courses, you may see mostly syllabi, perhaps some exercises, and a
list of assigned readings, but not the readings themselves (leading you
to wonder how the effort is going to provide new educational
opportunities in the developing world, as claimed). But on further
investigation, you'll find that some courses have the complete text of
every lecture (in PDF), and others have full-length videos of every
lecture (at three different resolutions for slow, medium, and fast
connections). At that point, MIT's claim to be the first open-source
university begins to seem more plausible.
MIT can't give away the readings in its courses -- in most cases,
textbooks and articles that come from commercial publishers -- but it
can give away the intellectual property created by its own faculty
members, and that's what it's doing. As with the open-source-software
movement from which it drew inspiration, it permits the reuse,
modification, and redistribution of content. Unlike open-source
software, however, it prohibits doing any of those things for
commercial purposes.
That distinction is important, and it is key to understanding the
doctrinal differences among open-source sects. Beginning in the early
'80s, the innovation of the open-source-software movement was to argue
that users should have the freedom to modify source code, but could
sell the results, as long as the source code for the modified version
was available for modification. Those terms are codified in the GNU Public License.
Since then, other variants of open-source licensing have emerged. MIT's
materials in OCW are covered by a different, newer copyright, developed
by the Creative Commons project,
an effort led by Lawrence Lessig, who set up Stanford University's
Center for Internet and Society, with support from Hewlett, Stanford
and Harvard Universities' law schools, and others (including the
philanthropic group Center for the Public Domain). The Creative Commons
license allows copying and redistribution, but also allows the content
creator a set of options with respect to attribution, commercial use,
and modification of the work. The Creative Commons license is inspired
by GNU, but also informed by a somewhat broader perspective, in that it
is intended to cover creative work other than software.
Though legal variants of open-source licenses do exist, at a technical
level, open systems require that everyone who designs or modifies the
systems does so under the same set of rules. In the case of online
courseware, content, and tools, the IMS Global Learning Consortium
is providing some important common ground on which to coordinate a very
broad range of specifications. One of the partners in that effort is
another "open" entity, called the Open Knowledge Initiative, or OKI.
That effort, financed by the Mellon foundation, is based at MIT with
Stanford as a principal partner and supported by a number of major
universities. It describes itself
as "an open and extensible architecture that specifies how the
components of an educational software environment communicate with each
other and with other enterprise systems." The goal is to liberate
universities from having to choose a single software solution for
managing online instruction and/or online components of classroom
instruction. The result would be greater portability of content,
greater flexibility in choosing and assembling elements of a
learning-management system, and a shift in the balance of power between
the client (the university) and the software vendor, in favor of the
client.
Universities -- or open-source developers at large -- could choose to
produce and share their own modules for things like calendars,
gradebooks, etc. Commercial vendors could also continue to build and
sell proprietary solutions that adhered to the architectural
specification (and that, therefore, allowed users to unplug some of the
vendor's modules and plug in some of their own, or some from another
vendor). That speaks directly to the practice of monopolistic
"bundling" that was at the heart of the antitrust case against
Microsoft.
As with any standard, success will depend on whether both vendors and
users buy into it. That is not yet a certainty with OKI, but in May
2002 Blackboard announced its intention to adopt the OKI architecture.
In October 2002 OKI announced that it had joined in an informal
consortium with other "leading organizations developing specifications
for e-learning technology in higher education ... to coordinate
strategy and conduct common activities."
While the OKI project aims at specifying an architecture for online
learning systems, and MIT's OCW is focused on content for such systems,
another open-source effort, the Sakai Project, focuses on educational
software tools. According to the Sakai Web site,
the project hopes to "demonstrate the compelling economics of 'software
code mobility' for higher education, and it will provide a clear road
map for others to become part of an open-source community." Sakai is a
collaboration among Indiana University, MIT, Michigan, and Stanford,
which will begin using its tools in 2004.
Another partner in Sakai is the open-source project uPortal.
A number of other universities (in the United States and abroad) and
for-profit companies (Sun Microsystems, SCT, Interactive Business
Solutions) are involved in developing uPortal. Once again, the Mellon
foundation is helping to support the project.
Portals can do more than integrate news and weather, or library and
course information. They can also integrate the
administrative-computing functions of the university, such as student
records, payroll and human resources, and purchasing. Interestingly,
but perhaps not surprisingly, one of the corporate sponsors of uPortal
is SCT, a company whose interests could be threatened, or at least
significantly reoriented, if uPortal achieves the success for which it
seems destined. SCT provides a "solution" called Banner, one of those
enterprise-resource-planning products mentioned above.
Over the past few years, universities have spent hundreds of millions
of dollars to acquire, customize, and make the transition to such
systems, often with very mixed results. The university that now employs
me, and the one I worked at last, are both in the throes of such a
transition, probably too far in to get out, but probably wishing they
could.
Admittedly, it's a huge undertaking to retool an entire university's
administrative-computing infrastructure and workflow, and it requires
long-range planning and commitments. An institution makes those plans
and commitments based on the best choices available at the time:
Several years ago, when decisions were being made at the Universities
of Illinois and Virginia, there were no plausible
open-source/open-standards ERP alternatives, so the universities bought
into monolithic proprietary systems. Now alternatives are beginning to
come into view. It will be years before the current generation of
university ERP adopters can switch to open-source alternatives, but
their experience will certainly help to make the case for such
alternatives as they emerge.
Toward a New Model of Scholarly Communication
There are a number of other pressing IT challenges facing higher
education, and at or near the top of the list are digital libraries
(or, more generally, data repositories). Those could include data held
in an institution's library (licensed or locally produced scholarly
information), data held outside the library (by an office of management
information, for example), and/or data published by a university press.
The case for institutional repositories is laid out convincingly in an article
by Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information, published in the February 2003 newsletter of the
Association of Research Libraries. Lynch argues that "an institutional
repository is a recognition that the intellectual life and scholarship
of our universities will increasingly be represented, documented, and
shared in digital form, and that a primary responsibility of our
universities is to exercise stewardship over these riches: both to make
them available and to preserve them."
There are a number of noteworthy "open" initiatives in this area as
well, and familiar institutions and financial supporters. Four very
different, possibly complementary, open-source frameworks for
institutional repositories and/or digital libraries are MIT's DSpace (supported by Hewlett-Packard), the Cornell/Virginia Fedora Project (supported by the Mellon foundation), EPrints (supported by the National Science Foundation and Britain's Joint Information Systems Committee), and Greenstone
(produced by the University of Waikato, in New Zealand, and developed
and distributed in cooperation with Unesco and Human Info NGO).
Beyond the individual repository, there is the problem of federated
collections, and how to search across repositories, a dream long held
in digital libraries. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
is a project aimed at achieving that goal, by developing and
maintaining standards to facilitate sharing information. Currently,
there are 134 registered OAI repositories, and you can see a nice
working example of sample searches across many of them on the Web site
for the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University.
The EPrints software mentioned above is the self-archiving component of
a larger project on open access, supported by the Soros Foundation and
marching under the banner of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, whose
purpose is "to make research articles in all academic fields freely
available on the Internet" -- either by institutional self-archiving of
articles that also appear in for-fee journals, or by authors publishing
in open-access (free) journals.
In the American Scientist Open Access Forum
(moderated by Southampton University's Stevan Harnard), there is a
lively, long-running, and unresolved debate on what open access means.
That debate has been attracting considerable attention around the
world, both within and beyond the academy.
The efforts to promote open access to scholarly research, to build
interoperable digital libraries, and to create institutional
repositories coincide with the broadening university revolt against the
monopolistic bundling strategy of Elsevier, in which university
libraries are required to subscribe to packages of titles and are
locked into multiyear subscriptions. Faculty members and libraries at
Cornell University, Harvard, North Carolina State University, the
University of California system, and the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill have all rejected those tactics in the last year.
University-press publishers have a golden opportunity here to
distinguish themselves from commercial publishers and join with
libraries and scholars to create a new model of scholarly
communication. To seize the opportunity, though, university presses
will require more capital, cooperation, and creativity than they seem
to be able to muster.
The Battle for the Desktop
Journals, repositories, portals, and ERP systems are the macro end of
IT in higher education; at the micro end is the individual user's
desktop environment. The desktop has been Microsoft territory for
years, but open-source projects are cropping up here as well. In
September 2003 25 universities joined with Mellon to provide funds for
Chandler, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's Outlook. Chandler
is (or will be) a desktop application for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows,
combining e-mail, calendars, address books, instant messaging, and file
sharing. It's being produced by Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation,
and it has two subtypes: a personal version called Canoga, due out in
the fall of 2004, and a version called Westwood that is specifically
aimed at higher education, due out in the fall of 2005.
What Chandler brings into focus is the battle for the desktop between
Microsoft and the open-source community. Microsoft has already seen a
serious challenge to its server market from Linux, but it still has a
lock on the desktop, in spite of a much-improved Macintosh operating
system and the persistence of efforts like OpenOffice, which provide an
open-source alternative to Microsoft's word-processing, spreadsheet,
and presentation software. Kapor estimates that it will be 2007 before
Linux makes significant inroads here. Still, Microsoft is clearly
already worried about its dominance, as one can see from a series of
leaked Microsoft memos on how to combat Linux, available in annotated
form on the open-source Web site.
More immediately, there are some noteworthy open-source developments in
the collaborative creation of content. One is a courseware project from
Rice University called Connexions,
which converts "raw knowledge" into self-contained modules of
information and places them in commons, to be used, reused, updated,
and adapted. It is designed to highlight the nonlinear "connexions"
among concepts both within the same course and, more important, across
courses and disciplines. It is open source and based on open standards
(XML), and has support from the Hewlett foundation.
Another, simpler and more general-purpose collaborative tool that's
become quite popular in the last couple of years is Wiki, a Web-based
platform for collaboration that comes in a variety of open-source
incarnations. Perhaps the most robust and widely used is TWiki.
Using any Web browser, you can directly edit any Wiki page, add links
automatically, group pages, search pages, attach files, track
revisions, control access at the individual or group level, and so on.
TWiki, which is just one type of Wiki, has hundreds, probably
thousands, of installations, not only in higher education, but in
corporate intranets at places like Disney, British Telecom, Motorola,
SAP, and others.
Combined with something like LionShare,
Wikis could provide a powerful tool for collaboration in academe, one
that could change teaching, project management, the work of
professional societies, and many other activities. LionShare (another
Mellon-financed project) is essentially peer-to-peer networking with
authentication. Peer-to-peer networking is the technology underlying
demonized post-Napster software like KaZaA, but it also has less
well-known applications in things like videoconferencing. LionShare's
addition of authentication makes it legitimate for a broad range of
applications in institutional settings.
Choice and Compatibility With Commercial Software
The university-based open-source projects described here have in common
two key characteristics: unbundling and interoperability. Those
strategies are inherent to open-source software development, but have
also proved compatible with commercial software development. They are
hostile only to monopolistic practices.
Unbundling and interoperability are important because they provide
choice and flexibility. Instead of being locked into a single
application or suite of applications from a single vendor, you can
choose to mix different applications to achieve the best performance
for your particular purposes, at the best price. For the end user, that
means that you can use a word processor from one place, a collaboration
tool from another, an e-mail client and an address book from somewhere
else, and exchange data among all of them using open standards to which
all adhere.
At the other end of the spectrum, in administrative computing or
digital libraries, it means that you can use a database engine from one
vendor, a portal kit from someone else, a Wiki for managing projects
and discussions. When something better comes along for one of those
functions, you can swap out that piece, rather than waiting until the
whole system is intolerably outdated, and then undergoing vast,
enterprisewide transition from one monolithic system to another.
On a broader level, what's noteworthy in the various threads of the
trend assembled here is the concerted efforts of a handful of private
foundations, working with public (and some private) universities, to
promote self-determination in higher education's use and development of
information technology. Most of the examples I've cited have been
supported by two foundations, Hewlett and Mellon. Both foundations give
to things other than higher education and, within higher education,
both give to things other than IT projects. Yet they clearly are having
substantial impact on the information infrastructure of the
21st-century university, and the projects they are helping get under
way will liberate it from Information Property monopolies and IT
monocultures. They've achieved those results by emphasizing long-term
sustainability of projects and by adopting and promoting the
open-source ethos of shared goals, shared work, and shared results.
Open-source methodology has already spread well beyond software
development: In the world at large, the Human Genome Project is a
famous example. Over the coming decade we're certain to see this new
mode of production locked in mortal combat with older methods and the
legal and ideological commitments that they entail. It will be
interesting to see whether, at this critical juncture, the university
comes down on the side of freely shared ideas.
With a little help from its friends, it just might.
John M. Unsworth is dean of the Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He is departing president of the Association for Computers and the
Humanities and is chairman of the American Council of Learned
Societies' 2004 Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities
and Social Sciences.
OPEN EVERYTHING: ONLINE RESOURCES
The following projects, articles, and other electronic sources are listed
in the order in which they are discussed in the accompanying article.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Home page: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
GNU General Public License
Home page: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Creative Commons
Home page: http://creativecommons.org
IMS Global Learning Consortium
Home page: http://imsglobal.org
Open Knowledge Initiative
Home page: http://web.mit.edu/oki
The Sakai Project
Home page: http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakaiproject
uPortal
Home page: http://www.uportal.org
DSpace Federation
Home page: http://www.dspace.org
The Fedora Project
Home page: http://www.fedora.info
EPrints.org
Home page: http://www.eprints.org
Greenstone Digital Library Software
Home page: http://greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library
Open Archives Initiative
Home page: http://www.openarchives.org
The Perseus Digital Library
Home page: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Sample search of Open Archive Initiative repositories:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/oai.ann.html
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Home page: http://soros.org/openaccess
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Moderated discussion: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci
Open Source Applications Foundation
Home page: http://www.osafoundation.org
Open Source Initiative
Locked Microsoft documents available: http://www.opensource.org/halloween
Connexions
Home page: http://cnx.rice.edu
TWiki
Home page: http://twiki.org
LionShare
Home page: http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 21, Page B16
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education