the most fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.
We fastidious connoisseurs can join the geek and nerds at the Computer Museum in Menlo Park California. They have an IBM 360 just like the one on which I learned to program. See Hollerith punched-card machine above. http://www.computerhistory.org/visit/
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
We now know that who decides what gets produced is the most important factor of what we can buy cheaply. That's a political question.
facsimile transmission
The only institution I deal with that requires facsimile transmissions is my college.
punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the purposes of the census
Raise your hand if you've used punch cards to program a computer!
physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment
hahahahaha Physicists don't construct vacuum tubes (valves in the UK) for research, glassblowers do! Just another case of workers being edited out of the academic record. We even have our own revisionist label: Invisible Assistant. Patronizing much?
produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish
Or a list of Muslims that have traveled to Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience
Now we have link rot. 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-court-opinions-clicks-that-lead-nowhere.html?_r=0
For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute
Yes! Let's highlight this...no technology can substitute for the cognitional acts that produce understanding and insight. Technological affordances may contribute to the conditions for the possibility of insight, but they never replace the intelligence that grasps a unifying idea in a set of particular and otherwise randomly associated data.
Britannica
I wonder if Bush could have foreseen, not just that the traditional stores of records would become astoundingly more accessible, but that technologies would enable new forms of building such records based on opening the processes of knowledge production and editing...here I am thinking of the comparison of the Britannica with Wikipedia, and those analyses that regard them as comparably authoritative sources of knowledge
enabling openness is therefore itself socially beneficial
this feels like a really dangerous assertion that's repeated here and not qualified AT ALL. imho. Openness enabling innovation does not automatically lead to social good
“it will be reviewed by the Administration and we will issue a response.”
The level of "openness" implied here might be calibrated differently now than when the article was written.
idea of open science dates back to the very origin of modern science,
Yes, although don't we need to be careful not to conflate scholarship and science? The methodologies of the humanities approach this process very differently.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS), for example, has a policy that requires authors “to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction,” with refusal to do so being grounds for rejection of a manuscript (PLOS, n.d.a). Importantly, PLOS positions this Data Availability policy as being a natural extension of OA publishing.
This seems especially crucial. Transparency and openness work in tandem to establish credibility and accountability.
not only must it be online, but it must be public, it cannot be behind a paywall or login or have other barriers to use.
How do we think about free (no fee) public (available on the open web) resources where you need to create an account to get access? I'm thinking more of databases, repositories, etc. than the underlying software.
Openness creates a virtuous cycle
But, if "open" is used to indicate that "a resource may be used in any way imaginable," then the cycle is by no means necessarily "virtuous." Again, the need for an ethical framework to this discussion is obvious.
“phraseological neologisms
This is so meta...I think "phraseological neologism" is itself an example of a "phraseological neologism."
In other words, “open” is being used here not to indicate the resource itself, but rather to indicate the nature of the tools used to build the resource, or by which resources are provided.
This use of open reminds me of the theme of "observable work," "working out loud," and "thinking out loud" that Jon Udell and others have spoken about. These are practices that perhaps, at least at first, benefit the original workers and thinkers, in that they open themselves to constructive feedback and thus improvement. Then, however, others benefit from access and use of both the product and the process that has been created and refined.
Jenkins, et al. (2009) argue that much of what we consider received culture is the product of appropriation and remixing, from the Iliad to Lewis Carroll
I love these historical examples of "remixing." Reminds me of older forms of scholarship which promoted commentary and exegesis before the production of "original" work.
“open skies” policy enables a nation to allow other nations’ commercial aviation to fly through its airspace — though, importantly, without giving up control of its airspace.
This may be the contemporary meaning, but in the fifties the US proposed an "open skies" policy that would allow for aerial monitoring of military installations in the Soviet Union by the US (and visa versa). I'm not sure I see surveillance agreements as examples of openness.
Creative Commons has very effectively lowered the bar to participation in the open source community
Not really. It's still quite confusing and even people deep into the community get confused
But chief among these is the fact that there is a finite number of developers in the world with the skillset to contribute to such projects. Open source may mean the freedom to change the software, but this is only true in theory; in practice, the bar to participating in the open source community is high, as one needs a high level of programming skill to meaningfully contribute.
exactly... as is the case with much openness
Open source democracy
so maybe the term open source gets reappropriated when what we really mean is that we need "open process" or "open design"
information about what the government is doing is meaningless without the ability for citizens to then act on that information to exert influence on the government. This, of course, is almost a definition of participatory democracy.
nice
aking his cue from Popper, George Soros in 1993 founded the Open Society Institute
wait if Popper is in 2013, how could Soros take his cue and do something 1993???
As the OU’s mission statement makes clear, the underlying philosophy of open education equates access to educational opportunity with social justice.
I'm assuming here they mean that even though it equates access with social justice, access does not automatically create social justice and equity, right?
Education, however, is not just about artifacts, not just about access to books and articles, not just about reuse of lesson plans. Education is also about advising and support, the sorts of services that are used at some point by every student affiliated with an institution of higher education. First generation college students, in particular, have a need for these kinds of support services, as they might not have access to that expertise elsewhere in their lives; use of these services at an institution dramatically increases first-generation and at-risk students’ graduation rates (
Exactly. And more of the social capital that comes from a university education is not at all possible to offer via MOOCs... not happening at the moment anyway, and may not be possible for people who don't have any of it to begin with
ense that the courses offered are accessible to all
yes, the knowledge is open & free, but not the certification, right?
This is perhaps the purest form of open education, in which the instructor is a facilitator, and the students collaborate to create a shared understanding
I think the word "purest" here is an exaggeration and that statements about cMOOCs should have come AFTER the "open means participatory" was described. I say this because there is nothing inherently "pure" about cMOOCs. They are open as in anyone can sign up, but they are not accessible to everyone equally... so no purity there, as far as I can see.. and in many instances, the authority of the course facilitators is pretty evident.
makes it clear that if a work is open, then any and all of the things that it may be possible to do with it are allowed, unless explicitly disallowed.
right... as opposed to copyright
legal scholar Lessig documents the expansion of copyright under U.S. law over the past 40 years. Lessig (2005b) argues that this expansion, far from promoting “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (as specified in the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8), actively inhibits it
is there evidence for that? I hope so!
Suber suggests that OA removes two types of barriers: price and permission. This is an important point, because these are far from the only barriers to access. Suber lists four types of barriers that may remain in place even if price and permission barriers have been removed: censorship, language, handicap access, and connectivity [2]. Open Access does not directly address any of these barriers. However, having resources available online for free (gratis) is certainly closer to the ideal of universal access than not. Open does not mean friction-free, it just means with as little friction as possible.
as little friction as possible, I like that. I like the outlining of barriers though there may be others... hmm
Open Source Hardware
I still remember when I first heard of this concept and at first had no idea what it was. It's genius though!
here are four rights articulated by Creative Commons licenses: Attribution: All distributions of a work, and derivative works based upon it, must be credited to the creator of the work. Non-commercial: Derivative work cannot be for commercial use. Share-alike: Derivative work must be licensed under terms identical to those of the original work. No Derivatives: A work may be redistributed, but only “unchanged and in whole;” no derivative works may be made based on it.
This is introduced here in a very strange way, as if CC means ALL 4 of these are necessary... I assume at some point they will clarify that you can use them in combination...
“free as in beer.”
as a Muslim, I always disliked the use of beer specifically in this example. Does anyone know why beer? Is there nothing else that's given out for free in Western countries, like stickers of happy meals or something?
Riffing on Stallman’s quote, some suggest that there is a third “free”: free as in puppies. This amusingly captures both the price meaning of free, as well as implying the costs of ongoing maintenance for the liberty meaning of free.
I actually love this and it's important, actually, because there is a privilege in the capacity to keep free puppies!!! And maintain/sustain open stuff obviously
so you can help your neighbor.
does the "so you can help your neighbor" mean it has to be done with the purpose of helping another, or is this just a way of saying "non commercial redistribution"?
. The interpretation of the word “open” to mean a shared resource to which all had access, fit neatly into the philosophy of the modern library movement of the nineteenth century. The phrases “open shelves” and “open stacks” emerged at this time, referring to resources that were directly available to library users, without necessarily requiring intervention by a librarian.
that is so interesting...wondering how it worked
Opening the door on open
I always liked the door metaphor for open, because it suggests decrees of openness, from open just a crack to wide open. And a wide open door can still be an obstacle to people in certain circumstances. So it can be a boon or it can be a tease. It is not as simple as it might seem.
the interface to Microsoft Word contains few deep principles about writing, and as a result it is possible to master Word's interface without becoming a passable writer. This isn't so much a criticism of Word, as it is a reflection of the fact that we have relatively few really strong and precise ideas about how to write well.
"Write well" is complex, like "personality" (although OCEAN, haha, oops). I think especially of Karla's lament so beautifully expressed in Oceanic Mind. https://rampages.us/karlaimpala/2015/12/04/oceanic-mind/. Perhaps "strong" and "precise" are not mutually compatible here--the pairing may be misleading.
Experts often possess many such minimal canonical examples, together with heuristics they can use to reason rapidly about the examples. Those heuristics are often quick-fire rules of thumb, full of exceptions and special clauses, not rigorous proof techniques. They let experts sketch out arguments, and figure out what is likely true, and what is likely false. In short, they're a powerful way of exploring and obtaining insight.
Key moment. There's a complex relationship between expertise and heuristics, almost a chicken-and-egg problem. But this idea of hidden representations maps well onto what Nielsen has noted in "Reinventing Discovery" about the transformational moment he experienced when he first heard a scientist speak informally. And informal maps onto "narrating work" openly. And of course, INSIGHT.