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SUBTITLES AND TRANSCRIPT
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Richard Baraniuk
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THE BIRTH OF THE OPEN-SOURCE LEARNING REVOLUTION
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0:11
I'm Rich Baraniuk. And what I'd like to talk a little bit about today are some
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ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been
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talked about the last two days. In fact, so many different points of resonance that it's
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going to be difficult to bring them all up, but I'll try to do my best.
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0:26
Does anybody remember these?
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0:29
(Laughter)
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0:30
OK, so these are LP records and they've been replaced, right? They've been
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swept away over the last two decades by these types of world-flattening digitization
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technologies, right? And I think it was best witnessed when Thomas was playing the
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music as we came in the room today. What's happened in the music world is there's a
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culture or an ecosystem that's been created that, if you take some words from
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Apple, the catchphrase that we create, rip, mix and burn. What I mean by that is that
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anyone in the world is free and allowed to create new music and musical
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ideas. Anyone in the world is allowed to rip or copy musical ideas, use them in
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innovative ways. Anyone is allowed to mix them in different types of ways,draw
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connections between musical ideas and people can burn them or create final products
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and continue the circle. And what that's done is it's created, like I said, a vibrant
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community that's very inclusive with people continually working to connect musical
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ideas, innovate them and keep things constantly up to date. Today's hit single is not
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last year's hit single.
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1:37But, I'm not here to talk about music today. I'm here to talk about books. In
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particular, textbooks and the kind of educational materials that we use every day in
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school. Has anyone here ever been to school?
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1:48(Laughter)
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1:49OK, does anybody realize there's a crisis in our schools, around the world? OK,
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I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but what I want to talk about is some of
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the disconnects that appear when an author publishes a book that in fact, the
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publishing process -- just because of the fact that it's complicated, it's heavy, books
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are expensive -- creates a sort of a wall between authors of books and the ultimate
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users of books, be they teachers, students or just general readers. And this is even
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more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world's major
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languages, and especially English.And I'm going to call these people below the barrier
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Shut-outs, because they're really shut out of the process of being able to share their
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knowledge with the world. And so what I want to talk about today is trying to take
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these ideas that we've seen in the musical culture and try to bring these towards
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reinventing the way we think about writing books, using them and teaching from
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them. So, that's what I'd like to talk about and really, how do we get from where we
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are now to where we need to go?
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2:50So, the first thing I'd like you to do is a little thought experiment. So, imagine
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taking all the world's books.OK, everybody imagine books and imagine just tearing out
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the pages. So, liberating these pages and imagine digitizing them and then storing
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them in a vast, interconnected, global repository. Think of it as a massive iTunes for
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book type content. And then take that material and imagine making it all open, so that
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people can modify it, play with it, improve it. Imagine making it free, so that anyone in
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the world can have access to all of this knowledge, and imagine using information
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technology so that you can update this content, improve it, play with it, on a timescale
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that's more on the order of seconds instead of years.Instead of editions coming out
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every two years, of a book, imagine it coming out every 25 seconds.
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3:39So, imagine we could do that and imagine we could put people into this. So that
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we could truly build an ecosystem with not just authors, but all the people who could
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be or want to be authors in all the different languages of the world, and I think if you
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could do this, it would be called, well, I'm just going to refer to it as a knowledge
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ecosystem. So, really, this is the dream and in a sense what you can think of it is we
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are trying to enable anyone in the world, I mean anyone in the world, to be their own
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educational DJ, creating educational materials, sharing them with the
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world, constantly innovating on them. So, this is the dream.
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4:15In fact, this dream is actually being realized. Over the last six-and-a-half
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years, we've been working really hard at Rice University on a project called
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Connexions, and so what I'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just tell you a little bit
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about what people are doing with Connexions, which you can kind of think of as the
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counterpoint to Nicholas Negroponte's talk yesterday, where they're working on the
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hardware of bringing education to the world. We're working on the open-source tools
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and the content. So, that's sort of to put it in perspective here.
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4:44So, create. So what are some of the people that are using these kind of
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tools? Well, the first thing isthere's a community of engineering professors, from
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Cambridge to Kyoto, who are developing engineering content in electrical
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engineering to develop what you can think of as a massive, super textbook that covers
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the entire area of electrical engineering -- and not only that, it can be customized for
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use in each of their own individual institutions. If people like Kitty Jones -- right, a
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shut-out -- a private music teacher and mom from Champagne, Illinois, who wanted to
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share her fantastic music content with the world, on how to teach kids how to play
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music. Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month. Tremendous,
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tremendous use. In fact, a lot of this use coming from Unites States, K-through-12
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schools because anyone who's involved in a school scale back, the first thing that's cut
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is the music curriculum and so this is just indicating the tremendous thirst for this
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kind of open, free content. A lot of teachers are using this stuff. OK, what about
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ripping?
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5:53What about copying, reusing, right? A team of volunteers at the University of
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Texas El Paso, graduate students translating this engineering super textbook
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ideas and within about a week, having this be some of our most popular material in
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widespread use all over Latin America and in particular in Mexico,because of the open
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extensible nature of this. People, volunteers and even companies that are translating
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material into Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai, to spread the
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knowledge even further.
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6:26OK, what about people who are mixing? What does "mixing" mean? "Mixing"
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means building customized courses, means building customized books. Companies
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like National Instruments, who are embedding very powerful, interactive simulations
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into the materials, so that we can go way beyond our regular kind of textbook to an
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experience that all the teaching materials are things you can actually interact with
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and play around with and actually learn as you do.
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6:55We've been working with Teachers Without Borders who are very interested in
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mixing our materials.They're going to be using Connexions as their platform to develop
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and deliver teaching materials for teaching teachers how to teach in 84 countries that
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are around the world. TWB is currently in Iraq training 20,000 teachers supported by
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USAID and to them, this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context
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is extraordinarily important, because just providing free content to people has actually
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been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism, that if
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you don't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material, translate it
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into their own language and take ownership of it, it's not good. OK, other
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organizations we've been working with, UC Merced, people know about UC Merced. It's
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a new university in California, in the Central Valley, working very closely with
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community colleges. They're actually developing a lot of their science and engineering
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curriculum to spread widely around the world in our system and they're also trying to
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develop all of their software tools completely open-source. We've been working with
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AMD, which has a project called 50 by '15, which is trying to bring Internet
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connectivity to 50 percent of the world's population by 2015. We're going to be
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providing content to them in a whole range of different languages. And we've also been
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working with a number of other organizations. In particular, a bunch of the
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projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation, who have taken a real leadership role
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in this area of open content.
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8:35OK, burn, I think this is sort of, quite interesting. "Burn" is the idea of trying to
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create the physical instantiation of one of these courses. And I think a lot of you
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received, I think all of you received one of these music books in your gift pack. A little
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present for you. Just to tell you quickly about it: this is an engineering textbook. It's
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about 300 pages long, hardbound. This costs, anybody guess? How much would it
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cost in a bookstore?
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9:08Audience: 65 dollars.
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9:10Richard Baraniuk: This costs 22 dollars to the student. Why does it cost 22
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dollars? Because it's published on demand and it's developed from this repository of
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open materials. If this book were to be published by a regular publisher, it would cost
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at least 122 dollars.
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9:27So what we're seeing is moving this burning or publication process from the
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regular sort of single-authored book towards community-authored materials that are
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modular, that are customized to each individual class and published on demand very
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inexpensively, either pushed out through Amazon, or published directly through an
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on-demand press, like Coop. And I think that this is an extraordinarily interesting
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area because there is tremendous area under this long tail in publishing. We're not
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talking about the Harry Potter end, right at the left side. We're talking about books on
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hyper geometric partial differential equations. Right, books that might sell 100 copies
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a year, 1,000 copies a year. There is tremendous sustaining revenue under this long
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tail to sustain open projects like ours, but also to sustain this new emergence of on-
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demand publishers, like Coop, who produced these two books. And I think one of the
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things that you should take away from this talk, is that there's an impending cut-out-
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the-middle-man, disintermediation, that's going to be happening in the publishing
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industry, and it's going to reach a crescendo over the next few years, and I think that
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it's for our benefit, really, and for the world's benefit.
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10:42OK, so what are the enablers? What's really making all of this happen? There's
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tons of technology, and the only piece of technology that I really want to talk about is
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XML. How many people know about XML?Oh, great, so it's the future of the web,
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right? It's semantic representation of comment, content, and what you can really think
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of XML in this case, is it's the packaging that we're putting around these
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pages.Remember we took the book, tore the pages out? Well, what the XML is going to
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do is it's going to turn those pages into Lego blocks. XML are the nubs on the
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Lego that allow us to combine the content together in myriad different ways, and it
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provides us a framework to share content. So, it lets you take this ecosystem in its
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primordial state, right, of all this content, all the pages you've torn out of books, and
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create highly sophisticated learning machines: books, courses, course packs.
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11:39It gives you the ability to personalize the learning experience to each individual
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student, so that every student can have a book or a course that's customized to their
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learning style, their context, their language and the things that excite them. It lets you
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reuse the same materials in multiple different waysand surprising new ways. It lets
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you interconnect ideas indicating how fields relate to each other, and I'll just give you
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my personal story. We came up with this six-and-a-half years ago because I teach the
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stuff in the red box.
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12:12And my day job, as Chris said, I'm an electrical engineering professor. I teach
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signal processing and my challenge was to show that this math -- wow, about half of
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you have already fallen asleep just looking at the equation --
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12:24(Laughter)
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12:25but this seemingly dry math is actually the center of this tremendously powerful
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web that links technology -- that links really cool applications like music
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synthesizers to tremendous economic opportunities, but also governed by intellectual
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property. And the thing that I realized is there was no way that I, as an engineer, could
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write this book that would get all of this across. We needed a community to do it and
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we needed new tools to be able to interconnect these ideas, and I think that really, in a
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sense, what we're trying to do is make Minsky's dream come to a reality, where you
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can imagine all the books in a libraryactually starting to talk to each other. And people
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who are teachers out here, whoever taught, you know this -- it's the interconnections
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between ideas that teaching is really all about.
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13:11OK, back to math. Imagine this is possible -- that every single equation that you
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click on in one of your new e-texts is something that you're going to be able to explore
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and experiment with. So imagine your kid's algebra textbook in seventh grade. You
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can click on every single equation and bring up a little tool to be able to experiment
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with it, tinker with it, understand it, because we really don't understand until we
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do. The same type of mark-up, like mathML, for chemistry. Imagine chemistry
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textbooks that actually understand the structure of how molecules are
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formed. Imagine music XML that actually lets you delve into the semantic structure of
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music, play with it, understand it. It's no wonder that everybody's getting into it,
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right? Even the three wise men.
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13:59(Laughter)
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14:00OK, the second big enabler, and this is where I told a big lie. The second big
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enabler is intellectual property, because in fact I got up here and I talked about how
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great the music culture is. We can share and rip, mix and burn, but in fact that's all
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illegal. And we would be accused of pirates for doing that,because this music has been
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propertized. It's now owned, right, much of it by big industries. So, really, the key
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thing here is we can't let this happen. We can't let this Napster thing happen here. So,
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what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning and what we have to do is
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find an intellectual property framework that makes sharing safe, and makes it easily
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understandable, and the inspiration here is taken from open-source software, things
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like Linux and the GPL.
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14:52And the ideas, the creative commons licenses. How many people have heard of
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creative commons? If you have not, you must learn about it. Creativecommons.org. At
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the bottom of every piece of material in Connexions and in lots of other projects, you
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can find their logo. Clicking on that logo takes you to an absolute no-
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nonsense, human-readable document, a deed, that tells you exactly what you can do
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with this content. In fact, you're free to share it, to do all of these things, to copy it, to
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change it, even to make commercial use of it as long as you attribute the
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author. Because in academic publishing and much of educational publishing, it's
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really this idea of sharing knowledge and making impact that's why people write, not
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necessarily making bucks. We're not talking about Harry Potter, right? We're at the
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long tail end here. Behind that is the legal code, so if you want to very carefully
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construct it, and creative commons is taking off -- over 43 million things out
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there, licensed with a creative commons license. Not just text, but music, images,
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video, and there's actually a tremendous uptake of the number of people that are
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actually licensing music to make it free for people who do this whole idea of re-
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sampling, rip, mixing, burning and sharing.
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16:13So I'd like to conclude with just the last few points. So, we've built this idea of a
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commons. People are using it. We get over 500,000 unique visitors per month, just to
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our particular site. MIT open courseware, which is another large open-content
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site, gets a similar number of hits, but how do we protect this? How do we protect it
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into the future? And the first thing that people are probably thinking is quality control,
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right? Because we're saying that anybody can contribute things to this commons.
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Anybody can contribute anything. So that could be a problem.
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16:51It didn't take long until people started contributing materials, for example, on
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lingerie, which is actually a pretty good module. The only problem is it's
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plagiarized from a major French feminist journal, and when you go to the supposed
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course website, it points to a lingerie-selling website. This is a little bit of a problem, so
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we clearly need some kind of idea of quality control, and this is really where the idea of
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review and peer review comes in. OK, you come to TED. Why do you come to
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TED? Because Chris and his team have ensured that things are very, very high
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quality, right, and so we need to be able to do the same thing. And we need to be able
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to design structures and what we're doing is designing social software to enable
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anyone to build their own peer review process, and we call these things "lenses." And
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basically what they allow is anyone out there to develop their own peer review
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process, so that they can focus on the content in the repository that they think is
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really important and you can think of TED as a potential lens.
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17:57So I'd just like to end by saying, you can really view this as a call to
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action. Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge. All of you here
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are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge and what I'd like to
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do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of
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its type, because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and
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educational publishing.
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18:26So, thanks very much.
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