The Open Digital Commons - A Truly Endless Array of Success Stories

We found that trying to concoct one list of the digital commons success stories was simply beyond the scope of our small site. The number of truly noteworthy developments is large and growing more substantial by the day, each new venture seemingly offering yet additional opportunities for further growth.

In fact, it is precisely as Larry Lessig writes in The Future of Ideas, “Philosophically, if the Web was to be a universal resource, it had to be able to grow in an unlimited way. Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the Web’s growth, and the Web would never scale up. Its being ‘out of control’ was very important.”

Out of control it has been and here are at least some broad categories and central themes that represent a partial list of the commons success stories. We have called it an endless array because of the sheer volume and the interconnectivity and layering that occurs over the numerous developments.

Online Resources/Collections
One could not create a list without the mention of the Wiki concept and the top Wiki dog, Wikipedia. We understand the issues that user editing can create. But the user editing feature is precisely why this online encyclopedia offers its immense depth and breadth in more than 15 languages. And yes, we understand that too many students rely on Wikipedia exclusively despite the fact that every teacher in America tells students the site is only a starting point.
When it comes to Wikipedia, we think that Bill Van Loo of billvanloo.com states it best. “Wikipedia is one of the most successful proofs of an open, community-contributed way of building a base of knowledge and ideas. Even with its drawbacks and critics, it’s hard to overlook the sheer size and breadth of the information contained there. The fact that a student can type in almost any historical name, place, event, invention, theory, or person and get back at least some information almost instantly is pretty remarkable, especially looking back 10 years.”

We have to agree - as we prepared our work for the digital commons series, we researched the likes of Garret Hardin, Daniel McFadden, and Larry Lessig. We researched more technical concepts like php and MySQL. We challenge anyone to find one existing tome or web site that could give novice folks information on as many disparate categories as the Wikipedia site.

The concept has spawned Wikiversity, Citizendium, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), eXtension, Rice University’s Connexions and countless others. The difference may be a focus, it may be possible contributors, but the concept is always similar. The movement has lead to another generation of sites, examples such as Ref Desk.com with a devotion to fact checking and Intute for those who want to research the truly technical with citations (now you can get real insight into php and MySQL).

For pure collections,there are those sites like the Yale University Art Gallery, Picture History, the University of Michigan’s Mother of All Art History, and the Picasso Exhibit from Texas A&M. Want to visit an anatomy collection, go to the University of Michigan’s Medical School site; for a biodiversity exhibit head to Louisiana State University’s Herbarium. For the physical sciences try the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Arizona University’s Themis (Mars spacecraft data), the University of Arizona’s Phoenix Mars Mission and HiRise. For history, how about the Talking History from the University of Albany, a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, and commentaries, or Historical Voices which seeks to create a fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century.
How about Project Gutenberg which will eventually fall by the way side considering sites such as Google Scholar Beta though the site still reportedly sees over two million downloads per month. The Internet Archive provides open access to anyone while the Directory of Open Access Journals is a free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journal search engine.

Then there is the popular, How Stuff Works, the Merriam Webster Dictionary site and Metafilter, a “community weblog” featuring all fields including politics, art, culture, and technology. The Ask Metafilter is a standby for many.

Transforming Teaching and Learning
For transforming education at the elementary level, the possibilities are so endless that teachers may likely find the options overwhelming. Perhaps here we must bring in McFadden’s notion of the need for greater cataloging. That said, teachers can now turn to wikis, blogs and a host of sites that enhance reading and writing while possibly reintroducing the age-old stalwart, storytelling.

The site Voicethread.com offers a service where students can now post a photo or video and then proceed to add narration to it. As a key component, students may of course share them with other students via the net. There are sites like Blabberize, Bubbleshare and Joomla - all of these allow for student collaboration, bringing potential teamwork discussions to the academic classrooms.

There is YouTube and TeacherTube along with sites like Open Culture that then point readers towards the best such videos available. There is site called pageflakes where each student in the classroom could have their own blog. One site can contain a class and house all blog. Melanie Lewis, the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher for Amherst County Public Schools offers, “Just think, as a teacher, you could see instantly who had updated an assignment!”

Transforming Education, Secondary, Post Secondary
Moving up the ladder teachers can turn not to educational podcasts at UC Berkeley or Stanford. There is the amazing Scratch which is “designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills” as well as Carnegie Mellon’s Alice, the free 3D interactive programming environment for teaching introductory computing.

The so-called Open Educational Resources (OER) movement continues to be one of the major success stories of the open digital commons. Thanks to one of the premiere universities in America, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) there is a movement to make college level materials free to anyone signing on to the Internet. MIT began this movement when Provost Robert A. Brown asked a committee of MIT faculty, students, and administrators how to best serve “the nation and the world in the 21st century.”

MIT began providing open access to class syllabi, lecture notes, exams, reading lists, and some video of lectures. Since the movement by MIT, other U.S. colleges have followed suit. Schools such as Johns Hopkins, Tufts University, the University of California, and Notre Dame have since followed suit. Unlike the online college concept, these materials do not carry college credits or degrees. But they do provide the materials to help other professors design courses as well as the material that would accompany a course at one of the premier institutions of learning. Current workers who want to brush up on a course taken years ago find these offerings perfect, conveniently accessible and legitimate in their depth of academic rigor.

Operating Systems/Software
The Linux story has been well told but according to the experts we will soon see Ubuntu and Edubuntu as analogous up-and-coming success stories. These packages have served to wean users from the very costly proprietary systems (Microsoft Windows or Mac OS). On the software side, we turn to OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice.org as enormous steps in a similar direction. Given the enormous costs associated with proprietary site license expenses, many schools have struggled to maintain both up-to-date hardware and software on limited budgets. However, the software and operating platforms transition easily from education to business applications. There is, of course Mozilla, Sunbird, Thunderbird and another project called the Sakai Project (educational oriented software).

We also have Moodle, the free software e-learning platform designed to help educators create online courses. Moodle transformed the initially stale online educational environment by allowing for much richer interaction. ZaidLearning lists the New Zealand OER Project as a Moodle site worthy of mention to readers. And there is the blog WordPress, a publishing system written in php and backed by a MySQL database, that is taking the blogging world by storm.

Social Networking
The area of the future may well be the various social networking sites. We have Facebook, MySpace, and the latest social interaction sites like Twitter or Tumblr. Schools currently block all of these sites insisting they have no learning value whatsoever. Technology teachers think otherwise and see the sites as potentially revamping how schools provide homework help as well as opportunity for group learning to extend outside the school building and school hours. Throw in the newer ideas like LiveMocha that combine the social networking with learning a language and we begin to scratch the surface of what such sites may do down the road.

We know that this list is non-exhaustive. We found that trying to create a list of successes within the open culture would actually be a relentless task; no list could stand for more than a day or two before a shift in the importance of one site versus another is followed immediately by a new idea pushing aside a prior top dog.

In fact, it was in trying to create a finite list of success stories that we realized just how right Lessig and the Creative Commons folks are on this issue.