Building bridges, breaking walls
In his The Power of Open, Joi Ito, the MIT Media Lab director collects the stories of many creators working under the Creative Commons philosophy. These experiences, from artists calling for collaboration by opening their creations to independent and networked journalism, like in Global Voices, have built many different new ways of thinking, creating, distributing and reusing the content opposed to the closeness and inflexibility of copyright.
The education is one of the fields that has been more benefited. Open Library, a project of the Internet Archive in example, is a collaborative global catalog whose goal is to have a bibliographic web page describing every published book. And related to learning paths, Khan Academy is an open repository of educational resources, where students can learn following a personalized path of videos and exercises related to a subject.
The main ideas of Joi Ito are that technology makes creation, distribution and cooperation easier; and lowers the costs of innovation in time and also in money. The mechanisms of recognition are different than they were with the copyright, and a little more sophisticated and indirect. Instead of the simple economic return, copyleft values more the increase of visibility, and the payment is deferred until the user finds the content valuable. Open content is a change of the cultural paradigm and a challenge that, on Internet is starting to become the rule rather than the exception.
About this post
This post was first published on LibTechNotes, a blog from the Library team at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to share our everyday findings, solutions and inspirations.
