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The birth of the open-source learning revolution

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    I'm Rich Baraniuk and what I'd like
    to talk a little bit about today
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    are some ideas that I think
    have just tremendous resonance
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    with all the things that have been
    talked about the last two days.
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    So many different points of resonance
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    that it's going to be difficult
    to bring them all up,
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    but I'll try to do my best.
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    Does anybody remember these?
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    (Laughter)
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    OK, so these are LP records
    and they've been replaced, right?
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    They've been swept away
    over the last two decades
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    by these types of world-flattening
    digitization technologies, right?
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    And I think it was best witnessed
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    when Thomas was playing the music
    as we came in the room today.
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    What's happened in the music world
    is there's a culture,
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    or an ecosystem that's been created
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    that, if you take some words from Apple,
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    the catchphrase --
    that we create, rip, mix and burn.
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    What I mean by that is that anyone
    in the world is free and allowed
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    to create new music and musical ideas.
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    Anyone in the world is allowed
    to rip or copy musical ideas,
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    use them in innovative ways.
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    Anyone is allowed to mix them
    in different types of ways,
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    draw connections between musical ideas,
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    and people can burn them or create
    final products and continue the circle.
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    And what that's done
    is it's created, like I said,
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    a vibrant community that's very inclusive,
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    with people continually working
    to connect musical ideas,
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    innovate them and keep things
    constantly up to date.
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    Today's hit single
    is not last year's hit single.
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    But I'm not here
    to talk about music today.
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    I'm here to talk about books.
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    In particular, textbooks
    and the kind of educational materials
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    that we use every day in school.
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    Has anyone here ever been to school?
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    (Laughter)
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    OK, does anybody realize
    there's a crisis in our schools,
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    around the world?
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    I'm not going to spend
    too much time on that,
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    but what I want to talk about
    is some of the disconnects
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    that appear when an author
    publishes a book.
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    That in fact, the publishing process --
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    just because of the fact
    that it's complicated,
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    it's heavy, books are expensive --
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    creates a sort of a wall
    between authors of books
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    and the ultimate users of books,
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    be they teachers, students
    or just general readers.
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    And this is even more true
    if you happen to speak a language
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    other than one of the world's
    major languages, and especially English.
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    I'm going to call these people
    below the barrier "shutouts"
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    because they're really
    shut out of the process
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    of being able to share
    their knowledge with the world.
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    And so what I want to talk about today
    is trying to take these ideas
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    that we've seen in the musical culture
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    and try to bring these
    towards reinventing the way
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    we think about writing books,
    using them and teaching from them.
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    So, that's what I'd like to talk about
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    and, really, how we get
    from where we are now
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    to where we need to go.
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    The first thing I'd like you to do
    is a little thought experiment.
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    Imagine taking all the world's books.
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    OK, everybody imagine books
    and imagine just tearing out the pages.
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    So, liberating these pages
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    and imagine digitizing them
    and then storing them
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    in a vast, interconnected,
    global repository.
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    Think of it as a massive iTunes
    for book-type content.
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    And then take that material
    and imagine making it all open,
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    so that people can modify it,
    play with it, improve it.
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    Imagine making it free,
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    so that anyone in the world can have
    access to all of this knowledge,
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    and imagine using information technology
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    so that you can update this content,
    improve it, play with it,
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    on a timescale that's more
    on the order of seconds instead of years.
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    Instead of editions of a book
    coming out every two years,
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    imagine them coming out every 25 seconds.
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    So, imagine we could do that
    and imagine we could put people into this.
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    So that we could truly build
    an ecosystem with not just authors,
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    but all the people
    who could be or want to be authors
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    in all the different
    languages of the world,
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    and I think if you could do this,
    it would be called --
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    I'm just going to refer to it
    as a knowledge ecosystem.
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    So, really, this is the dream,
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    and in a sense what you can think of it
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    is we're trying
    to enable anyone in the world,
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    I mean anyone in the world --
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    (Laughter)
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    to be their own educational DJ,
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    creating educational materials,
    sharing them with the world,
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    constantly innovating on them.
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    So, this is the dream.
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    In fact, this dream
    is actually being realized.
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    Over the last six-and-a-half years,
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    we've been working really hard
    at Rice University
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    on a project called Connexions,
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    and so what I'd like to do
    for the rest of the talk
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    is just tell you a little bit
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    about what people are doing
    with Connexions,
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    which you can kind of
    think of as the counterpoint
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    to Nicholas Negroponte's talk yesterday,
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    where they're working on the hardware
    of bringing education to the world.
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    We're working on the open-source tools
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    and the content.
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    So, that's sort of
    to put it in perspective here.
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    So, create.
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    What are some of the people
    that are using these kind of tools?
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    Well, the first thing is,
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    there's a community
    of engineering professors,
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    from Cambridge to Kyoto,
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    who are developing engineering content
    in electrical engineering
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    to develop what you can think of
    as a massive, super textbook
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    that covers the entire area
    of electrical engineering.
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    And not only that --
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    it can be customized for use in each
    of their own individual institutions.
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    If people like Kitty Jones, a shut-out --
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    a private music teacher and mom
    from Champagne, Illinois,
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    who wanted to share her fantastic
    music content with the world,
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    on how to teach kids how to play music --
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    Her material is now used
    over 600,000 times per month.
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    Tremendous use.
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    In fact, a lot of this use coming
    from United States K-12 schools,
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    because anyone who's involved
    in a school scale back,
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    the first thing that's cut
    is the music curriculum.
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    And so this is just indicating
    the tremendous thirst
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    for this kind of open, free content.
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    A lot of teachers are using this stuff.
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    What about ripping?
    What about copying, reusing?
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    A team of volunteers
    at the University of Texas at El Paso --
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    graduate students translating
    this engineering super textbook ideas.
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    And within about a week,
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    having this be some
    of our most popular material
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    in widespread use all over Latin America,
    and in particular in Mexico,
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    because of the open,
    extensible nature of this.
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    People, volunteers and even companies
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    that are translating materials
    into Asian languages
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    like Chinese, Japanese and Thai,
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    to spread the knowledge even further.
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    OK, what about people who are mixing?
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    What does "mixing" mean?
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    "Mixing" means
    building customized courses,
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    means building customized books.
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    Companies like National Instruments,
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    who are embedding very powerful,
    interactive simulations
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    into the materials,
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    so that we can go way beyond
    our regular kind of textbook
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    to an experience
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    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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    We've been working
    with Teachers Without Borders,
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    who are very interested
    in mixing our materials.
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    They're going to be using
    Connexions as their platform
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    to develop and deliver teaching materials
    for teaching teachers how to teach
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    in 84 countries around the world.
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    TWB is currently in Iraq,
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    training 20,000 teachers
    supported by USAID.
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    And to them, this idea
    of being able to remix
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    and customize to the local context
    is extraordinarily important,
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    because just providing
    free content to people
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    has actually been likened
    by people in the developing world
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    to a kind of cultural imperialism --
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    that if you don't empower people
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    with the ability
    to re-contextualize the material,
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    translate it into their own language
    and take ownership of it,
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    it's not good.
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    OK, other organizations
    we've been working with, UC Merced --
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    people know about UC Merced.
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    It's a new university in California,
    in the Central Valley,
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    working very closely
    with community colleges.
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    They're actually developing
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    a lot of their science
    and engineering curriculum
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    to spread widely
    around the world in our system.
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    And they're also trying to develop
    all of their software tools
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    completely open-source.
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    We've been working with AMD,
    which has a project called 50x15,
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    which is trying to bring
    Internet connectivity
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    to 50 percent of the world's
    population by 2015.
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    We're going to be
    providing content to them
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    in a whole range of different languages.
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    And we've also been working
    with a number of other organizations.
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    In particular, a bunch of the projects
    that are funded by Hewlett Foundation,
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    who have taken a real leadership role
    in this area of open content.
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    OK, burn -- I think
    this is, sort of, quite interesting.
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    "Burn" is the idea of trying
    to create the physical instantiation
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    of one of these courses.
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    And I think a lot of you received --
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    I think all of you received one
    of these music books in your gift pack.
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    A little present for you.
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    Just to tell you quickly about it:
    this is an engineering textbook.
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    It's about 300 pages long, hardbound.
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    This costs -- anybody guess?
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    How much would it cost in a bookstore?
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    (Audience) 65 dollars.
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    Richard Baraniuk:
    OK. This costs 22 dollars to the student.
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    Why does it cost 22 dollars?
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    Because it's published on demand
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    and it's developed
    from this repository of open materials.
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    If this book were to be published
    by a regular publisher,
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    it would cost at least 122 dollars.
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    So what we're seeing
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    is moving this burning
    or publication process
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    from the regular,
    sort of single-authored book
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    towards community-authored materials
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    that are modular, that are customized
    to each individual class
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    and published on demand
    very inexpensively,
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    either pushed out through Amazon
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    or published directly
    through an on-demand press, like QOOP.
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    And I think that this is
    an extraordinarily interesting area
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    because there is tremendous area
    under this long tail in publishing.
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    We're not talking
    about the Harry Potter end,
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    right at the left side.
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    We're talking about books
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    on hypergeometric
    partial differential equations.
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    Books that might sell
    100 copies a year, 1,000 copies a year.
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    There is tremendous
    sustaining revenue under this long tail
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    to sustain open projects like ours,
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    but also to sustain this new emergence
    of on-demand publishers,
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    like QOOP, who produced these two books.
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    And I think one of the things
    that you should take away from this talk
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    is that there's an impending
    cut-out-the-middle-man disintermediation,
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    that's going to be happening
    in the publishing industry.
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    And it's going to reach a crescendo
    over the next few years,
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    and I think that it's for our benefit,
    really, and for the world's benefit.
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    OK, so what are the enablers?
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    What's really making all of this happen?
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    There's tons of technology,
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    and the only piece of technology
    that I really want to talk about is XML.
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    How many people know about XML?
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    Oh, great.
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    So it's the future of the web, right?
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    It's semantic representation of content.
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    And what you can really
    think of XML in this case
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    is it's the packaging
    that we're putting around these pages.
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    Remember we took the book,
    tore the pages out?
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    Well, what the XML is going to do
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    is it's going to turn those pages
    into Lego blocks.
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    XML are the nubs on the Lego
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    that allow us to combine the content
    together in a myriad different ways,
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    and it provides us a framework
    to share content.
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    So, it lets you take this ecosystem
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    in its primordial state
    of all this content,
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    all the pages you've torn out of books,
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    and create highly sophisticated
    learning machines:
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    books, courses, course packs.
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    It gives you the ability
    to personalize the learning experience
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    to each individual student,
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    so that every student
    can have a book or a course
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    that's customized to their
    learning style, their context,
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    their language and the things
    that excite them.
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    It lets you reuse the same materials
    in multiple different ways,
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    and surprising new ways.
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    It lets you interconnect ideas,
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    indicating how fields
    relate to each other.
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    And I'll just give you my personal story.
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    We came up with this
    six-and-a-half years ago
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    because I teach the stuff in the red box.
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    And my day job, as Chris said --
    I'm an electrical engineering professor.
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    I teach signal processing
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    and my challenge
    was to show that this math --
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    Wow, about half of you
    have already fallen asleep
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    just looking at the equation.
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    (Laughter)
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    But this seemingly dry math
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    is actually the center
    of this tremendously powerful web
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    that links technology --
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    that links really cool applications
    like music synthesizers
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    to tremendous economic opportunities,
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    but also governed
    by intellectual property.
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    And the thing that I realized
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    is there was no way
    that I, as an engineer,
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    could write this book
    that would get all of this across.
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    We needed a community to do it
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    and we needed new tools
    to be able to interconnect these ideas.
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    And I think that really,
    in a sense, what we're trying to do
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    is make Minsky's dream come to a reality,
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    where you can imagine
    all the books in a library
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    actually starting to talk to each other.
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    And people who are teachers out here --
    whoever taught, you know this --
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    it's the interconnections between ideas
    that teaching is really all about.
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    OK, back to math.
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    Imagine -- this is possible:
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    that every single equation that you
    click on in one of your new e-texts
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    is something that you're going to be able
    to explore and experiment with.
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    So imagine your kid's
    algebra textbook in seventh grade.
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    You can click on every single equation
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    and bring up a little tool
    to be able to experiment with it,
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    tinker with it, understand it.
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    Because we really
    don't understand until we do.
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    The same type of mark-up,
    like MathML, for chemistry.
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    Imagine chemistry textbooks
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    that actually understand the structure
    of how molecules are formed.
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    Imagine Music XML
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    that actually lets you delve
    into the semantic structure of music,
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    play with it, understand it.
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    It's no wonder that everybody's
    getting into it, right?
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    Even the three wise men.
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    (Laughter)
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    OK, the second big enabler,
    and this is where I told a big lie.
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    The second big enabler
    is intellectual property.
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    Because, in fact, I got up here
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    and I talked about how great
    the music culture is.
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    We can share and rip, mix and burn,
    but in fact, that's all illegal.
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    And we would be accused
    of [piracy] for doing that,
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    because this music has been propertized.
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    It's now owned,
    much of it by big industries.
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    So, really, the key thing here
    is we can't let this happen.
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    We can't let this
    Napster thing happen here.
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    So, what we have to do
    is get it right from the very beginning.
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    And what we have to do
    is find an intellectual property framework
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    that makes sharing safe
    and makes it easily understandable.
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    And the inspiration here
    is taken from open-source software.
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    Things like Linux and the GPL.
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    The Creative Commons licenses.
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    How many people
    have heard of creative commons?
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    If you have not, you must learn about it.
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    Creativecommons.org.
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    At the bottom of every piece
    of material in Connexions
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    and in lots of other projects,
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    you can find their logo.
  • 14:56 - 15:00
    Clicking on that logo
    takes you to an absolute no-nonsense,
  • 15:00 - 15:03
    human-readable document, a deed,
  • 15:03 - 15:05
    that tells you exactly
    what you can do with this content.
  • 15:05 - 15:09
    In fact, you're free to share it,
    to do all of these things:
  • 15:09 - 15:12
    to copy it, to change it,
    even to make commercial use of it,
  • 15:12 - 15:15
    as long as you attribute the author.
  • 15:15 - 15:19
    Because in academic publishing
    and much of educational publishing,
  • 15:19 - 15:24
    it's really this idea of sharing knowledge
  • 15:24 - 15:25
    and making impact.
  • 15:25 - 15:29
    That's why people write,
    not necessarily making bucks.
  • 15:29 - 15:31
    We're not talking
    about Harry Potter, right?
  • 15:31 - 15:33
    We're at the long tail end here.
  • 15:33 - 15:38
    Behind that is the legal code,
    very carefully constructed.
  • 15:38 - 15:39
    And Creative Commons is taking off --
  • 15:39 - 15:44
    over 43 million things out there,
  • 15:44 - 15:46
    licensed with a Creative Commons license.
  • 15:46 - 15:49
    Not just text,
  • 15:49 - 15:51
    but music, images, video.
  • 15:51 - 15:53
    And there's actually a tremendous uptake
  • 15:53 - 15:57
    of the number of people
    that are actually licensing music
  • 15:57 - 16:00
    to make it free for people
    who do this whole idea of re-sampling,
  • 16:00 - 16:02
    ripping, mixing, burning and sharing.
  • 16:02 - 16:06
    OK, I'd like to conclude
    with just the last few points.
  • 16:06 - 16:08
    So, we've built this idea of a commons.
  • 16:08 - 16:10
    People are using it.
  • 16:10 - 16:17
    We get over 500,000 unique visitors
    per month, just to our particular site.
  • 16:17 - 16:21
    MIT OpenCourseWare,
    which is another large open-content site,
  • 16:21 - 16:23
    gets a similar number of hits.
  • 16:23 - 16:25
    But how do we protect this?
  • 16:25 - 16:26
    How do we protect it into the future?
  • 16:26 - 16:29
    And the first thing
    that people are probably thinking
  • 16:29 - 16:31
    is quality control, right?
  • 16:31 - 16:36
    Because we're saying that anybody
    can contribute things to this commons.
  • 16:36 - 16:38
    Anybody can contribute anything.
  • 16:38 - 16:41
    So that could be a problem.
  • 16:41 - 16:45
    It didn't take long until people
    started contributing materials,
  • 16:45 - 16:47
    for example, on lingerie,
  • 16:47 - 16:49
    which is actually a pretty good module.
  • 16:49 - 16:55
    The only problem is it's plagiarized
    from a major French feminist journal,
  • 16:55 - 16:58
    and when you go
    to the supposed course website,
  • 16:58 - 17:02
    it points to a lingerie-selling website.
  • 17:02 - 17:04
    So this is a little bit of a problem.
  • 17:04 - 17:07
    So we clearly need some kind
    of idea of quality control
  • 17:07 - 17:11
    and this is really where the idea
    of review and peer review comes in.
  • 17:11 - 17:13
    You come to TED. Why do you come to TED?
  • 17:13 - 17:16
    Because Chris and his team have ensured
  • 17:16 - 17:19
    that things are
    very, very high quality, right?
  • 17:19 - 17:21
    And so we need to be able
    to do the same thing.
  • 17:21 - 17:25
    And we need to be able
    to design structures,
  • 17:25 - 17:28
    and what we're doing
    is designing social software
  • 17:28 - 17:31
    to enable anyone to build
    their own peer review process,
  • 17:31 - 17:33
    and we call these things "lenses."
  • 17:33 - 17:34
    And basically what they allow
  • 17:34 - 17:37
    is anyone out there can develop
    their own peer-review process,
  • 17:37 - 17:41
    so that they can focus
    on the content in the repository
  • 17:41 - 17:43
    that they think is really important.
  • 17:43 - 17:46
    And you can think of TED
    as a potential lens.
  • 17:47 - 17:48
    So I'd just like to end by saying:
  • 17:48 - 17:53
    you can really view this
    as a call to action.
  • 17:53 - 17:58
    Connexions and open content
    is all about sharing knowledge.
  • 17:58 - 18:03
    All of you here are tremendously imbued
    with tremendous amounts of knowledge,
  • 18:03 - 18:06
    and what I'd like to do
    is invite each and every one of you
  • 18:06 - 18:09
    to contribute to this project
    and other projects of its type,
  • 18:09 - 18:13
    because I think together
    we can truly change the landscape
  • 18:13 - 18:15
    of education and educational publishing.
  • 18:15 - 18:16
    So, thanks very much.
Title:
The birth of the open-source learning revolution
Speaker:
Richard Baraniuk
Description:

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.
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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
18:16

English subtitles

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