I’m not *particularly* irritated by this specific post, though once the comments get going and Jim appears seemingly denigrating the not-radical-enough then Scott’s post gets misconstrued and then Brian Lamb appears to pile on in his blog with Leigh Blackall’s enthusiastic support– well, it seems easy to see where those of us who fit into that overlapping set of OCW supporters/members who aren’t clueless might feel a bit aggrieved with the atmosphere in our neck of the blogosphere.

@Terry I agree with the spirit of your statement. I said the same thing in our recent announcement about “going open,” specificallyl that membership in the OCW official movement wasn’t the most important thing in and of itself, but as a signifier that we have managed to start a small fire in our institution.

That being said, there is a tone in the air in various places (and I’m not the only one that’s noticing it) that seems to swirl about ideas like: there’s enough open content and/or joining the OCWC or being part of it is addressing an already solved question if not a sign that you aren’t doing enough and/or that content doesn’t matter, just artifacts of process and “contextualized information” etc.

Jared’s post by itself didn’t bug me– as you can see looking at my first comment– but in conjunction with Jim Groom (I’m a mad fan of the Reverend, so I’m assuming he’ll take my comments the way I intend them) it assumed a very different light.

@Chris I accept your criticisms as they apply to the “tone” of my post and intend to read through it again, as it does seem I’ve struck a nerve. Having said that, I suspect you may be reading too much into this. My intent was to state frankly why this milestone is important to me regardless (not in spite) of how it impacts our involvement with OCWC. I have benefited from the OCWC, particularly in terms of the support the members have given me (Dave Wiley, Marion Jensen, Steve Carson, John Dehlin, Terri Bays, and Jenny Gray in particular have been tremendously important in pushing this forward) and hope to continue to benefit from the organization.

Re. budgets my actual statement was “a designated budget of zero” which was only meant to indicate we haven’t had any institutional or outside funding allocated for this, and thus any process we have will have to be sustainable. In terms of how much it costs, sure it has cost me time to put together ideas and processes, and it has cost the institution money to send me to Open Ed conferences, and we have allocated some of my staff time to developing the Moodle mod, but my point is that we want to do this as part of our everyday jobs; we want openess to happen as naturally and efficiently as possible. I’m not saying this is the best scenario for all institutions; I’m saying it’s the only scenario that seems to be plausible for our institution at this point in time.

So, maybe I’m reading with rose-colored glasses here, but I read Jared not as saying that there’s any problem with OCW membership, but that it isn’t *the most important part of this announcement.* I quite agree: the UVU folks have been hanging around with the OCWC so long that I was quite surprised that they”ve just now gotten word of official UVU support. They’ve been official members of the OCWC since before UVSC became UVU (BTW, you need to change your name in your OCWC member profile), so their membership isn’t news.

What *is* news is their idenitification of their importance as:

a trade college. Because we have a vocational
history. Because we have dozens of expert faculty
in vocations and trades, and skilled students
preparing to excel in their fields.

Those of us in the OCWC are delighted to hear this news and to share with Jared and his colleagues their vision of openness. Again, congratulations for getting your administration on board!

I guess one of the things I am reacting to is the tone in this post and some it links to that the approach we have taken is somehow not really open or open enough, not cool enough for Jim and too planned for Scott and too cognizant that we are an institution for you. I find the whole thing rather strange, in fact.

As for Reverend Jim’s last point– the only problem I have with it (and his point really sits aside from anything else being discussed here) is that NO ONE is yet articulating that vision of openness and to my knowledge no one has proposed any action that takes even a single step in that direction… sharing a bunch o’ blogs (as valuable as that is) certainly isn’t it.