What began as a short response to @Danny Kingsley has gradually blown out into something far larger. So rather than leave this in the comments area of the original post I thought I might devote a new post to it. (Thanks for your thoughts on this, Danny.)
I suppose I should take a step back and add a bit of context to the perspective I’m coming from here, because the original post was a bit too broad brush in many ways.
My comments were directed largely at the notion of sharing and reuse of teaching materials – not in terms of general file storage, such as department intranets and servers.
As you probably know, there was a widespread push in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s to establish “learning object repositories” for housing the teaching materials for an institution or school in nice, neatly organised categories for easy access, adaptation and reuse. Many people set them up. Some, like UNSW, invested a fair amount of money to develop them from scratch.
But we found – as I’ve seen occur elsewhere – when it came time for instructors to actually start populating the spaces, many weren’t interested in doing so. Some were outright unwilling, and cited IP issues. Others argued that there just wasn’t time to index their materials, and in fact they had absolutely no motivation to do so.
No sense of personal benefit
The question of “What’s in it for me?” was never adequately addressed for them.
Making their research publications widely known and available was one thing, because it improved the impact and influence of their work, which in turn increased their profile and reputation. Doing the same thing with their teaching materials was another matter entirely.
Importantly, I also observed a noticeable absence of re-use or adaptation of the materials that were being shared. Despite all the efforts to reduce duplication and “reinventing the wheel” in practice this seems to be the preference of most people.
From what I was told during that time, this unwillingness to share was (and is) due largely to a perception (whether accurate or otherwise) that teaching wasn’t valued as highly as research. So it was in their best interests to focus more of their energy on the latter than the former. Voluntarily spending time to index their items when there was no visible benefit to them was seen as pointless. So the expensive spaces lay fallow and were eventually shelved and decommissioned.
Current Practice and Culture
I agree that there is a demand out there that isn’t being met – you mentioned several subject fields for instance. The question is what to do about it. Unfortunately most of the sharing of work/materials that I’m seeing is still distributed via attached WORD or PDF files in emails. There is an extraordinary amount of valuable information that could be made available, but isn’t.
The ease of personal publishing isn’t necessarily having a huge impact there either – partially for the reasons you mentioned. Not everyone is cognizant of the possibilities available to them, or have the technical abilities to use them. That’s one of the things I’m trying to help resolve locally.
But above and beyond that is the fear factor I think. A culture of sharing is still noticeably absent in most of education. Certainly there are enthusiastic pockets – in the open education movement for instance – but I think this is a relatively vocal minority. Many people still keep their resources stored on local drives, or in folders on their shelves.
I think the reason for that is a fear of becoming obsolete. The prevailing attitude in education still seems to revolve around content – and maintaining ownership and control over it – as if making your teaching materials more openly or freely available will mean you as an individual are no longer needed, which just isn’t true.
Learning involves far more than content alone.
Bigger than content
The point here is that, in light of the prevailing aversion to sharing of material, I just can’t see the financial justification or prospect of success in setting up these large, expensive centralised repositories. People seem far more willing to share their materials in a context and environment that they feel a sense of “ownership” and control over.
In order to evolve past this cycle of hoarding and protecting, I think we must address the cultural elements first. The discussion has to be bigger than content, because the concerns are bigger than content.
In my view this is one of the key aspects that PLNs, open education, networked learning, and communities of practice have going for them. Not only do they model sharing and reuse, they demonstrate how it fits within the wider landscape of learning, teaching, personal and professional development – and in fact largely answer the question “what’s in it for me.”
Honestly I can’t say that centralised repositories do the same thing, because they still focus on content, and content by itself is static.
New model required
But back to your question “So what do we do, us institutions? Sit around and wait for even longer?” No, definitely not. But I do think central systems need to be developed with a greater understanding of who the key stakeholders are – that is, who the primary users will be. I would argue that these aren’t the content producers.
What were once centralised repositories need to evolve into something more like portals. These would enable people to pull in feeds from distributed spaces according to specified criteria or tags, without requiring content creators to post the material there first.
This could be expanded to include back-up of material as well. This is particularly important when it comes to student data, because it would enable the institution or university to preserve assessable material and meet any legislative requirements it has.
The point is that this process – aggregation and backup – can be largely done without involving the content producers. So the people who actually need access to the information can be responsible for ensuring it appears in the search results, while the people creating the material can continue to work wherever they like.
But fundamentally we need to start thinking of content as something that sits within a broader process of participation, engagement, and discourse, rather than a singular focal point.
