by Mike Holderness
The framework for a globally distributed virtual university is much nearer completion than you might think. What it needs now, according to object-computing guru Brad Cox, is a market machinery. And the THES understands that the Instructional Management Systems scheme, to which Cox is a senior consultant, is about to be made the standard for significant chunks of the European Union's Fifth Framework research programme.
In a previous career, Cox developed Objective-C, an alternative programming language to "C++"--which is less elegant and robust and (therefore) dominant in commercial programming. In 1996 he published Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier. He summarises its argument for us thus: "If you think of the difference between bits and atoms, it's more useful to buy and own things made of atoms; for technical reasons it's easier to charge for use, not for acquisition of bits."
The development of software "objects" will therfore, Cox concludes, take off only when there is a market. Objects--which might be course notes, plug-in statistical analysis tools or virtual-reality lectures--will send secure messages "home" reporting that they have been used, and raising a small charge. This concept was named "Superdistribution" in 1983 by Professor Ryoichi Mori, then at Tsukuba University and now of the Japan Electronics Industry Development Association. It is, of course, a refinement of an idea which goes back as far as Vannevar Bush's 1945 proposal for a "memex" machine and Ted Nelson's 1960 Xanadu project.
It meets resistance from traditional publishers: they misunderstand it, Cox says, "as pay-per-keystroke or pay-per-minute". In fact it could accommodate any scheme from a lifetime license through a license to use an object for a term down to--if you insist--per-keystroke payment. "The suits should be right at home with this," says Cox--"if they understood it."
At the end of 1998 Cox announced that he had "had it with charity work for the learning disabled, by which I mean faculty and administration, not students". He resigned from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia to concentrate on promoting superdistribution, including consulting for the Instructional Management Systems project. IMS is a part of the EduCause consortium, through which the major US software and publishing players are developing standards for inter-operable educational tools. (THES September 18, 1998, p14).
Around the edges of the New Orleans IMS meeting in early February, there was lively discussion on the issues which Cox's model of electronic commerce raises for education. Paul Lefrere, who works on IMS UK at the Open University, reports that the electronic commerce aspect is in its early stages: "The key is ensuring that you have sufficient learning objects out there for it to be worth having a digital economy."
Lefrere is struck by the level of interest shown by top-graded research universities. This, however, feeds his feeling that IMS does not at present "take enough account of the human dimension. There is a lot of uncertainty," he reports, "among faculty and adjunct staff [part-time lecturers]. Capturing and trading prominent people's courses and course notes could lead to the commoditisation of their work... these people are worried about the ease with which they could be replaced."
This is an even bigger issue seen from a less personal point of view. If students at the University of West Kesteven all choose to spend their tuition credits on a course from MIT, will diversity suffer? Will the Microsoft dominance effect, in other words, spread into education? Lefrere muses: "If you think in Darwinian terms, it doesn't help a society to have just one way of living or teaching."
His IMS UK colleague Oleg Liber, based at Bangor, counters this: "the aim is to create a level playing field. Inter-operability allows all sorts of people to play in this market; the idea is that it won't be weighted in favour of anyone." He notes, however, that "Singapore, say, may offer just the courses it's famous for... and the UK could be a net earner. Even if we don't get students to come here from elsewhere we could be selling them our resources--the Bodleian and so on."
Linked to this choice between the award-winning-title-takes-all and the million-flowers-blooming models of the educational network is the method of payment. Many people are keen on institutions and students making transactions not in dollars or euros but through tokens of educational value, similar to LETS (Local Exchange and Trading Systems). Some attribute this idea to Cox, who protests that his idea is currency-independent.
The other huge issue which the vision of a global market in educational objects raises is the nature and practise of authorship. Academic publishers in the US and UK are accustomed to authors handing over their work lock, stock and barrel. When the journal Science ran a paper challenging this, it still insisted on having all rights in that paper. But under the law of France and Germany, for example, this is not possible.
Thus contributors to Le Monde retain all fundamental rights, and merely license their work to the publisher--even if they are on staff. Cox sees this as "a particularly nice example of a 'higher-granularity' product." His proposal supports multiple levels of granularity. In a 'high-granularity' reference text the publisher might get paid when the user opened the enclosing object, and individual authors would be paid when their contributions were used.
Such issues will become prominent as IMS and educational e-commerce move beyond the English-speaking world--and they are about to do just that. In November 1998 Directorate- General III of the European Commission, realising the urgent need for a common framework for exchanging educational and research material, issued a Memorandum of Understanding on Multimedia Access to Education and Training in Europe, committing the parties to inter-operability. When this was closed to new signatures on February 4, Educause/IMS was the only standards-setting body and the only project with an e-commerce component directly signed up.
IMS is already co-operating with European researchers: its "metadata" standard, by which educational objects will describe themselves and their contents to the world, was drafted by the EU-funded Ariadne project. The THES understands that when the MoU is launched in Brussels on March 25, compliance with an IMS-related standard will be announced as a condition for participation in at least some strands of the EU's Fifth Framework research programme.
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Links: ------ IMS www.imsproject.org The Memomorandum of Understanding http://www2.echo.lu/telematics/education/en/news/mou.html Brad Cox http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/index.html Fifth Framework http://europa.eu.int/comm/dg12/fp5.html Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Bachrach et al, Science 281 (4 Sep 1998), p. 1459 and from http://www.sciencemag.org
Here's the submitted copy for the Times Higher Education Supplement article... and the _Science_ paper reference is at the bottom. Mike http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuk/mike/ - x - ATTN -- Tony Durham, THES multimedia FROM -- Mike Holderness, 0171-729 3143 DATE -- Feb 09, 1999