More on missing the point…

Sometimes you slave over a post that you hope will get people thinking and clicking and get no response. Other times, something dashed off in a moment seems to connect with people for mostly inexplicable reasons.

My previous post triggered a surprising number of comments and posts, many of them very provocative, and it has been frustrating to not to have the time and network access (still no internet at my hotel here) to properly respond to them. I’m still under the ticking clock, so I will acknowledge that reading the comments on the previous entry are probably a better use of your time than this post…

First off, I was not trying to suggest that content is not important, or that we should not make our content openly available. To me, those propositions are for pretty much self-evident. I’m reminded of David Wiley’s catcy phrase content is infrastructure… I was trying to quickly restate a question that had been posed to me, one that had left me flat-footed… Essentially, are there better uses of my time and efforts to promote open education in its broadest sense than fighting this particular problem?

I do not know the answer to that question. I do believe that as things seem to be going, the reluctance of higher education to engage the new realities of information publication and diffusion will ultimately diminish its influence. But I’m not an academic, just a dirty edupunky technology support staffer who likes to think about things he can only begin to understand.

I warned a couple posts back that I would be posting some “half-baked musings” here, and the danger with writing something so quickly is being misunderstood. The upside in this instance is that many of the responses were very thoughtful and useful to me, and I expect to engage some of the points raised more directly in future posts.