eds.activemath.org

Below is an extract of The Wealth of Networks, a book trying to describe the mechanisms of “peer productions” with a very convincing analysis of why big projects such as Wikipedia or Open-Source-Software projects have managed to attract a large human investment. The extract follows the strong claim that an essential quality of high-involvement peer-production spaces is the possibility of small-grained human investments.

“Perhaps the clearest example of how large-grained modules can make projects falter is the condition, as of the middle of 2005, of efforts to peer produce open textbooks. The largest such effort is Wikibooks, a site associated with Wikipedia, which has not taken off as did its famous parent project.
Very few texts there have reached maturity to the extent that they could be usable as a partial textbook, and those few that have were largely written by one individual with minor contributions by others. ” (the book can be read online)

In the production that concerns us, authoring e-learning content, a quick analysis of the usage of technologies by educators reveals that, most of the time, they do not have the time to write content from scratch and are expected to use existing textbooks which match the expected learning outcomes set as their mission. There is, however, a clear desire to adapt things, both in terms of small changes, and re-organizations to match better the reality of their set of learners.

In a content exchange space based on licenses that enables peer production with derivations, ie that enable recipients of content to publish modified, I am currently seeing the delta (that is the contribution of the adapted content compared to its original) as a good choice of elementary grain of human-investment.

The current copyright schemes, push course authors to rather hide possible sources of copies… If only the systematic usage of links such as “is a derivative of” was made, we could start such an exchange practice and certainly build more communities around them.