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Editor of Open-Source Technologies for Maximizing the Creation, Deployment, and Use of Digital Resources and Information

Interview with Shalin Hai-Jew of Kansas State University

By IGI Global on Oct 12, 2012

Open-Source Technologies for Maximizing the Creation, Deployment, and Use of Digital Resources and Information

IGI Global recently hosted an interview with Shalin Hai-Jew, editor of Open-Source Technologies for Maximizing the Creation, Deployment, and Use of Digital Resources and Information. This book highlights the global importance of open-source technologies in higher and general education. Written for those working in education and professional training, this collection of research explores a variety of issues related to open-source in education.

IGI Global: What are the most important issues addressed in this book?

SHJ: The biggest takeaway is probably that open-source has finally arrived in higher education! Open-source technologies are used to build laboratories. There are popular open education courses. Publishing in open-source journals have rational cost-benefit considerations for academic writers. Faculty is hosting wiki sites that structure new knowledge in a crowd-sourced way. People in academia are reaching out to the wider public using a wider range of information and communication technology (ICT). One chapter was by two global public health professionals who use a range of technologies to strive to prevent rabies across a range of peoples, cultures, and environments. Further, there are many points of entry in terms of participating in open-source endeavors—as digital content creators and content users. The ranges of applications of open-source technologies are broad and innovative. That’s heartening.

What’s even more encouraging are the rationales behind the move to selective open-source. There is the dynamic of sharing and striving for social equity in an inequitable world. There are ideas of addressing the coming of age of so many college-age youth, a majority of whom will be left out of formal education because of the limited college infrastructure and prohibitive costs. So many who work in higher education are promoting other ways of harnessing human potential through less formal open-source learning and imbuing that with gravitas and semi-formality (like certification). There’s the idealism of harnessing human potential in an inclusive way.

On the more selfish front, we in academia benefit from open-source. Many would be surprised at what parts of a back-end IT infrastructure are open-source…and how much we use that is open-source. On my instructional design projects alone, we use plenty of freeware authoring tools, wikis, and open-source contents (images, videos, and research).

In academia, there just seems to be a natural alignment with the open-source movement. The professionals in this area make it their professional interest to teach and learn constantly. There are wonderful pockets of deep expertise and also wonderful cross-disciplinary teams. In any number of projects, there are byproducts of the work—which may be gleaned from for effective open-source learning. That’s the argument I want to make with administrators. The full frontal proposal of going full open-source is still a little too radical to propose. For universities that do not have huge endowments and guaranteed income streams separate not somewhat dependent on tuition, going open-source would be a non-starter because it would be hard to make the business case.

IGI Global: What findings have you found most fascinating in the field of Open-Source Technologies, as well as in the research and development of your book?

SHJ: What I’ve enjoyed is learning what people on other campuses are doing with open-source technologies and learning objects. I’m seeing that a lot of what happens occurs because individuals take initiative. Many of these endeavors started with individual faculty and staff, not because of a formal endeavor from the top.
Further, I am intrigued by open-source developer communities (aka “virtual teams”) that have strong leadership and that support technologies with wide deployment around the world. It seems to be that these are meritocracies of sorts—that one positions oneself in those environments by what he or she can deliver in code, in writing / documentation, and in leadership and communications. More specific to higher education, I am especially intrigued by repositories and referatories of digital learning objects, how those are peer evaluated, and the domain areas that have apparently encouraged more of this sharing than others.

IGI Global: Where do you see the future of Open-Source as it pertains to education?

SHJ: Daniel Kahneman talks about the cognitive illusion of WYSIATI (“What You See is All There Is”), and I certainly don’t want to fall into that. I’ve been intrigued by open-source for many years and have tried to keep up with open-source, but given how busy life gets, it’s hard to make the time to immerse in a topic—unless one can justify it by working on a book. That’s my ulterior motive in pursuing book projects. It’s to satisfy my own curiosities. Now that “Open-Source Technologies…” is out, I still feel like there is a lot that I haven’t even engaged fully. For example, what about the role of open-source in K-12? What about more unified and larger open-source curriculums instead of single learning objects or independent courses? How will learner data analytics affect automated learning through endeavors like Coursera and the Khan Academy? How will colleges and universities make the business case for going open-source? Will it ever come from top-down in a meaningful way (such as MIT’s originating role in OpenCourseware)? Are there ways that society may change up the incentive structure to encourage the sharing of quality learning materials? How can those in academia come to some workable consensus on what quality is in open-source learning materials? How will societies fully integrate and use (in a good sense) learners who have informal (say, open-source) training as creative and engaged citizens? What sorts of socio-technical structures will enhance the development of open-source contents for developers, and what structures will enhance the development of a “user base” of those contents?

The authoring tools in the world have become much simpler and easier to use. As an instructional designer (and an instructor), I use two dozen main software tools in my daily work. It’s encouraging to see both faculty and students who know how to use many of the tools and wonder what they may need me for (the answer is the more high-end curricular builds that are grant-funded). With Creative Commons licensure and other open-source licensing, there are some pretty sophisticated ways to create coherent (designed) mash-ups that may promote learning (without breaking copyright).

Going open-source is a non-trivial endeavor. It requires some complex development and writing skills. It takes time. There has to be a motivation to reach out to others, with or without the byline. I think going open-source requires some ambition, too, because to be useful, one has to have unique knowledge (generally) and the capability to express that vision and to bring the learning to a wider audience. On the Internet, one has to be in the top few pages of a search to acquire learners, or forget it. It’s a competitive space in one sense. That said, it’s not crowded competition in the sense that many do not want to develop work altruistically for open-source. The competition is really with the knowledge domain and the limits of the technologies and time. Learners can identify quality when they see it—even if they may not know how the work was created; the converse is also true: they can see poor quality as well and will vote with where they place their trust and attention.

IGI Global: Who could most benefit from reading this book?

SHJ: This book is really for any who are engaged in open-source development and would like to know what others are doing. The development cycle for this book took more than the typical year. It was a struggle eliciting chapters. For me, it felt like I was aiming for a subset of a subset of a subset for those engaged in open-source endeavors who had the will to write and share and then who could follow through on their aims. Maybe other open-source developers who considered writing were dissuaded by the fact that IGI-Global is a proprietary commercial publisher. I’m not sure why this one was so challenging to bring together. However, after a lot of hard work, I am glad that this book is solid and thought-provoking. The authors are an amazing and diverse group!

IGI Global: Is there any message you would like to give to your readers as it pertains to the research?

SHJ: I would encourage them to explore open-source resources to see how they can benefit their own learning and teaching. I would also encourage them to try their hand at creating open-source resources for others and see how they enjoy the process. Open-source, for me, is not about a political stance. It’s about a practical response to the world, with a little bit of concern for others mixed in there.

Shalin Hai-Jew, Instructional Designer at K-State and Instructor for WashingtonOnline, has worked in higher education for many years as a tenured professor. She has BAs in English and Psychology and an MA in English, from the University of Washington, where she was an Early Entrant at 15 (through the Hal and Nancy Robinson Center for Young Scholars) and a Hugh Paradise Scholar. She has an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership / Public Administration from Seattle University (2005), where she was a Morford Scholar. Her dissertation was about the role of trust in online learning. Dr. Hai-Jew has written several books and edited others related to information technologies. She reviews for a number of educational publications. She was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in the US.

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