Lesson 12- Response to readings: Reflections on Online Repositories, Open Access and Stone Soup

It was interesting to read the perspectives of both Willinsky and Esposito on the issues of open access and on-line repositories but I must say I was left a little confused. Should we trust Willinsky, when he states that “In this current knowledge economy, the Internet appears to be able, through various models of open access publishing, to do more to extend the circulation of knowledge, and to increase participation in a global exchange around that knowledge, than print has been able to achieve” (Willinsky, 2003)? Or should we believe Esposito when he warns that, “OA is the Botox of scholarly communications, a cleverly applied poison destined to keep a permanent smile on a publisher’s face (Esposito, 2004)? Thank goodness for Alice and her Voicethread on on-line repositories and open access! Her presentation made the topic much more accessible by bringing it out of the world of academia and into our classrooms and libraries.

One of the issues that Alice brought up is one that I thought very worthy of a little more reflection. I am now pretty familiar with Asselin and Doiron’s “Literacies for the Information Generation” (Asselin & Doiron, 2008), as I have addressed them in several of my assignments during this course. I have thought about their concept of “ethics and social responsibility” (Asselin and Doiron, 2008) from a variety of perspectives. This said, I hadn’t really considered the “responsibility” to contribute to online knowledge from quite the same point of view before reading Alice’s Voicethread. Do we, as teachers have an ethical obligation to share online and to teach our students to share as well? How important to digital citizenship is the idea of becoming “givers” rather than just “takers”? Alice’s point about the amount of time teachers “volunteer” to create resources is very well taken. I think it does impact on the willingness of some to generously “give away” what they have created. Is such reticence justified or is it the result of a narrow-minded, archaic point of view? In my comments on Alice’s Voicethread, I used an analogy of the wonderful art project that a teacher might create and share only to find that the following year, it had already been done and published on another teacher's bulletin board with no credit given. How important is the issue of credit and how well will it be respected as materials are cut up, mixed up and mashed up? I’m not sure, but I can’t help but think about one of my favourite primary school books, Stone Soup. Is the Internet not, in fact, serving as a facilitator for our communal generosity in much the same way the hungry travelers did in Stone Soup? How can it be a bad thing when we all take the little bits of knowledge that we have, which might individually not amount to much, and contribute them generously to the global “soup pot” of knowledge? When considered in this very simplistic way, OA seems to provide a great vehicle for the digital sharing that should perhaps not just be considered an option but a moral obligation.