Open Resources

This course embraces a number of values around what could be called the “open movement”, including free software, open science, and open educational resources (OERs), as well as crowdsourced knowledge-sharing platforms like Wikipedia. While these three ideologies are distinct, they share a common value system emphasizing barrier-free accessibility to information, tools, and knowledge, as well as transparency. Their common goals are to empower human society by making high-quality resources available to everyone, and allowing each of us to build on the work of others, such as improving, adapting, remixing, or extending prior work. Indeed, the nonprofit Free Software Foundation emphasizes that their use of the word “free” focuses more on liberty than on price. A famous quote exemplifying this is, “To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.” (gnu.org, accessed May 29, 2020).