Page - 66 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

70 T.Amiel et al. 5.1 Introduction In1945, themagazineTheAtlanticpublishedanessaynamed“AsWeMayThink” (Bush,1945).ItsauthorwasVannevarBush, thethenDirectoroftheOfficeofScien- tificResearchandDevelopmentof theUSGovernment.Bushhadbeen responsible for the bulk of the technoscientific effort led by theUS throughoutWorldWar II, an effort that led to a deep restructuring of how the country’s research would be developedandnetworked fromthenon (Turner, 2010). AfterWorldWar II, with the Allied victory over the nazi–fascist threat, Bush was facedwith a new and immediate challenge: to reconfigure, in peacetime, the sociotechnical apparatusmobilized atwartime. In aworld struggling to be rebuilt from scratch, how should one set inmotion a new architecturewhere information and sciencewould foster individual freedomand the emancipation of knowledge? The answer sketchedbyBush in his essay addresses this challenge through anew, radicalrationaleforcataloging,storing,andaccessingofinformation.Asystem,that inits idealform,wouldenvisionterminals tolargerepositoriesgrantingopenaccess, at different levels of retrieval, to thewhole of human knowledge—in print, audio, andfilmalike.Tothisnetworked,universal library,BushgavethenameMemex.The notionarticulatedbyBushinhisMemex—ofhightechniqueassomethinginservice ofknowledgemadeuniversal—underlies, to someextent,what the internet came to beperceivedas in thepublic imagination. In thesecondhalfof the twentiethcentury, access to informationandknowledge hastakentheforefrontofcivicdiscourseandinthedevelopmentandemancipationof individualsandcommunitiesalike.Theemergenceandfastdevelopmentofcomput- ers, from the largemainframesof the1960s to individual networked terminals, has openedauniverseofpossibilities intertwining thesocial and the technical.Through ideals such as free software, open source, copyleft, and remix culture, access to knowledgemoreoften thannotcomes tomeanalso themasteryofnewdigital tools. With thewidespreadexpansionof thecommercial Internetand theemergenceof theWorldWideWeb from the 1990s onward, the centrality of the internet for the circulation of knowledge and in the transformation of educational practices fueled highexpectations.Thiswastheorizedbyauthorswhowouldbecomecanonicalofan optimisticoutlook, includingCastells (2011),Levy(2010), andNegroponte (1995). ThisethoswouldbecomeinstitutionalizedininitiativessuchastheW3C,articulating thecivil societyasaguardianof the internet in its technical andpolicyaspects. In 2001, amidst thismovement to institutionalize newstandards, best practices, and joint objectives, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) made the decisiontoopenupteachingcontent throughanonlineplatform(Taylor,2007).The initiativewascopiedbymultipleother institutions, inwhat is sometimes referred to as thebeginningof theOpenEducationalResources (OER)movement.The termi- nologywas consolidated during a 2002UNESCO forumon educational resources (UNESCO,2002),whichevolvedduringthenextdecadeintoOERbeingdefinedas: Learning, teachingand researchmaterials in any format andmediumthat reside in the public domainor are under copyright that havebeen releasedunder anopen