Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, June 10, 2008

How much open content do you recycle?

David Wiley, Calculating Your EduCarbon Footprint, iterating toward openness, June 6, 2008.
... I’ll throw out the idea of an “EduCarbon Footprint.” Marie Duncan, a doctoral student of mine, is currently finishing a study of the structure of reuse with the Connexions repository. While reading her discussion of why more people don’t reuse existing, openly-licensed material, it made me think ‘we need a measure, like your carbon footprint, of how much you reuse existing educational materials.’ What would such a measure look like? A ratio of how much you reuse to how much you create? A ratio of the amount of open resources you use to closed resources? Would it be useful to have a measure like this? Surely you can think of a better name? And lastly, someone else has probably already proposed this - who was it?
P.S. If you're looking for information on the actual carbon footprint of digital literature, see Adam Hodgkin's rough calculations.