David Wiley is the current contributor to the excellent Terra Incognita series on Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education. In his article, titled ‘Content is Infrastructure’, David puts forward the somewhat controversial view that for any experimentation to take place within education systems: “we must deploy a sufficient amount of content, on a sufficient number of topics, at a sufficient level of quality, available at sufficiently low cost”. Only then will we be able to “realize that content is infrastructure in order to more clearly understand that the eventual creation of a content infrastructure which is free to use will catalyze and support the types of experiments and innovations we hope to see in the educational realm.

I feel this is a very timely article, refocusing on the role of content and content related services with the education sector. It does seem to me that a the role of content is often over-looked, particularly in our (UK) HE sector and that there is a somewhat pervasive ‘been there done that’ attitude. But as David points out, if we are to fully reap the potential rewards of open content initiatives then we really need start looking at content as being as an infrastructure on which we can build and experiment with.

There have already been a number of comments (and replies) to David’s post all of which available from the Terra Incognita blog.