2011, for many of us, has been predominately characterised by having everything we once cared about and held dear torn away from us – and not merely torn away but snatched, mocked and destroyed by gibbering fools who care for nothing but their own momentary pleasure. Things that we loved for their purity, truth and beauty have been turned into sewage by the very people who promised to protect and cherish them. We’ve seen ever spark of humanity, every twitch of the rotting corpse of the beautiful civilisation that once gave us Swift, Cervantes and Rabelais immediately extinguished by a world that confuses what it means to be authentic with what it means to be selfish.

Every piece of music that made our souls leap, every connection with a fellow-traveller, every idea that ever spoke to us has become tarnished and poisoned by the cult of immediacy and sensation. Creative acts are now simply opportunities for monetisation, every altruistic impulse is a way of serving advertisements. The idea of “choice” has been cited by politicians and businessmen as a reason to choose not to care.

It’s no longer enough to shudder against the onslaught of uninformed speculation – we’ve developed entire industries dedicated to maximising our exposure to the dribblings of idiots, and another to provide those very dribblings freshly minted and cropped to the requisite number of characters. All of it slewn with the suffocating irony and dog-whistling crowd management lowest-common-denominator dreck that has left us flinching from joyless, spiritless puns and artless references to other nuggets of popular culture that have had any semblance of humanity sucked from them generations ago.

Looking back across 2011, we have been lied to by everyone who has ever pretended to have our interests at heart. We’ve moved from governments pretending to do the right thing to seeing them pretend to do the wrong thing as a cover for doing something even more wrong. Anyone attempting to speak up for anything approaching meaning has been marginalised, smeared with shit before being effectively subsumed into the same stinking machine they once wanted to smash. We have failed to stand in support, we’ve bickered, jeered or ignored anyone we’ve been told to.

It has been the year of the false binary, the cynical requests that we provided detailed and costed alternatives to acts of audacious evil before we earn some “right” to question it. We’ve seen selfishness and mendacity enclose our memories and pleasures, limit our search for meaning to those which can be sold at an eye-watering profit margin.

2011 was the year we gave up and bought in to the narrative where we settle for losing what we are most proud of unless we lose more. We’ve redefined education as a state-funded hothouse for junior executive recruitment programmes, we’ve sold the minds of our children to entrepreneurs and thought leaders. We’ve turned the pursuit of truth, via art and science, into a disgusting and demeaning plea for money and security.

This was also the year when we learnt the languages of business and finance – quoting thoughtless anti-profundities in the way we used to quote poetry and philosophy. We’ve watched people live and die by the whims of discredited economic theories, we’ve let people starve and wither as we’ve argued for ideas that have been wrong for more than 100 years. We’ve seen ancient prejudices and jealousies, thought long-managed, re-explode into ugly life. And we’ve watched on YouTube, pointed and sniggered, as if our own ill-considered opinions are being ratified.

Top amongst the great sales pitches of the year has been the industrialisation of the artesan. Supermarkets pile-high “hand baked” and “authentic” goods, but these are available at an even greater price from airbrushed and idealised “farmers markets”. The ecological movement has become a smokescreen for the industries that celebrate inefficiency as if it were some kind of worthwhile goal.

2011 was the year we finally managed to sell love and friendship. Brands start conversations and launch memes, and the potentially beautiful platforms where we spread these to those we care about are able to carefully place the appropriate advertisements alongside them. 

And this year marks the end of outmoded ideas like retirement, curiosity, dignity and mutual support. Solidarity is little more than a hashtag. Even the language of the old left has been plasticised into vague exhortations about the “big society” and “we’re all in this together.”

And all this is what we used to call the “first world”, the supposed exemplar of all that is noble and intelligent about humankind. In less advantaged parts of the world things are also exactly as I have described above, the only difference is that 99% of the population of the world have never known it any other way.

It is traditional to end yearly reviews with an optimistic message for this happiest of all seasons. And it is true that 2012 would have to monumentally suck to have any chance of out-sucking 2011. So we can all be happy that it already shows every sign of doing so. Merry Christmas!

 [This post originally featured a section dealing with the German Brothel Myth, at the time I didn’t realise it was a myth but I’m very glad to hear that it is. However I guess it says something about the state of the rest of the year that I didn’t notice this until the wonderful @amcunningham pointed it out to me]

For practical purposes, there have been three main “phases” of UKOER (the large programme led by JISC and the Academy). I tend to characterise them as per the diagram below:

• low initial and ongoing cost practice
• empowering individual academics to create and release materials, within (and outside of) institutional policies and practice.
• a nuanced understanding of the issues around reuse.
• a genuine feeling of community action and community support, supported by an inclusive and wide rationale.
• drawing on existing strengths and structures, most notably the existing national services and ongoing work around the more library-esque facets of digital resource management.
• a spirit of technical and structural experimentation.
• large amounts of tea and/or warm beer.

Sometimes the clearest precursor of an academic development comes from outside academia. I’d argue if you want to understand open learning, you’ve got to look beyond distance learning and the learning object. You’ve got to look at guitar tablature.

As long as there has been written music, there has been tablature (or tab) – it represents a far older, and less formal, system for notating music than “traditional” western notation. When writing tab, one records the actual movement of the fingers, rather than the notes produced, and timing information is explicitly approximate. For this reason, tab is very popular with students of the guitar and other stringed instruments – it provides exactly the information needed to play, it is easy to read, and – like playing by ear – it requires the development of listening (especially rhythmic listening skills).

I’d argue that it is a better fit for most music outside of the classical tradition, as it notates what is possible to perform on the instrument, rather than limiting performance to what it is possible to notate. It also presents a close analogue to “learning by listening and watching”, the traditional way that tunes and arrangements were spread throughout pre-literate society.

So, to look at an arbitrarily chosen piece of guitar tablature, you’ll see that each string of the guitar is represented by a line, and each line has numbers on it – which indicate which fret you should have your finger on when you play that string. The position of the numbers along the lines give an indication of timing and relationship, and a fluid and adaptable language of additional markings has developed to represents the huge arsenal of non-classical techniques and effects the modern guitarist has access to.

You’ll also have noted that tab is very easy to share electronically. All you need is a fixed-width font and a text editor. Such as your email client. So it should come as little surprise that tab was shared via newsgroups such as rec.music.makers.guitar and alt.guitar.tablature (both now pretty much dead, sadly) , and eventually archived on the OnLine Guitar Archive (OLGA). It was a participative, networked process – tabs requested, presented, tested, argued, refined and finally published in a way that feels more like a modern MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) than the later parallel of mp3 sharing on Napster.

Like movements around sharing more conventional learning material (because isn’t a tab simply a learning object?), the online guitar tab movement had to deal with issues of licensing. It chose the “fair use/fair dealing” route, providing one of the first serious digital-age tests of this defence.

But – and, I need hardly add, the resulting IPR story is both tragic and uplifting – the real interest to OER folks comes within a short 2004 paper by Thomas Chesney in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communications, detailing participants motivations. At OER11, I summarised these as follows:

 get my name out there

[o]nce I’ve transcribed them for myself, it’s not hard to send them to OLGA or another site.

I have worked them out and someone else might want to learn that song

23o of the 72 respondents claimed they received no benefit from publishing tabs. Referring to benefits, one respondent claimed he got “none. others benefit. i benefit from their work.” Chesney concludes:

 The act of preparing (collecting, collating etc.) the material to be shared should have meaning in itself for the person who is preparing it. This was seen in the fact that most self motivations were motivations to transcribe a song and store that transcription in electronic form, and not motivations to publish the tabs. The publishing came later and all that publishing involved was emailing a file to OLGA. This result could be used by organizations with a little imagination.

To me, this sounds a long way from the received wisdom that academics are unlikely to share materials without some system of codified reward and recognition. Of course, your young guitar player – fixated on mass adulation and random sexual encounters in anonymous global hotels rather than becoming a professional transcriber – could not be further from our traditional view of an academic, but we do see in their reported comments the idea that the work is involved in creating the materials, and after they have been created sharing is little or no effort. In Martin Weller’s terms this is very much an argument for little OER.

I hinted darkly at the IPR-mageddon that essentially ensued from this proto-academic behaviour – and it was as far back as the late 90s that music publishers started to claim rights over transcriptions. Just to bring home how odd that is, imagine Damien Hirst claiming rights over a book about biology preservation techniques. The stream of takedowns and legal challenges ending in 2006 served to remove the fundamental folk idea of “playing by ear” from the commons. As Rob Balch from “Guitar Tab Universe” put it in The Register:

At what point does describing how one plays a song on guitar become an issue of copyright infringement? This website, among other things, helps users teach each other how they play guitar parts for many different songs. This is the way music teachers have behaved since the first music was ever created. The difference here is that the information is shared by way of a new technology: the internet.

When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright infringement? What about if you helped him/her remember the chord progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin…infringement? If he/she calls you later that night on the phone or emails you and you respond via one of those methods, are you infringing? I don’t know.

Needless to say, it failed.

How it failed is very interesting, has further parallels to the world of OER, and will be the topic of post two in this little series.