cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

I was a minor player in an episode that is known, in my mind at least, as The Great Attribution Hubbub. Short version: via trackbacks and alerts from friends, some bloggers who tilt to the open side of the spectrum found that their posts had been aggregated with inadequate, unclear or non-existent attribution by an educational consultant. Said consultant’s bio trumpeted that he was a big corporate player, and a founder of Blackboard.

A few of the people who had their work aggregated responded with shock and vitriol, among them Alan Levine and Clark Quinn. Personally, I was nowhere near as upset. Though I don’t want to diminish how others felt… and the comments to both Alan’s post and Clark’s post unearth some other details and allegations that to me are more troubling.

I wasn’t upset because when I decided to apply the CC-BY license to this blog, I did so mindful that my work could be appropriated for commercial uses I might not be comfortable with… I figured if something I posted here could be used in those ways, then I was obviously doing something wrong. So I got a wake-up call. If I want to maintain this space as a cozy lovenest of ed tech subversion, I need to do better.

But the episode does reflect a few more significant lessons. One, that the CC-BY license, especially as practiced by most casual users (who rarely define how they wish to be attributed, etc…) does not protect against some uses that can feel like abuses. As I pointed out to Alan, since he embedded his attribution into his own RSS feed, legally speaking Gilfus did not violate the terms of his CC-BY license. Alan subsequently added SA (and some other choice words) to his license, and for similar reasons Clark uses SA and NC in his own terms. The ideological purity arguments aside, there are legitimate reasons that people might want to share, yet feel uncomfortable with what may come of it. That’s why the SA and NC clauses exist, however ill-defined they may be.

Which brings me to a comment on Alan’s blog left by Martha Rans of Artists Legal Outreach. Martha argues that for artists a real attribution process involves some communication, and as a result “artists are sceptical of adopting Creative Commons licenses because they do not actually want it to be easy for you to avoid the direct contact with them they want.”

Which reminds me why I often send an email to people whose work I am reusing under CC, even though legally I may not be required to do so. It lessens the likelihood of ill will being generated, and a good relationship is usually worth more to me than a media asset. Frequently, the act of communicating opens up new possibilities, access to other resources, and useful dialogue.

Which sends me back to a talk that David Wiley gave at UBC back in 2007 (I see I need to update those dead audio links). This talk has been immensely influential on my thinking. One of the key concepts David articulated was the need for “frictionless adaptability” around IP. Here’s that segment, lovingly laid over a loop sampled from what may be the greatest single of the 1970′s, “Brandy” by Looking Glass:

I’m starting to rethink friction when it comes to sharing. Certainly, most examples of frictionless sharing that I see on the web just add to online noise: autotweets, zombie curation (such as the “news feed” that prompted The Great Attribution Hubbub, at one point reproducing a post complaining about the misuse), pointless notifications, redundancy. Do I need to know via Twitter that you favorited a video on YouTube? A Facebook notification that you are listening to music on Spotify? If that piece of media you just liked is worth sharing with hundreds or thousands of people in your networks, shouldn’t it be worth typing 140 characters or less to tell us why?

So many chunks of the Vapid Web that is choking the life out of my browser are fed by the frictionless web, or services that make it easy to spew an instant opinion or rating with no contextual grounding whatsoever. Restaurant and hotel ratings online are rarely useful, the “help” you will find on random ad-supported unmoderated discussion boards is usually divorced from any real utility. It makes me wonder how much real meaning and other things we value on the web are actually supported by the right kinds of friction.

I certainly don’t want to valourize pointless difficulty: bad interfaces, fear-driven rules, or the kinds of bureaucratic processes that Wiley correctly argues just get in the way of most educational sharing (lawyers, contracts, cheques, etc…).

But could the articulation of processes for meaningful friction, forms of friction that actually promote discourse, reflection, and deeper understanding be worthwhile? Could that be a mission worth taking on by educators?

It wasn’t that long ago that I thought “disruption” was a word with some utility. But almost instantly “disrupt” has become a badge representing all manner of noxious attitudes and dangerously simplistic thinking.

Disruption is easy… Raging toddlers do it. Drunken frat boys do it. Megalomaniac neo-cons do it. It’s not hard to knock something down and loot whatever looks shiny, especially if you have money and power. So until you’ve made something real, I’m not going to be impressed that’ve you’ve managed to disrupt something else, even if that something else is in need of a shakeup.

It’s increasingly clear that disruption is a code word for blowing up everything public about education. Everything, that is, except for those dwindling pockets of public money that will enrich the social media ninjas who can engineer revolutions like rock stars while ensuring a thirty percent annualised ROI for their angel capital investors… These are scary times to be old media, and public education has certainly made some clumsy moves as new media has evolved. Confidence is shaken, and ivory tower self-satisfaction has rapidly given way to a panicked search for easy solutions.

That said, I don’t think I’ve seen a more ostentatious display of oblivious triumphalism masking dangerous ignorance (except maybe the Rumsfeld Doctrine on the eve of the Iraq War, or maybe this) than what’s been on display via TechCrunch Disrupt (tagged #TCDisrupt on Twitter) the past couple days. Its been so deliriously obnoxious I haven’t been able to stop reading, even as it deranges my thinking and makes me physically ill. (Yeah… I’m kinda messed up.)

Twitter is the perfect medium for an event like this. None of these inexplicably euphoric jackasses can sustain cognition beyond 140 characters of nuance. So it’s unsurprising that the best analysis I’ve seen so far has been presented by the increasingly-essential Audrey Watters, via the Twitterish tool Storify.

There are so many pieces of Watter’s narrative that literally made my jaw drop, but none more than the fee to hop on this carousel whirligig – $2000 $3000. And that’s with an endless list of presumably lucrative corporate sponsorships padding the bottom line. Power to the people — right on. If you want a sense of the ethics that will animate post-public education, look no further. “Accessibility” is not even a phoney value for these creeps. And let’s not forget what it takes to enter the Ed Tech Innovation Summit ($2000 if I recall correctly), or TED ($7500 if you are deemed worthy).

This is a rather long and intemperate preamble to my main point. This is the last week to register for the 2012 Open Education Conference for the insanely low price of $200. And that fee includes a (sing along with me now) three hour tour on the Love Boat (while spaces last, not all conference registrants will fit on the boat).

This conference began nearly a decade ago, and I haven’t missed one yet. In conference Godfather David Wiley’s long-standing but still-accurate phrase, this is the “annual reunion of the open education family” and it’s an unparalleled opportunity to spend quality time with the finest and most committed minds in the field in an intimate, informal and very fun setting. As a long-time organizer, I can assure you that we will spend every dollar from registration and our wonderful sponsors carefully to provide the best attendee experience possible. (Scott Leslie has really stepped up as lead organizing host this year with some truly inspired work.)

We have an incredible program, vitally important topics considered by people for whom openness is a way of being, not just a means to venture capital funding. People with a wealth of experience in classrooms, running schools, divisions, projects, programs and yes, start-ups. Deep thinkers and accomplished do-ers. They were into open education before Rupert Murdoch got interested and they won’t leave now just because he is.

Register!