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July 13th, 2006 by Richard K Miller | Filed under Ideas, Mormon, Online missionary work, Writing and Editing.If you're new here, read more about the More Good Foundation. We help members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) share their beliefs on the Internet. Learn more about what Mormons believe or talk with Mormons at LDS.net.
Christopher Phillips has been advocating an LDS content repository like commoncontent.org. If the Church were to license some or all of its content with a Creative Commons, GFDL, or other license, it would make it much easier for institute and seminary instructors, Sunday School teachers, and other members to share notes and collaborate on materials.
Imagine, for example, licensing the Teaching of the Presidents manuals with a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. Derivative works would be allowed. Church members could volunteer to read the manuals aloud and make audio recordings, just as the LibriVox project is doing with public domain works. These audio recordings could be shared with hearing-impaired Church members around the world. They’d also be useful for members learning a second language since Gospel teachings give so much context and common ground when learning a foreign language. Recordings could be made of all Church publications and in all languages. The Church could call Church Service Missionaries to manage or participate in this movement.
Last year J. Max Wilson blogged about how many universities including MIT, Harvard, and Utah State have begun OpenCourseWare initiatives to share their course content online and how a similar initiative might affect and help the Church. Brother David Wiley is the professor in charge of the OpenCourseWare initiative at Utah State.
I expect that, in the not so distant future, the Church will begin to extend a university level education, through BYU, to its members in all nations through the use of missionaries and Internet based classes. Someday we may very well see stake centers throughout the world become hubs in a vast, interconnected education system. Just as they can now do genealogical research, faithful latter-day saints of all means will be able to attend classes and attend lectures and lessons by professors and experts in all kinds of fields through web-enabled learning centers in stake centers everywhere, directed and helped locally by “education” missionaries. (OpenCourseWare, Education, and the Church, by J. Max Wilson)
Thanks Richard.
It is always surprising for me to see links to things I have written in the past.
I still think this is an interesting speculation and am excited to see the direction the church will go in this regard. Your comments on licensing are worth noting. I am also privately working on some related ideas from a technology standpoint.
Just so there is no confusion, even though I helped found the blog cited in this post, I discontinued my participation there almost a year ago. I now blog solo at my personal blog, http://www.sixteensmallstones.org.
The trick I see with allowing sunday school teachers to create derivative works is that we then start to get projects (books, videos, music, etc.) being shared in the classroom that have the appearance of an official church publication but that hasn’t been “vetted” by the the curriculum department. This may make it more difficult for students to identify what is the teacher’s opinion and what has been approved by the Church.
From what I’ve read, a primary concern for the Church is keeping the doctrine taught in sacrament meeting and other classes in tact. I can definitely see the potential benefits of OC licensing church materials. Before we can take that step, we need to think through the risks as well as potential benefits.
Aaron,
I agree with you about the need to keep official doctrine unmodified. We already struggle with this throughout the church.
I think adopting a license that would allow members, as Richard suggests, to create audio recordings of manuals and other works and publish and distribute them would be great. But it would have to somehow stipulate that while the work may be reproduced in another medium, the content must remain unmodified or something to that effect.
Translationn to a different language introduces additional problems for maintaining original doctrine, since the potential for introducing personalized readings, or misreadings of the text is great.
Hey!
I work for Dr. Wiley at USU, and have been a player in the OpenCourseWare movement for the past year. Let me know if you ever need any help w/ this, or want to discuss.
John, I wish I had known this when we met at the FAIR Conference! This is a very interested idea to me. Let’s talk sometime!