Can we have the cake, and eat it too?

Tim (Sansblogue) has correctly critiqued a previous post relating to the philosophical foundations of OER. It's great to be challenged like this - part of the reason I blog actually!

My response to Tim, available as a comment to his blog:

True, true, true! Let me dig deeper into my rationale. What concerns me in part is that 'open' does not reward effort in the same way that 'closed' does, nor does it have the same degree of filtering (peer review). I am still wrestling with what this means epistemologically, even anthropologically. For example, is 'free' valued? To a point, yes - beyond that, no. I'm not trying to suggest that we should somehow secretly guard knowledge to the point of elitism. I just wonder - aloud, as you've seen in the blog post - what we actually stand to lose by all of this openness. Also, in my post my issue was with maintaining the ivory tower "perspective". Abstract theory - which tends to result from the (metaphorical) ivory tower - is still an important element of scholarship, and it is my conviction that those who provide this theory should be rewarded for it. If this means an element of 'closedness', well, that's what I fear the trade-off might be. So, at the heart of it, I guess I see the potential for the disestablishment of the professional academic... a jump too far? I am yet to see any theory of open (Web 2.0-BASED) education that does not allay this concern. I am not yet convinced that 'openness' is disruptive to distribution but not to the professionalism of academia. Now, there's another interesting topic for discussion - why do we need to pay people like you? If we do, where will the funding come from? How will your ivory tower perspective - and I do not intend the term to be understood as devaluing academia, not at all - be reimbursed in this new economy?

In other words, can we have our cake, and eat it too? How will this economy be driven, by BIG international experts, a handful of professional thinkers, mediated by the 'wisdom of the crowd'?

Still big questions for me... I am naturally suspicious of 'all benefit' thinking, and have a tendency to think beyond immediate gains to systematic issues. Stay with me while I explore a potential parallel:

1. Big budget movies tend to show a particular cinematic and professional quality (think "The Lord of the Rings" if you're stuck).
2. Big budget movies cost, well, big money.
   
3. Movie producers make money through sales.
   
4. Remove the sales, you remove the ability to produce big budget movies.
   
5. Movies in the 'new economy' are based on, err, goodwill? Or, perhaps we will become content with "The best of YouTube"?
   

Replace 'big budget movies' with 'ivory tower perspective' and hopefully you will see my concern. This could just be Paranoia 2.0... or, are we considering the limits of 'amateurisation'? I think that 'open' in the new economy will get us to a certain level of scholarship, but no further.