Who feeds the information society?

Through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies, American taxpayers invest billions of dollars every year into research to improve health, safety, the environment, scientific understanding, etc.

The accountability of whether these investments have real impact for Americans is tied to the education and communication of research findings.

It is the education/communication set of activities that “maximizes the return on the research investment; it provides value to the research product, which is intrinsically worthless” (Charles Wallace in Transportation Research Circular 488).

Everett Rogers’s famous “diffusion of innovations” theory describes the process of new discoveries moving into practice through a sequence of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Rogers emphasized the importance of communications in implementation.

Cuts to public education funding present a challenge to the ability to broadly communicate research discoveries. While increased tuition may be justified by the private benefits that result from a college diploma, will the benefits of publicly funded research be associated disproportionately with those who can afford higher education?

Or can we figure out a way to utilize technology to provide open access educational materials for the benefit of the population as a whole?

The cultural movement for open (free) educational resources continues to grow.

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