[Open-education] Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids

[Pat Lockley]

hear hear

And this is what I was going to say re Friday's chat. To me a lot of the
open data / open access arguments around openness are a lot more
neo-liberal / neo-con. So when we say traditional education, do we mean
before league tables? Or before licensing? Or before openness?

As an experiment, contrast our "Open" (if that thing exists) with Corporate
Openness (say http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil) and
then perhaps tie this to citzens united and the openness of lobbying
organisations.

Paraphrasing this quote "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as
a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an
exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy:
neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

Because if we have a public openness and then allow a corporate "closed"
then the benefit of the openness looks to me like it is lost, or worst, has
the negative outcomes you'd expect to have once neo-liberal competition
kicks in.


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Terry Loane <terryloane at aol.com> wrote:

>  For me there is a huge irony here.
>
> The very concept of open education is surely that people should be “free
> to use, reuse, and redistribute [resources]” (to quote from:
> http://booktype.okfn.org/open-education-handbook/_draft/_v/1.0/what-is-open/)
> Now this is the very opposite of a market approach to distributing goods
> and services. Marketisation of learning runs counter to open education
> because it is has to involve an assumption of privilege for those who
> access a particular resource/institution, which by definition will be
> scarce (e.g. an expensive textbook or an over-subscribed school.) The first
> paragraph of the quotation from Radu Cucos is a text-book, neo-liberal
> rationale for the market approach to schooling:
>
> "Each country has its own school market, if education is considered as a
> product in this market. Perfect information about products is one of the
> main characteristics of competitive markets. From this perspective, giving
> parents the opportunity to have access to information about schools
> characteristics will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of
> the schools market. Educational institutions will have incentives to
> improve their performance in order to attract more students."
>
> Do we really believe that the idea of using 'open data' to ensure that our
> kids attend a better school than the ones next door who do not have access
> to such data is what open education should be about? Do we really believe
> the last sentence of the above quotation: "Educational institutions will
> have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more
> students"? (The evidence in the UK is that publication and fetishizing of
> league tables can have a detrimental effect on learning because it focuses
> the attention of the institution on improving performance data rather than
> providing the best for each individual child.)
>
> I am also struck by the irony of using 'open data' to choose a school,
> because schools are such 'closed' institutions, in just about every sense
> of the word – I have blogged bout this recently here:
> http://terryloane.typepad.com/reallylearn/2014/03/why-are-schools-locked-shut-most-of-the-time.html
>
> Surely, surely open education should be about far more than just using
> performance data to try to get our kids into a better school than our less
> well informed neighbours.
>
> Terry Loane
>
> On 03/06/2014 16:02, Marieke Guy wrote:
>
> There is a great post on the Open Government Partnership blog about using
> open government data to help parents find the best school.
>
> http://www.opengovpartnership.org/blog/radu-cucos/2014/06/03/open-government-data-helping-parents-find-best-school-their-kids
>
> The post, by Radu Cucos from Moldova, lists several apps from different
> countries that have been built on government data related to education and
> education institutions. I'll be adding these to the Open Education
> Handbook
> <http://booktype.okfn.org/open-education-handbook/_draft/_v/1.0/open-data-use-cases/>
> .
>
> He concludes by saying:
>
> "Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for
> the educational system in general. Each country has its own school market,
> if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect information
> about products is one of the main characteristics of competitive markets.
> From this perspective, giving parents the opportunity to have access to
> information about schools characteristics will contribute to the increase
> in the competitiveness of the schools market. Educational institutions will
> have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more
> students.
>
> While adopting the Open Data Initiative policy in the education field has
> advantages for everybody – parents, schools and state authorities, it falls
> to governments to take the leading role in promoting Open Data. First of
> all, governments have to make sure that data on schools is being publicly
> released and regularly updated. Second, state institutions have to
> incentivize developers to create innovative apps. Third, governments have
> to increase demand for educational apps by raising awareness, lowering the
> costs for Open Data apps accessibility and decreasing the costs of
> accessing additional sources and information about schools."
>
> I'd be interested in hearing more about this from a country perspective.
> Anyone got any interesting use cases to share?
>
> We plan to have a community session on 'What has open data got to do with
> education' during June - details to follow.
>
> Marieke
>
> --
>
> Marieke Guy
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