[Open-education] Friday Chat: what is openness to you?

Fri May 2 18:33:13 UTC 2014

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Hello, list,

Am 02.05.2014 15:47, schrieb Marieke Guy:
> In an attempt to keep things going I've set up an etherpad
> <http://new.okfnpad.org/p/Open_Education_Working_Friday_Chats>
> [apologies Andre ;-)] and have dropped in some ideas for topics - please
> do add more!

It's okay, Marieke. At least as long as I cannot come up with a
reasonable alternative. Just keep in mind, that it has its limitations.

> Fred suggested we start with "what is openness to you?"
> […]
> I see openness as one of the tools that helps us find knowledge. For me
> openness is about a freedom that allows us to work together, rather than
> in isolation.

Dealing with a background in software development, I have to point out,
that Open Source is not the same as Free Software.

Open Source means that, well, the source is openly available.
Free Software was used first. Due to confusion with “free as in free
bear” companies got a bit confused, fearing that they cannot make a
business model on base of Free Software (which is not true, by the way.
There are companies offering Free Software like RedHat and earn money by
support contracts et al.).

For those of you interested in this topic, I can recommend an free book
about Richard Stallman (RMS in developer circles) on O'Reilly's website:
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ (esp. chapter 11).

The spirit within Free Software is about helping each other. Back in the
60's (that is, before I was born) universities contributed to each
others code. it was taken for granted. No one thought of making money
with software code.

Things changed later. Starting with UNIX, then Microsoft and later
Apple. Read the book :)

So what is openness to me?

Openness, that is, being able to read content. Therefore it does not
only have to be open licensed so I'm allowed to retrieve the document
whenever I'm pleased, but also that is in an Open format. For example,
try to open a document you wrote in Win95. Hard, isn't it? Abiword may
help. Here, LaTeX and other WYSIWYM languages play an important role:
Even if it is not possible to compile the source, it's still readable,
since the format (.tex) is plain text.

Openness, that is, being able to get answer to the question: How does it
work?
People call me open-minded. I try to look on subjects from different
points of view: Software development, user, business scientist etc. They
think different and thus have different areas of interest.
For example, how this chart is constructed? Where do those numbers come
from? Can I adopt this technique in my own work? How did he do that
(like: embedding videos in a LaTeX beamer presentation)?

I can ask the editor of course. But better is to have the source code
open. And be allowed to modify it and tinker as I like. There are
license like for Ghostery
(https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ghostery/license/5.2.1)
which allow you to study the code - but does no permit to modify it.
Simply said: Open, but not free.

Speaken of Open Education, I expect learning about how pedagogy work. My
mother studied social pedagogy back then in the GDR, but I was never
allowed to take a look into her notes. I know, teacher here are pretty
busy preparing for lessons - even in holidays. I want to understand, how
teaching *works*. I assume, it's worthy for many other topics as well.

Regards,

André
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