[Open-education] Friday Chat: The differences between open (as in access) or open (as in participatory & contribution)

Fri May 23 11:24:42 UTC 2014

I've mumbled about this before re open access as a geography (
http://www.slideshare.net/Pgogy/open-as-in-oer-and-open-as-in-mooc). The
analogy I use is in the UK we have footpaths, which the public are allowed
to walk on - even if say they cut across your land. Whereas in the US you
might have a national park, which is open but you have to get to it.

Footpaths aren't big, parks are. Footpaths tend be nearer, parks tend to be
further away.

I think shifting the burden of accessing openness onto developers is
problematic for two reasons

1) How could they know what to do? Are we talking a Berners-Lee like star
system?
2) How could taking things to people not seem a bit Victorian Empire
Missionary?

I would say developing an accessible first (akin to mobile first) style of
openness makes sense. So make transcripts available for MP3s as an example,
but again, are we having better forms of open? And can we do this and not
put people off being bad open?

So you can be open, but at a point of moving your openness onto people, do
you close things down? Or does it look a little spam like?

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:15 AM, Marieke Guy <marieke.guy at okfn.org> wrote:

>  Hi Everyone,
>
> Sorry we missed our Friday chat last week - this was due to the Making it
> Matter workshop (lots of good discussions<http://linkedup-project.eu/2014/05/21/what-we-learnt-at-making-it-matter/>there though!)
>
> So on the open design list there was an interesting conversation<https://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/opendesign/2014-May/000390.html>about the differences between open (as in access) or open (as in
> participatory & contribution)? They were trying to decide which is the most
> important and if we have, in the past, focused too much on access?
>
> I was wondering how this ties in with open education. Are conversations
> too centered on resources and fail to consider whether people can actually
> participate. So here a couple of things come to mind:
>
>    - Being where people are at - do we often trying to force people to
>    come to 'a place' rather than going to where they are?
>    - Language - we continue to use a lot of jargon
>    - Is open education elitist? e.g. material OER is WEIRD (Western,
>    Educated, Rich, Democratic), much activity relies on infrastructure,
>    learning & teaching practice approaches are often tied to cultures.
>
> Just a few thoughts.
>
> Marieke
>  If you have an idea for a Friday chat add it to the etherpad<http://new.okfnpad.org/p/Open_Education_Working_Friday_Chats>
> .
>
>
> **
>
> Marieke Guy
> LinkedUp <http://linkedup-project.eu/> Project Community Coordinator |
> skype: mariekeguy | tel: 44 (0) 1285 885681 | @mariekeguy<http://twitter.com/mariekeguy>
> The Open Knowledge <http://okfn.org/>
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