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

Fri May 23 13:50:05 UTC 2014

My take on this, Marieke and Pat, is that up until a few years ago we
held long-established hierarchical assumptions about the relationships
among students, teachers, institutions and published resources. In crude
terms these relationship looked something like this:

Institutions
  |
Teachers   -  Publishers/resources
  |
Students

But in the last few years technology has completely challenged these
assumptions and all the relationship are in a state of flux. So issues
of access, participation, collaboration are all beginning to look quite
different. People who find themselves in the roles of teacher and
student have to negotiate new ways of relating to each other, and the
institutions and publishers have to negotiate new and (in my view)
significantly reduced roles. (I recently questioned the very need for
educational institutions in a conference presentation called 'Who needs
institutions?' - and it went down very well.) OERs and MOOCs are just
part of the process of destabilisation of the whole educational
environment, and the whole process will be painful and unpredictable.

Picking up your footpath and park metaphor, Pat, I think that all we can
do is to explore the new educational terrain that technology has opened
up, and that sometimes this will feel like walking along a path with a
fairly clear destination in mind, but at other times it will feel more
like wandering across open parkland searching for waymarks. We live in
exciting times (and I am very glad to work neither as an institutional
manager nor as a publisher).

Terry Loane
How do people really learn? <http://terryloane.typepad.com/reallylearn/>

On 23/05/2014 12:24, Pat Lockley wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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/>
>     /Empowering through Open Knowledge/
>     http://okfn.org/ | @okfn <http://twitter.com/okfn>| OKF on
>     Facebook | Blog | Newsletter
>     http://remoteworker.wordpress.com
>
>
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