[Open-education] Friday Chat: The differences between open (as in access) or open (as in participatory & contribution)
Terry Loane
terryloane at aol.com
Sat May 24 09:43:37 UTC 2014
Yes, the points you make, Fabian, are important, thanks. I am certainly
no technological determinist - which is why in my final paragraph I
advocated an exploratory approach to the use of technology in education.
And I believe you are absolutely right to point to a dialectical
relationship between technology and human aspiration.
But I do think that technology has the potential (and of course
potential does not equal certainty) to bring into the mainstream of
learning, as it were, the various developments over the last fifty years
to which you refer. Surely this is what Illich foresaw in Chapter 6 of
Deschooling Society
<http://ournature.org/%7Enovembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html#chapter6>.
(By the way, I never cease to be amazed by how prescient this chapter
has turned out to be. For example, the paragraph that starts 'Someone
who wants to learn knows that he needs both information and critical
response...' give a pretty good description of what MOOCs could, at
their best, become.)
Let me finish, on a non-technologically determinist note, with a quote
from Chapter 6 of Deschooling Society
<http://ournature.org/%7Enovembre/illich/1970_deschooling.html#chapter6>:
'Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or
bureaucracy and teaching.'
Best wishes
Terry Loane
How do people really learn? <http://terryloane.typepad.com/reallylearn/>
On 24/05/2014 08:39, leutha at fabiant.eu wrote:
>
> Thanks for that Terry, but I think you haven't got the whole story.
>
> It seems to me that the real challenge to hierarchical assumptions
> started over fifty years with the Civil Rights movement in America, in
> particular the Freedom Schools
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Schools> which were tied in
> with the sit ins <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins>
> were students broke down the colour bar. I think it is important to
> remember that students involved in this sit-ins took their college
> books with them and used the time to study.
>
> People like Mario Savio <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio> and
> Tom Hayden <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hayden> always
> acknowledge the role of what they learnt from their participation in
> the civil rights movement in their subsequent activities like the
> Berkeley Free Speech Movement
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement> and the Port Huron
> Statement <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement>.
>
> These social movements played a crucial role in providing the
> environment which gave rise to Silicon Valley. ThePeople's Computer
> Company <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Computer_Company>
> were advocates of Open Source, and went on to spawn the Homebrew
> Computing Club <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club>.
>
> So I am not sure I can go along with an approach based on
> technological determinism. It was the social activism of the sixties
> and seventies which gave rise to the knowledge revolution and the
> technological advances which have had such an impact on contemporary
> society.
>
> I agree that it is important to question the role of educational
> institutions, but let's do this in the context of a questioning which
> goes back a long way. Ivan Illich
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich>, for example, questioned
> the role of schools and advocated learning webs:
>
> And let's keep a balanced perspective which sees a dialectical
> relationship between technology and human aspirations, as I sometimes
> worry that technological determinism paves the way for technocratic
> solutions.
>
> all the best
>
> Fabian Tompsett
>
>
>
>> On 23 May 2014 at 14:50 Terry Loane <terryloane at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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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