Locks on our bridges: Critical and generative lenses for open education
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The document discusses issues with conceptualizing openness in education. It argues that openness is often presented as politically neutral when it is not, and can gloss over issues of inequality, power dynamics, and justice. True openness requires addressing these issues and questioning what forms of selectivity and closure are justified. It notes definitional problems with openness and issues that arise from portraying open and closed as binaries. An overemphasis on access to content can homogenize learners and contexts. Open education needs to better address power and inclusion. The document advocates understanding education through complexity theory and embracing uncertainty, distinctiveness, diversity, emergence, and what lies at the boundaries.
![Photo by Flickr user fauxto_digit, CC-BY 2.0
Collier & Ross, 2016
“digital practices contribute to the fruitful mess that characterises education, casting new
light on issues of power, responsibility, sustainability, reach and contact. …a key
element of emerging technology is its not-yetness: there is so much we do not know
when we engage with these technologies. We must therefore choose to dwell as
teachers in [a] state of radical and enduring uncertainty …We need practices
that acknowledge and work with complexity to help us stay open to what may be
genuinely surprising about what happens when online learning and teaching meets
emerging technologies.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/plymouthstopenness-170609173216/85/Locks-on-our-bridges-Critical-and-generative-lenses-for-open-education-16-320.jpg)
Locks on our bridges: Critical and generative lenses for open education
- 1. Locks on our bridges: Critical and generative lenses on open education Amy Collier, Ph.D Associate Provost for Digital Learning, Middlebury College @amcollier
- 3. We act — at our peril — as if “open” is politically neutral, let alone politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the word to stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy.We presume that, because something is “open” that it necessarily contains all the conditions for equality or freedom or justice.We use “open” as though it is free of ideology, ignoring how much “openness,” particularly as it’s used by technologists, is closely intertwined with “meritocracy” — this notion, a false one, that “open” wipes away inequalities, institutions, biases, history, that “open” “levels the playing field.” If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound. Audrey Watters, “From Open to Justice” Hack Education Photo by thr3 eyes, CC0 via Unsplash
- 4. “all forms of openness entail forms of closed-ness” Photo by me. Hello, Cairo!
- 5. “The question is not whether to make education more open, but what forms of openness and closed-ness are justifiable.To bring to the fore the paradoxical inter-relationship of open–closed-ness is to investigate the micro-practices of education and their powerful effects, the specific forms they take and the possibilities for alternative practices. It is to deconstruct openness as an inherently worthwhile educational goal and bring to the fore explicit questions about the basis upon what specific forms of selectivity and closure are justifiable in particular educational practices, however open.” Edwards, 2015 Photo by Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 & GFDL
- 6. 1) There are definitional issues with openness, and often a false binary is established between “open” and “closed.” (issues of definition also lead to problematic “openwashing” w/ branded digital content and platforms); 2) An overemphasis on access to content homogenizes learners and their contexts; 3) Open educational practice does not attend sufficiently to issues of power and inclusion. Photo by me. It’s a hermit hole
- 8. 1) There are definitional issues with openness, and often a false binary is established between “open” and “closed.” (issues of definition also lead to problematic “openwashing” w/ branded digital content and platforms); 2) An overemphasis on access to content homogenizes learners and their contexts; 3) Open educational practice does not attend sufficiently to issues of power and inclusion. Photo by me. Did I mention this is Scotland?
- 10. 1) There are definitional issues with openness, and often a false binary is established between “open” and “closed.” (issues of definition also lead to problematic “openwashing” w/ branded digital content and platforms); 2) An overemphasis on access to content homogenizes learners and their contexts; 3) Open educational practice does not attend sufficiently to issues of power and inclusion. Photo by me. Parts of Outlander filmed nearby
- 11. 1) There are definitional issues with openness, and often a false binary is established between “open” and “closed.” (issues of definition also lead to problematic “openwashing” w/ branded digital content and platforms); 2) An overemphasis on access to content homogenizes learners and their contexts; 3) Open educational practice does not attend sufficiently to issues of power and inclusion. Photo by me. Parts of Outlander filmed nearby
- 12. not-yetness Photo by me. Lovely Cairo.
- 13. embraces agency, and related risk & messiness is, at its core, about love considers the edges, possible futures, & borderlands Photo by me. These are called Snow Drops.
- 14. “complexity invites us to understand that many of the processes and activities that shape the worlds we inhabit are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. It also invites us to be skeptical of mechanistic and reductionist explanations, which assume that these processes and activities are linear, deterministic and/or predictable and, therefore, that they can be controlled (at least in principle).” Gough, 2012 Photo by me. Have a seat. Take a load off.
- 15. "Mexico/US Pacific Ocean border fence" by Tony Webster. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons. “Borders are set up to define the spaces that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them...A borderland is a vague undetermined place created by the residue of an unnatural boundary.” Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera
- 16. Photo by Flickr user fauxto_digit, CC-BY 2.0 Collier & Ross, 2016 “digital practices contribute to the fruitful mess that characterises education, casting new light on issues of power, responsibility, sustainability, reach and contact. …a key element of emerging technology is its not-yetness: there is so much we do not know when we engage with these technologies. We must therefore choose to dwell as teachers in [a] state of radical and enduring uncertainty …We need practices that acknowledge and work with complexity to help us stay open to what may be genuinely surprising about what happens when online learning and teaching meets emerging technologies.”
- 20. Amy’s advice: Get lost in @holden (Mike Caulfield) goodness
- 32. 1.What space is in these practices for distinctiveness, diversity, open-endedness? 2. How much uncertainty can this approach to openness accommodate? 3.What closures come along with these practices? What is in the borderlands? Photo by Steinar Engeland, CC0 via Unsplash
- 33. acollier@middlebury.edu @amcollier http://redpincushion.me http://digitallearning.middcreate.net Use my images! https://flic.kr/s/aHskWorcbQ