Openness’ and ‘open education’

‘Openness’ and ‘Open Education’ in the
Global Digital Economy: An Emerging
Paradigm of Social Production
Michael A Peters
UIUC, 2008
Paper presented at Economic and Social Research Council (ERSC, UK) Seminar
Series on ‘Education and the Knowledge Economy’, University of Bath,
March 6-7th, 2008.

Open Systems
‘Systems are rarely ever either open or
closed but open to some and closed
to other influences… Systems without
output are non-knowable by an
external observer, e.g., black holes in
the visible universe… Systems without
inputs are not controllable’
Principia Cybernetica Web at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Asc/OPEN_SYSTE.html

Structure of Presentation
1. Introduction
2. The Emerging Open Education Paradigm
3. The History of ‘Openness’ in Education: From
the Open Classroom to OCW
4. Bergson, Popper, Soros and the Open
Society
5. The New Paradigm of Social Production
6. Conclusions

Introduction: Emerging Knowledge Ecologies
• Harvard mandates open archiving
(Feb 14, 2008)
• MIT adopts OpenCourseWare (2001)
• Budapest OA statement; NIH; ERC.
• The Ithaca Report, University Publishing
In A Digital Age (2007)

Ithaka Report, 2007
• changes in creation, production and consumption
of scholarly resources --‘creation of new formats
made possible by digital technologies, ultimately
allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated
electronic research and publishing environments
that will enable real-time dissemination,
collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and
usage of new media’ (p. 4).
• ‘alternative distribution models (institutional
repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals)
have also arisen with the aim to broaden access,
reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content’
(p. 4)

Open Education
Open Education that builds on the nested
and evolving convergences of open source,
open access and open science, and also
emblematic of a set of still wider political
and economic changes that ushers in
‘social production’ as an aspect of the
global digital economy, an economy that is
both fragile and volatile as the current world
credit and banking crisis demonstrates so
well.

Wider Cultural Changes:
Writer’s strike in Hollywood
‘Cheap production technology, no-barrier-to-entry
distribution, and a Niagara of “product” (65,000
new videos are uploaded on YouTube daily) mean
the entire Hollywood story-development complex is
now in a daily competition with do-it-yourself writers.
Hollywood product itself is remade, reduced to
clips, bites, fractals, and mixes. Sitting through an
entire feature film more and more feels like an
unreasonable commitment. (We use DVRs to fast-
forward, to pause, to hold for some other time—
anything not to have to watch something from
beginning to end.) The narrative is disposable.’
--Michael Wolff

Open Century?
The present decade can be called the
‘open’ decade (open source, open
systems, open standards, open
archives, open everything) just as the
1990s were called the ‘electronic’
decade (e-text, e-learning, e-
commerce, e-governance)
--Materu, 2004.

Change in Philosophical Ethos
And yet it is more than just a ‘decade’
that follows the electronic innovations
of the 1990s; it is a change of
philosophy and ethos, a set of
interrelated and complex changes
that transforms markets and the mode
of production, ushering in a new
collection of values based on
openness, the ethic of participation
and peer-to-peer collaboration.

New Forms of Freedom
• a shift from an underlying metaphysics
of production—a ‘productionist’
metaphysics—to a metaphysics of
consumption
• new logics and different patterns of
cultural consumption in the areas of
new media where symbolic analysis
becomes a habitual and daily activity.

Information & Freedom
Information is the vital element in a
‘new’ politics and economy that links
space, knowledge and capital in
networked practices. Freedom is an
essential ingredient in this equation if
these network practices develop or
transform themselves into knowledge
cultures.
--Peters & Besley, 2006

Information and Control
The specific politics and eco-cybernetic
rationalities that accompany an
informational global capitalism comprised of
new multinational edutainment
agglomerations are clearly capable of
colonizing the emergent ecology of info-
social networks and preventing the
development of knowledge cultures based
on non-proprietary modes of knowledge
production and exchange.
--Peters & Besley, 2006

Open Education - Definition
‘the open provision of educational
resources, enabled by information and
communication technologies, for
consultation, use and adaptation by a
community of users for noncommercial
purposes’
--UNESCO, 2002

OECD, 2007
• Learning content: Full courses, courseware, content
modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the development, use,
reuse and delivery of learning content, including
searching and organisation of content, content
and learning management systems, content
development tools, and online learning
communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property
licences to promote open publishing of materials,
design principles of best practice and localise
content.

Knowledge Systems and Complexity
Complexity as an approach to knowledge
and knowledge systems now recognizes
both the development of global systems
architectures in (tele)communications and
information with the development of open
knowledge production systems that
increasingly rest not only on the
establishment of new and better platforms
(sometimes called Web 2.0), the semantic
web, new search algorithms and processes
of digitization

‘Open Knowledge Production Systems’
Social processes and policies that
foster openness as an overriding value
as evidenced in the growth of open
source, open access and open
education and their convergences
that characterize global knowledge
communities that transcend borders of
the nation-state.

Global Knowledge Systems
Openness seems also to
suggest political transparency
and the norms of open inquiry,
indeed, even democracy itself
as both the basis of the logic of
inquiry and the dissemination
of its results

The Emerging Open Education Paradigm
US Committee for Economic Development
• Open Standards, Open Source, and Open
Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of
Openness (April 2006)
• The Digital Economy and Economic Growth
(2001)
• Digital Economy: Promoting Competition,
Innovation, and Opportunity (2001)
• Promoting Innovation and Economic
Growth: The Special Problem of Digital
Intellectual Property (2004)

‘open innovation’
new collaborative models of
open innovation, originating
outside the firm, that results in
an ‘architecture of
participation’

Three Reports
• Giving Knowledge for Free: The
Emergence Of Open Educational
Resources (OECD, 2007)
• Open Educational Practices and
Resources (OLCOS, 2007)
• A Review of the Open Educational
Resources (OER) Movement:
Achievements, Challenges, and New
Opportunities (2007)

OECD Report
‘An apparently extraordinary trend is
emerging. Although learning resources
are often considered as key
intellectual property in a competitive
higher education world, more and
more institutions and individuals are
sharing digital learning resources over
the Internet openly and without cost,
as open educational resources (OER)’.
(p. 9).

OLCOS
‘OLCOS emphasizes that it is crucial to also
promote innovation and change in
educational practices. In particular, OLCOS
warns that delivering OER to the still
dominant model of teacher centred
knowledge transfer will have little effect on
equipping teachers, students and workers
with the competences, knowledge and skills
to participate successfully in the knowledge
economy and society.’

‘Competences for the knowledge society’
‘priority must be given to open
educational practices that involve
students in active, constructive
engagement with content, tools
and services in the learning
process, and promote learners’
self-management, creativity and
working in teams’ (p. 37)

Skills of ‘digital competence’
• Ability to search, collect and process (create,
organise, distinguish relevant from irrelevant,
subjective from objective, real from virtual)
electronic information, data and concepts and to
use them in a systematic way;
• Ability to use appropriate aids (presentations,
graphs, charts, maps) to produce, present or
understand complex information;
• Ability to access and search a website and to use
internet-based services such as discussion fora and
e-mail;
• Ability to use ICT to support critical thinking,
creativity and innovation in different contexts at
home, leisure and work (p. 39).

The History of ‘Openness’ in Education:
From the Open Classroom to OCW
•The Open Classroom
•Open Schooling
•The Open University
•Open Courseware
•Open Education

OpenCourseWare
• MIT OpenCourseWare has reached 35
million people and another 14 million in
translation
• OpenCourseWare Consortium ‘is a
collaboration of more than 100 higher
education institutions and associated
organizations from around the world
creating a broad and deep body of open
educational content using a shared model.’

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration
‘We are on the cusp of a global revolution in
teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are
developing a vast pool of educational resources on
the Internet, open and free for all to use. These
educators are creating a world where each and
every person on earth can access and contribute
to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also
planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where
educators and learners create, shape and evolve
knowledge together, deepening their skills and
understanding as they go.’

The Open Society
• Henri Bergson (1859-1941)- The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion
(Bergson, 1977 [1935]).
• Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its
Enemies (Popper 1945): The Spell of
Plato and The High Tide of Prophecy:
Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath
• George Soros & Open Society Institute
(est.1993)

Henri Bergson
• ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to
mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly’
• ‘The concept of open society was first used by the
French philosopher Henri Bergson in his book The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion published in
1932. One source is tribal and that leads to a
closed society whose members feel an affinity for
each other and fear or hostility toward the other
tribes. By contrast, the other source is universal and
leads to an open society which is guided by
universal human rights and seeks to protect and
promote the freedom of the individual’

Karl Popper
‘I see now more clearly than ever before that even our
greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable
and sound as it is dangerous - from our impatience to better
the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of
what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual
revolutions of history, a movement which began three
centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to
free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority
and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society
which rejects the absolute authority to preserve, to develop,
and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to
their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational
criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire
responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman
authority, and their readiness to share the burden of
responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its
avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling
destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.’

Ideology of the ‘Open Society’
• Popper was a ‘Cold War warrior’ like
Friedrich von Hayek, his countryman, who
wrote the fiercely anti-socialist tract Road to
Serfdom (1949)
• Hayek was responsible for inviting and
securing a place for Popper at the London
School of Economics (LSE).
• Hayek and Popper together formed a
formidable twin opponent to socialism and
strong defense of the principles of liberal
democracy and the ‘free market’ in the
postwar period.

George Soros
‘Fundamental principles have been traditionally
derived from some external authority such as
religion or science. But at the present moment in
history, no external authority remains undisputed.
The only possible source is internal. A firm foundation
on which we can build our principles is the
recognition of our own fallibility. Falli-bility is a
universal human condition; therefore it is applicable
to a global society. Fallibility gives rise to reflexivity
and reflexivity can create conditions of unstable
disequilibrium, or to put it bluntly, of political and
economic crisis. It is in our common interest to avoid
such conditions’ (Soros, 1998: p. 84).

Benkler & The New Paradigm of
Social Production
In The Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Benkler develops a vision of the good
society based on access and distribution of
information goods in a networked global
information economy that places a high
value on individual autonomy where within
the public information space of the Internet
and the information commons people have
the individual means to pursue their own
interests.

Nonmarket p-t-p production
The emergence of the global networked
information economy made possible by
increasingly cheaper processors linked as a
pervasive network has created an
information economy based on the
production of information and culture that
enables social and nonmarket or peer-to
peer production and exchange to play a,
perhaps even, the central role.

‘The Economy of Ideas’ - Barlow
The economy of the future will be
based on relationship rather than
possession. It will be continuous rather
than sequential. And finally, in the
years to come, most human exchange
will be virtual rather than physical,
consisting not of stuff but the stuff of
which dreams are made. Our future
business will be conducted in a world
made more of verbs than nouns.

Creative Commons
• Richard Stallman
• John Perry Barlow
• Larry Lessig
• James Doyle
• Pamela Stephenson
• Yochai Benkler
• Creative Commons, http://
creativecommons.org/

Networks of Collaboration
Benkler’s The Wealth of
Networks links ‘to a broader
tradition of thought; that of
people like Jane Jacobs,
James Scott, Richard Sennett
and Iris Marion Young.’

Educating for Participation in the
Networked Environment
‘To conclude, the basic questions we face are how
we understand the human being who is revealed
by the new practices of large scale, distributed
cooperation in the networked environment; and
how we educate such human beings as they are
and become. My answer is that we must see, with
increasing clarity, that human beings are basically
diverse in their motivational profiles, proclivities to
sociality, backgrounds, insights, and creativity, and
that networks allow us to pool these individual
capabilities in an ever-wider range of combinations
and institutional frameworks, well beyond those that
were available in the past, to a new and ever
growing set of effective social tasks’
--Benkler, 2008

Conclusions (I)
Criticisms of the major reports on Open Education:
(a) Critique of underlying ‘engineering’ concept of
information (as opposed to knowledge) and
therefore also underlying notion of skills;
(b) Problem of ‘structured ignorance,’ ‘information
overload,’ ‘misinformation,’ disinformation’;
(c) Lack of context claims for open education in order
to understand of fundamental changes to liberal
political economy;
(d) Relation of OE to traditional goals of education
policy to notions of freedom, equality, access and
distribution of public goods.

Conclusions (II)
Criticisms of the ideological nature of the ‘open
society’ as proposed by Popper and Soros:
(a)Contextualizing Popper in the Cold War, state
phobia of late 1940s, rise of neoliberalism, links to
Hayek and LSE;
(b)Differences and dangers of ‘openness’: open
society/institutions vs open markets; preservation of
cultural differences; Ameri-English as global lingua
franca; asymmetical power relations; rise of the
‘information utility’ and new forms of ‘information
imperialism’;
(c)‘Societies of Control’ (Deleuze, 1992) vs Open
Society: 1. Historical, 2. Logic, 3. Program

Conclusions (III)
Criticisms of Benkler and limitations of
liberal political economy:
(a)‘open governance’ in an era of
globalization;
(b)UK community cards, House of Lords
and the problems of the digital self;
(c) state & corporate surveillance;
privacy;
(d)copyright; WTO & GATS etc.

Conclusions (IV)
An ontology of openness?
(a)Deleuze’s postion as ‘a radical, non-
essentialist realism that encompasses
the virtual as real’ (Cooksey, 2005) (as
opposed to ‘actual’)
(b) See also DeLanda (2005a,b) and
Agamben (2004).

Openness’ and ‘open education’

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked (10)

Similar to Openness’ and ‘open education’ (20)

More from Michael Peters (14)

Recently uploaded (20)

Openness’ and ‘open education’