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Open What?

I thought I had a handle on this whole open education movement, but after this week I realize that what I thought I knew only scratched the surface of openness in education.  I am trying to wrap my head around what is open?  What open is?  And the many varying degrees of openness…we have Creative Commons, open content, open educational resources, open educational practices, open for, open to, open by…my brain is starting to hurt.  I see the value in investigating into levels of openness, but I don’t think that it needs to be so complicated.  Openness to me should be separated into just a couple of categories, content and practice.  The first category is either open content that is usable for the general public or not, and the second category is an open practice or pedagogical tool that is open to use or not.  I realize that things are not always so black and white and it might just be a pie in the sky dream, but it would be fantastic if a structure could be developed similar to a simplified creative commons licensing where one could know quickly and easily whether or not a particular practice or content is open to use.  

Stop Looking At Me!

Dave Cormier’s presentation on the ‘Values of Open’ (RRU Virtual Symposium, 2017) reminded me of an issue that has plagued me as a teacher over the years, how do I get the students to stop looking at me for answers and start looking to each other for learning support?  The idea of participatory culture in education is not new, but as Catherine Cronin noted in her presentation, advances in technology have given learners choice as to where to learn, when to learn, and how to learn.  Hargittai and Walejko (2008) note that it is much easier to share content over the web and there is a much greater possibility that your content will be viewed due to the fact that there are so many that can access it (p. 239).  They bring up a valuable point however, that some have the means to produce content, while others simply have the means to consume it.  This creates a divide as the socially and financially better off have the opportunity to set the agenda of what information is out there, while others without the means can only consume and don’t have as much of a voice (p. 252).  I believe this to be true in education, but also in society as a whole.

Jenkins (2009) brings up an important point regarding participatory culture, and that is we cannot assume that our youth are media literate and have the proper skills to actively be involved in participatory culture.  We as educators must take on the responsibility of properly training our learners so that they can be fully involved in participatory learning (pp. 15-16) and also so that we can properly prepare them for the workforce where these skills are critically needed.

References

Hargittai, E., & Walejko, G. (2008). The Participation Divide: Content creation and sharing in the digital age. Information, Community and Society, 11(2), 239-256.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. MIT Press.