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Ground Zero Approaches to Open #YearofOpen

Whilst I was at the OER17 Conference, via Twitter I became aware of a minor controversy around a post by David Wiley, How Is Open Pedagogy Different? published on April 4, just before OER17. Jim Groom’s response I don’t need permission to be open attracted a lot of comments (30 at time of writing). I commented at Jim’s post, read Suzan Koseoglu’s Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley,  and commented at Tannis Morgan’s Reflections on #OER17 – From Beyond Content to Open Pedagogy

The week before OER17, I had responded to a request from #101openstories (still time for you to add yours too). In writing my open story, I realised that I became open, in the sense that it is generally meant within OER/Open Access/ Open Education Practice/ Open Pedagogy, by accident.

Open by Accident

Writing my story, reading posts and commenting all added to my personal reflections on what open meant for me in my own practice as an educator and as a learner. I am not really interested in getting into a definition war about open – I am more interested in the relationship between the theory  and practice of openness, and for me that predates my use of the Internet in education.  One OER17 presentation that was particularly relevant to this issue for me was this one by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewycz. Putting critical pragmatism in a reflexive relationship with advocacy is a powerful contribution, and leaves space for us to explore broader and older ideas. Viv Rolfe gave a presentation entitled Open but not for criticism at Opened16, and Dave Kernohan stressed the need to a community of practice to operate in part as a shared history of that practice (in order to combat ahistoricity) in his Opened15 presentation.

Eventually, I realised that #101openstories, David Wiley’s blog post were focused around #YearofOpen so I explored that site, interested to see that more active education was a claim for open pedagogy.

‘Open Pedagogy provides teachers with an extended set of didactical approaches to make their education more active. ” Robert Schuwer in https://www.yearofopen.org/april-open-perspective-what-is-open-pedagogy/

Around the same time Maha Bali, who also has a post at the Year of Open site, invited me to a hangout to discuss What is Open Pedagogy?. I was honoured to be invited but I am not a huge fan of Google Hangouts, and I think Maha understands that. The question of how we explore the meaning and practice of open in education is an interesting one and fortunately won’t be answered in the next two days 🙂

So distilled from my reflection and recent reading and thinking, here is my contribution to the #YearofOpen in the area of open in practice.

Image of Ground Zero definition from Oxford Dictionaries definition

When I was commenting on on Tannis Morgan’s post I referred to the problematic nature of what I called Ground Zero approaches to Open. Afterwards, I was slightly worried that the use of the term Ground Zero might have been offensive in the light of its use in the context of the destruction of the World Trade Centre so I was relieved to find that it had a pre-existing meaning, as I had thought. I was very pleased to see the exemplar given for meaning 2 , a starting point or base for an activity ‘if you’re starting at ground zero in terms of knowledge, go to the library’. 

Some writers like Tannis do look back in the literature to explore meanings of open in education prior to the Internet age. Because my own educational practice pre-dates the Internet, I thought it would be interesting to look back to see if I could find some of the sources that influenced my own HE philosophy/pedagogy in the late 1980s/ early 1990s https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=Open+Active+Learning&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_yhi=1995 .  Apparently a journal changed its name to ‘Open Learning’ in 1986 and there was argument over the misuse of terminology in 1990 so not much has changed. I realised that an important concern for me was the activity of the student, and I was able to incorporate new activities as opportunities for open web learning emerged.

As well as looking back, it’s good to look around too . I have worked with many colleagues who would be reluctant to openly share their resources according to 5 or even 6…. 25  Rs but would be open practitioners according to a less stringent orthodoxy. In terms of the scholarly literature, an example of something that fails the 5Rs but is hugely valuable source for theorising and practicing openness is the excellent Learning, Media & Technology Special Issue edited by Sian Bayne, Jen Ross and Jeremy Knox http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/40/3?nav=tocList . Only one of articles is ‘open access’ but several of the others are available as pre-prints or by ingenuity via one’s network. Does that mean that the wealth of knowledge available by reading and discussing the articles should be excluded from consideration of OER and open educational practice. I don’t think so. I have been very pleased to some of the work cited in the OER community, notably in Catherine Cronin’s OER16 keynote but I always hope to see more crossover.

So I am recommending a healthy suspicion of Ground Zero approaches to Open (Pedagogy). For me they tend to suggest that we ignore what has gone before, and require signing up to tightly defined rules (that may change in future). Why should we be suspicious of these approaches? Firstly, the unenlightened who refuse, for example, to sign up to a particular version of a CC license may have a good reason for their decision, and why should it be imposed upon them? If we exclude people and their rich, lived educational practices, we may fail to learn from them as well as them learning from us.  Can we afford to exclude valuable knowledge that falls outside the parameters of our particular ground zero?

We may need to look beyond what we see as our community, and go the the library.

I’ll be watching this at 9 p.m. BST today and on #YearofOpen hash tag on Twitter – maybe see you there?

Curation of Relevant Posts by Maha Bali

Relevant posts that I had read but not directly linked to

https://howsheilaseesit.blog/2017/04/21/thinking-about-open-pedagogy/

http://www.josiefraser.com/2017/04/reflections-on-oer17/