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What can’t we say? What don’t we say?

At our ALT-C 2011 Symposium tomorrow The Paradox of Openness: The High Costs of Giving Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan Richard Hall and I will speak briefly about different aspects of openness and online in relation to education and learning, in order to open up discussion amongst participants.  We are also keen to extend dialogue beyond the conference and over time.

One of my interests in being involved in this symposium is that I suspect that there are questions that are not being asked about openness online.  I am keen to explore what openness means and what we can’t or don’t ask about online sharing and communicating.  18 years ago, when I first started thinking about processes of enquiry in relation to information technology, I came across the idea that surfacing assumptions could be useful.  I was intrigued by the idea that  what we thought and talked about could be constrained by things that we took for granted to the extent that we were neither aware of them or discussed them.

Today, I was at pre-ALTC 2011 Conference workshop that was timed to coincide with the launch of Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016, the first report in a new series of NMC Horizon Report Regional Analyses.  One thing I will carry from that workshop to our symposium was part of the definition of ‘open content’ as something that embraces not only the sharing of information, but also the sharing of pedagogies and experiences.

Tomorrow, I’ll be using some ideas from Steven Lukes well-established work on 1,2 and 3 dimensional views of power to help think about examples of the exercise of power in online ‘openness’. I’ll report back on the outcome and continue the discussion here.