Laura @ CET

Openness has been on my mind. It’s coming from all sides, at the moment, a confluence of events and possibilities. We have an Open Education Resources Project here in CET (OER UCT), which is speeding up to the launch in February 2010. Our Opening Scholarship Project (ie access to research outputs) came to the end of its funded period, but lives on in the form of advocacy work and another grant proposal. We at the university are talking about Open UCT, and what that might mean and what form it would take. And next week Tony Carr and I are presenting at a seminar in Barcelona called Open Social Learning, where we will be reflecting on e/merge, the online conference we have hosted bi-annually since 2004 (e/merge 2008 being the last one). It seems ironic but we are thinking about how a “traditional” online conference might respond to and be changed by the broader social trends and expectations about openness, sharing, immediacy, and widening of community presently being enabled by social software.  

Like other universities in the world, there are many reasons we are engaged in these projects. For us there is an additional reason, an especial imperative to address imbalances; the righting of the direction of the global flow of knowledge production.  

This graphic (from worldmapper) graphically illuminates the imbalances. Although it visually represents percentages of book publishing in different parts of the world, it’s also a kind of proxy for all outputs including academic research, teaching resources and contributions to conferences.

 There are many excellent reasons for advocating open. And we do.

At the same time, the guru of open access Lawrence Lessig, sagely warns against what he calls “naked transparency”. (He is writing about government in particular but I think the principle applies to us in education.*) I like the way he comments that reformers always focus on the good and think that the bad is someone else’s problem. It’s a useful reminder that we have to consider the “horribles” as well as the “blessings” of openness. All bits may not need to be open. Some spaces should not be open. Closed may not always be a negative word, it may also connote positive attributes such as a safe space for risk, privacy, a trusted community…...  

I am finding it more useful to think about degrees of openness on a continuum, rather than open/closed as a binary. My colleagues Cheryl Hodgkinson and Eve Gray beautifully demonstrate how this can usefully be applied to open educational resources (in a thoughtful piece in IJEDICT at http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/include/getdoc.php?id=3695&article=864&mode=pdf). 

This is helping me think through CET’s current and planned Open projects, as well as openness in general. I think the tendency towards openness is right, and generally hugely beneficial. But I think that a nuanced view of developmental work in differentiated contexts is also necessary. So rather than a blinkered view of openness, rather it’s about openness at different times, for different people, for different reasons. Sometimes about semi – openness, partial openness, on a gradation, about opening up bit by bit, about being ready. It makes it more difficult but hopefully we can avoid some of the “horribles” by taking all these complexities into account, and going into all this with eyes wide open!

* Lessig, L “Against Transparency”, in The New Republic (http://wwwtnr.com) 9 October 2009