We are living in a sharing economy. Some platforms specialise in car sharing or flat sharing, others offer variants such as book and jewellery sharing. Even exchange platforms for tools are part of the almost unmanageable landscape. The basic idea underlying all of this is the idea of benefit without ownership. The user can benefit from it, but does not have to own it. This is a classic description of any service delivery. He/she can get the benefit of using a hotel room or air travel without owning the hotel or the plane. This makes sense for objects like hotels, cars or planes, but what does this mindset look like for learning? What does this mindset look like in education? Unlike a tangible object like a car, an education/learning service does not transfer ownership to the user anyway. The shared car can only be in one place (similar to a piece of cake that can only be eaten once), whereas shared knowledge acts like a candle, because the igniting flame is still burning even after more candles have been lit.

Knowledge is one of the few things that becomes more when it is shared. As David Wiley stressed that expertise is nonrivalrous – it can be given without being given away. Our task as learning facilitators is to increase our capacity to be generous … that is our role as educators … with content, with time, with resources etc..

I personally think, we cannot afford to be greedy and frugal with our knowledge. We don’t need silos, we don’t need contained knowhow that does not spread around (Weinberg, 2017). We need far more interdisciplinary and connected learning, because we need these abilities and expertise to solve our problems of today and tomorrow!

In a traditional way of thinking, openness is mostly interpreted and perceived in the wrong way, in a mono-directional way: the know-it-all teacher shares his/her knowledge treasure and the learner receives it. Bates (2015) stresses the fact that open textbooks save money for the students, because the access is free for them. But this is not the only openness that we need in our industry (and I might add: in our world of learning). Because this approach to openness does not reflect what we should learn and co-learn today: The teacher becomes a learner and the learner becomes a teacher – not only at their own institutions. That is the future openness we all need.

Therefore, I fully support the idea by University of Texas Arlington Libraries of “Open pedagogy” as a practice of engaging with learners as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It’s a form of experiential learning in which learners demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are learner created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community.

… and that is exactly what we are doing in ONL211 right now and I’m loving it.

References

Bates, T. (2015) Writing an online, open textbook: is it worth it? Online Learning and Distance
Education Resources, June 10.

Weinberg, Ulrich (2017): Network Thinking. Beyond Brockhaus Thinking, Murmann Publishers GmbH, Berlin.