TOPIC 2

HOW OPEN IS OPEN LEARNING?

Not strangely the theme that has captured my imagination is again “openness” in open learning. I have no doubt of the benefits of openness in learning. Everyone has access (or some access) to any course material. This is not far from the idea of public space which I have been studying. The two paradigms overlap also because neither are open to everyone equally, but some of us want them to be, so we try. This is all that I think we can do. There are so many red tapes about compiling our course materials and so many limitations to follow related to privacy and copyrights that at the end – I believe – the openness in “open” really becomes a shadow. Social justice plays the most important role in this discussion and this is why we ought to indeed opt for “open learning”; however, we also need to be aware of all the obstacles our communities and ourselves create for that openness to never fully materialise. I see then an ambiguity in this discussion; I won’t call it hypocrisy although it may seem like this at first. For instance, regarding the “equality” in sharing and participating in an open learning environment, that one of the suggested resources mentions, there is evidence from various scientific fields (political and feminist studies) that such equality is an misleading illusion. In societies that are stratified in various overt and covert ways an open shared space to learn amongst equals cannot but only promote those in a more powerful position (the smarter, the wealthier, the more eloquent, the more entitled to speak up, those with higher digital literacy, etc). This is the way I paraphrase Nancy Frazer’s (1990) critique on Jurgen Habermas (1962) to fit in our topic. To conclude this post, I will write what was the first thought that came to my mind when thinking on my reflection: there is no “open learning” as such and that does not mean that we should not strive for it.

Open Networked Learning

A course, a community, an approach