What does openness and closeness mean to you?

Openness to me means sharing, whether it is sharing my ideas, material produced or something that happened to me recently. Openness is about choosing to go public or stay in the draft zone (closed). Openness is also about finding the balance between going public and being private or personal.

Having a fixed or closed mindset often means that you tend to stay in your comfort zone, you are afraid of making mistakes (anxiety), you get stuck in excuses and your focus is on looking smart. Trying to shift your mindset to be more open will also change the way you look on mistakes, namely as something to learn from, you are ready to challenge your comfort zone and your focus is on learning (Smith, J, 2020)

Applying the open and closed mindset to the world of education could be about creating a participatory culture (Jenkins et.al., 2001 in Cronin: https://www.slideshare.net/cicronin/open-culture-open-education-open-questions/24) where the institution supports creating and sharing and where the members of the institutions believe that their contribution matters. Personally I prefer this type of mindset in a workplace, where sharing comes naturally and colleagues encourage this. Maybe we can even take the view openness, OEP and OER to the world of economy and adapt it to the concept of circular economy where the concepts of reuse and above all – share – are used (Urbinati et.al., 2017).

In the world of education, what is the point of re-inventing the wheel over and over again instead of sharing what is already out? In circular economy terms that would be product life extension i.e. Products are designed to be durable and to have a long lifetime, thus reducing consumption. Such products are by definition high quality…; and redistribution i.e. The most sustainable product is often one we already own. Reusing a product preserves all of the added-value within that product (Urbinati et.al., 2017). The most cited articles are those that ranked the highest, i.e. the author/researcher gains recognition when others reuse his/her materials i.e. definition of high quality research. If someone decides to reuse your material it automatically gains added-value and recognition. Applying a Creative Commons approach to sharing might increase the growth and open mindset.

Reasoning from the above perspective, the question is not “to share or not to share”? We can instead ask whom to share with (meso level: Cronin 2017) and where/how will I share this (choice of media)? The more specific content you want to share, the less visible you will be i.e. the more specific your target group is, the less people will view/reuse/redistribute your shared knowledge/material.

Creative Commons licences explained

Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017)

Smith, Jennifer (2020): https://www.mindsethealth.com/matter/growth-vs-fixed-mindset

Urbinati, A., Chiaroni, D., & Chiesa, V. (2017). Towards a new taxonomy of circular economy business models. Journal of Cleaner Production, 168, 487-498.