Back in 2012, I watched an inspiring talk by Clay Shirky on open-source movement. His ideas about how opportunity to access knowledge could be a strong impetus for additional knowledge generation – with greater momentum and efficiency. As a scholar whose research interests touch upon knowledge management and innovation, I found open-source as a great challenge (for the established scientific paradigm in my field) and a huge opportunity (for the society at large). This has sparked my interest further in this subject, which resulted in me developing a strongly positive take on the need for keeping knowledge open as much as possible. In a way, the idea is not unusual for the wider academic environment within which I have developed my academic career. Sweden has a strong culture in favor of openness and transparency in academia and beyond. For example, academic arch projects funded by public agencies (e.g., The Swedish Research Council) require researchers to make the outputs of these projects available to the entire society, which shares the same rationale with open-source movement. Another telling example is the recently announced agreement between Elsevier and Swedish Consortium of University & Research Libraries, which was concluded thanks to the stern stance of the latter and enables open access publishing for Swedish researchers.
Based on the above, this week’s topic was particularly interesting and relevant for me. Although the TED talk by David Wiley is one of the course materials that was perfectly in line with my personal conviction summarized above, we were also assigned additional presentations and readings that pointed out to the lints and challenges of opening courses open for wider use. As a result, open education might not be as clear of a foregone conclusion for everyone as it was for me. In fact, this was also reflected in other course participants’ personal blogs who shared personal reservations about opening up course materials, sharing controversial topics with a wider audience, possible challenges with adopting new ICT tools that would enable open education, and possible limits on the quality and interaction is massive open courses.
But perhaps the most notable moment for this week took place in our PBL Group discussion. One member of our group presented a challenging question of what happens when someone shares a course material that propagates some kind of radical ideas, ideas that would run against the tenets (e.g., equality, freedom, democracy) that constitute very spirit of modern education? We have to admit that it is not an easy question to handle. On the one hand, we have strong reasons to believe that open education offers a lot of benefits to world especially by making education available to those who would not have the chance to get education otherwise. On the other hand, open education platforms do not typically levy any constraints on who could publish what kind of educational material online. In other words, could open education be a possible way to spread mis-education around, especially in an era that has been colloquially referred to us ‘post-truth world’? Despite the validity of these concerns, I would like to maintain my stance in favor of openness on two grounds. First, it is very difficult to determine whom shall be placed in ‘authority’ position to decide what is (not) appropriate to be shared as an educational material proper. Clearly, freedom of speech shall not be used as a basis of permit for people to inflict harm on others, nor does it mean that anyone can share anything in any way s/he wants with no moral standards whatsoever. However, I still have not figured out how ‘legitimate courses’ could be selected and how ‘harmful’ material could be filtered out. Where is the line between offering the ‘right courses’ and censorship? Today, we condemn Roman Inquisition for how they treated Copernicus and Galileo, but who could ensure that today’s legitimate authorities would not be seen in a similar way 500 years later? Therefore, I do not feel at ease with the idea of a central authority that would steer the open education movement. In fact, I believe it somehow goes agains the spirit of this movement. Second, open education is a very young phenomenon. Therefore, it is inevitable that the system has its own voids and backdoors. However, as systems with massive number of participants who have the ability to connect to one another in various ways, open education platforms have the capacity to course correct such problems over time. Some can call it a naive idea, but I do believe in the wisdom of crowds and their capacity to pick out the good apples from bad ones.