What is openness?

What is it to me? To you? Can it help save the world?

There are a lot of reasons being open, and there are a lot of reasons why you shouln’t be to open. But for me, opening up more have given me GREAT possibilities to learn, to join and create communities, and to build upon each other’s conceptions. I can see though, that you also need to feel safe to be able to feel comfortable enough to share. Not everyone feels that safety. For a lot of reasons. And perhaps none of us wants to be completely open with everything..?

I hope that by me being open with my thoughts and concerns, we can better think together. So, if I hadn’t written this post: How would we have found each other..?

Openness could be interpreted in SO many ways. I am currenty engaged in the course Opennetworked Learning and I will next term be responsible for the topic of openness within this course. This have made me think further about what openness is for me, and also why I think it is important.

As you may see openness means a lot to me. It is also connected to democracy for me. Salman Khan has made a great contribution to democratize education by Khan Academy. And other MOOCs and their platforms has done the same. The Open University is another great example and also Universities creating platforms to share their material and resources.

Because of these possibilities described above I also think that openness is connected to sustainable development. Why? We live in an situation where we HAVE to transform, and it’s urgent. So the only possibility to solve this is to really work together. And how can we work together if not by being open? This create ways to find each other, but also to build upon each other’s solutions. And as it is so urgent, I think we also can speed up the process by working together.
…If we share our ideas and possibilities we can more quickly adapt as a society.

Yes, this was some thoughts about openness and how this may save the world. Please let me know more about your thoughts, so we can save the world together.