Cultivating Open Minds: Unveiling the Power of Education and Democracy

Working with topic 2 has definitely been an eye-opener for me. As I wrote in my previous blog post, I entered this course with quite a bit of confidence and the belief that I had a pretty good grasp of the subject matter. In our group work, we chose to focus on the definition of openness – there were several different definitions depending on the type of educator and the type of institution they worked in. Within the realm of openness, we decided to delve into OER, Open Educational Resources. The biggest takeaway for me from this work is how vital openness in education is for democracy. Here we are in Sweden with our super-fast internet connection and our university education funded by taxpayer money, and we may think that openness isn’t so great for the quality of education or for our brand, or because we can’t control dissemination, or because we might make money by selling our courses, or…

That education is something everyone is entitled to and something we can all help facilitate is a given. I have realized that I need to make more effort in this regard. There is a lot that can be done to open up more at universities. It’s so easy to start from oneself and one’s own circumstances, but if everyone strives for inclusion and accessibility, we will have a much fairer situation.

I was very uninformed about things like Creative Commons before starting topic 2, but with the help of my group members, I now know much more about both the advantages and disadvantages of this. I will definitely delve much deeper into the subject and see what it could mean for me in the future.

Overall, the work in my group and with topic 2 has been very rewarding, and I have learned a lot, both about myself and about openness in education in general.