Open Course 1

Channel:

Stephen Downes

Subscribers:

1,610

Published on September 8, 2017 8:42:07 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPHYAFcUziA

Duration: 5:00

400 views

7

I discuss the importance of openness and the role it plays in knowledge, communication and learning.

Text

George Siemens and David Wiley, congratulations! You’re covering an important subject when you’re covering open content and openness in general in your new MOOC, and I’m glad that your new MOOC is open -yeah, except for certification, but we’ll leave that aside.

It’s an important subject because ‘open’ is an important subject and open is an important subject because without that we literally have no way of communicating with each other.

Openness is what allows us to share our ideas, our discoveries, our hopes and our dreams with each other. Without a language, without a possibility of a medium we can’t find the way to express ourselves, and this involves much more that just the communication of culture and arts.

It involves our growth, our development, our hopes and dreams, our families, our parents, our children, indeed all aspects that make up life, because what makes up life is our interactions with ourselves and our world around us. And what makes these interactions is communication and communication is impossible without openness.

Now I know you are talking specifically about openness in education, and you’re going to cover things like open content, well I’m sure David will, open courses, right George, maybe even open pedagogy, open teaching, and open practices. Looking forward to some discussion there.

I think that education benefits in all manner of ways from openness. There’s this old fashioned belief that education is somehow closed, proprietary, that knowledge is power and the hording of knowledge is how you accumulate power and influence but I don’t think that’s the case.

My own experience has been that through the sharing of resources, through the sharing of knowledge and capacities and insights, my own influence and that of those that I work with and those around me increases (ah, I just knocked a cup to the floor, because ah, you know, it’s an informal video and I started gesturing. Gestures are openness. Gestures are ways of indicating openness).

So, I’ve talked a lot over the years how learning is a network phenomenon, George has heard a no end of that. And I’ve talked about how success in learning is based on success in networks, and we’ve discussed what makes these networks successful over time.

I’ve included autonomy as one of the major virtues, and diversity of course is one of the major virtues of networks, and we’ll have some discussions about that as well.

But openness as well is one of the major virtues of networks. If you think about it in order for knowledge to be developed in a network, a person, in a classroom, in a society: That network needs to be able to shape and grow, to strengthen connections and weaken others.

That is not possible without input. It is not possible without feedback. It’s not possible without openness. Without openness the individual members of the network have no way of communicating with each other, have no mechanism for developing new thoughts, new ideas.

So that’s where I’d begin with openness.

I want to add one more comment as I’m near the end of my five minutes. Openness is not about rights, and I might disagree with David on this, but to me openness has always been about access.

Openness is about the possibilities of communicating with other people, being communicated to from other people and being a part of that social network.

It isn’t about stuff. It’s about what you do with stuff – it’s about what you do with each other. Thanks a lot! Have a good course George and Dave.


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