For whom, for what? Not-yetness and challenging the

“stuff” of open educationAmy Collier | Jen Ross

Middlebury College | University of Edinburgh

#notyetness

Promises of efficiency and simplicity come at a cost. How can we resist the ‘politics of complexity reduction’?

https://pixabay.com/en/minimalism-simplicity-detail-white-94803/

value

labor

diversity

pedagogy

power relations

academic freedom

authority & authorship

critical perspectives on openness

technologically mediated ‘openness’ is

consistently associated with democratic,

inclusive and radical ideals…. Meanwhile other

educational possibilities are positioned as

conservative, exclusionary or controlling of

learners or knowledge…. The risk with such

polarised accounts is that education is

inevitably bad, because it is and can only ever

be ‘closed’. Arguably, whilst such a position may

work as an ideology, it does not provide the

nuance or discrimination that is needed

analytically or practically to engage with

education in a constructive way.

(Oliver 2015, pp.366-7)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremybrooks/3450585089

The effectiveness of OER is frequently articulated in

terms of the ability to ‘reduce the costs associated

with reproducing and maintaining online courses’ ...

this emphasis on replication appears to suggest the

need for uniformity, where a homogeneous

population of learners benefit from identical

resources. (Knox 2013, p.829)

do [OERs] reproduce historically asymmetric power

relations? (Olakulehin & Singh 2013, p.33)

openness is not the opposite of closed-ness, nor

is there simply a continuum between the two. ...

all forms of openness entail forms of closed-

ness.

...An important question therefore becomes not

simply whether education is more or less open,

but what forms of openness are worthwhile

and for whom; openness alone is not an

educational virtue. (Edwards 2015, p.255)

openness alone is not an educational virtue.

(Edwards 2015, p.255)

Not-yetness and open education

not yet fully understood

not yet fully researched in a meaningful way

veletsianos, 2012

Lego army by Flickr user Mark Levin, reused with permission of CC-BY 2.0 license

not-yetness emerged as a

response to a dominant

discourse of technology in

education that has been

characterised by rhetoric of

control, efficiency and

enhancement, underplaying

more ‘disruptive, disturbing

and generative dimensions’

(Bayne, 2014, p.3)

"Mexico/US Pacific Ocean border fence" by Tony Webster. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.

“Borders are set up to define the spaces that

are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from

them...A borderland is a vague undetermined

place created by the residue of an unnatural

boundary.”

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera

"Playground at Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park" by Stephen Oung from Lübeck, Germany. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.

diversity and context

emergence and open-endedness

authority and authorship

risk-taking and encounters

what space is there for distinctiveness, diversity, open-endedness?

how much uncertainty can this approach to openness accommodate?

what closures come along with this? what is in the borderlands?