More Open Education 2009 Fallout

Open Education 2009 must have had quite an edge to it this year if the reactions of George Siemens and David Wiley are any indication.

In The Tension Between Reform and a New Start, I commented on two posts that George Siemens wrote about higher educational change. Each post seems precipitated in part by his experience at the conference. And now David Wiley has written Feeling Out of Place on the same important theme. He says:

[T]here is an increasingly radical element within the field [of open education] – good old-fashioned guillotine and molotov type revolutionaries. … This “burn it all down” attitude really scares me.

I didn’t attend the conference, so I have no first-hand experience with what was or was not said and how it might be interpreted. So my comments here will be a personal reflection on the tension between reform and a new start. Maybe it will just add fuel to a fire, but I hope not.

Destruction of social institutions for the sake of destruction is stupid. It may provide temporary relief from actual injustices but it inflicts major hurt on innocent people. So I have no tolerance for a “burn it all down” approach to educational change.

Which is not to say that I have no tolerance for radical ideas or people. There is ample latitude for differing opinions and strategies. Sometimes people who see the world most differently can provide the greatest insight. Other times they’re just kooks. It can be difficult to distinguish the two.

Wiley asks: “What is our collective purpose [in open education]?” His answer: “I believe it is to increase access to educational opportunity.” He later modified that answer in this statement:

Increasing access to educational opportunity is the reason I chose the path of openness and launched the idea of open content upon the world. But that goal is my own, and I shouldn’t and don’t expect others to accept it as their own.

I like the ecumenical tone here, but we actually do have a core purpose don’t we? Don’t all the spokes trace back to learning?

The core is definitely not open content or openness or open education or open anything. At this point openness is just a proposition. Maybe it will work; maybe it won’t.  For example, you could probably make a very strong case that neither teachers or learners want to be bothered by remixing and reusing open content. There’s not enough time in their days to deal with ideologies. They want solutions to problems, not more complications in overly complicated lives.

Nor is the core about educational opportunity, access, or affordability.

Pardon me for taking a less tolerant position than Wiley. There is a core. It’s learning.

For me higher educational change starts and ends with learning. And I don’t mind one bit trying to influence other people to see things the same way.