Open Education 2015

David Wiley's calls to "stop saying high quality" at the expense of talking about learning shed light on core issues facing OERs and open education. Focusing on the "stuff" of open education can obscure crucial questions: for whom, and for what, is the stuff supposed to be? What values and politics inform its creation and content, and what are the gains and losses involved in "black-boxing" these? Biesta (2007) argues that "education is a moral practice, rather than a technical or technological one" (p.10), and it is not immune to "the influences of digitisation, interpretation or cultural understanding" (Knox 2013, p.25). Digital education practitioners and researchers need to take account of how we privilege stuff, and what work that stuff does for and to other understandings of openness.

Futures for open education might fruitfully grapple with other modes of openness which engage students more fully in the process of knowledge creation, rather than the consumption of resources, however openly shared. Can and should we strive to encourage our students to be who MacNeill called "open practitioners," learning how to appropriately participate in an educational ecosystem that may not yet value those practices? These modes of openness are risky, and their outcomes can be uncertain, so we also need a way of approaching them that can take account of this risk: one such approach is what we call not-yetness (Collier and Ross 2015, in press). In this session, we will share examples of alternative modes of openness, and argue that not-yetness provides a critical and inclusive space for broadening views of open education. Rather than focus on "what works" or "what it looks like," not-yetness provides space for "what's possible" and invites educators to embrace the process and provocation of learning.