Openness in education

I can't help wondering if this is about values as well as behaviours. I keep thinking of the agile manifesto which is framed in terms of valuing various things over other things, with the latter  being things that people do in fact value.  

Juliette Culver
3:54pm 16 September 2009

There is an issue of credibility and legitimacy that I would also add. Yes openess is a great thing, but there are various definitions around this relating to pedagogies and spaces....There maybe a lot of things that people value within one discipline or academic tradition in e.g. the US that maybe different those ones in Europe... There's an element of public value too...Yes there are benefits for putting lots of your papers, presentations online in a open access formats, but then how is this going to affect your professional development as an academic seeking tenure within a system that peer recognition is bounded by 'professional' bodies, not necessarily 'buying' this approach?  There are gaps in innovation and adoption and many structures within that field are still hierarchical power structures within academic institutions, esp. for junior academics.

MIT press charges a lot of money for copyrighted material (e.g. book chapters) to be incorporate in local VLEs. Yet there's lots of other material (e.g. the MacArthur chapters on digital media and learning series) that are free. Yes there is an element of public value that was fostered by the MacArthur funding...but still MIT Press continues to promote the message of the authoriative and credible brand. And of course being open access increases impact? But still, would the chapters of relatively junior academics be recieved in the same way if they were not part of an instituional website or an academic publisher?

Again, there are issues about value and impact that are associated with self-promotion too.

Giota Alevizou
6:22pm 16 September 2009

Great timing Martin - am talking about openess in my keynote today in Salerno, Italy - will add this a link to this cloud in the cloud I have set up for the session which is at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2295

Gráinne Conole
8:01am 17 September 2009