This post is a continuation of yesterday’s In the Open (Part 1).
The second part of the In the Open workshop was a group task in which we were asked to consider the characteristics of “closed” learning. We each added our own examples of closed learning resources or closed learning environments to our group Miro board and arranged them according to their shared attributes. We then discussed potential ways of redesigning, modifying or codifying those closed resources or environments in order to make them more “open”. This exercise raised a number of interesting issues, for example:
- paywall-protected academic journals like JSTOR were offered as a “closed” educational resource which could be made more “open” by reducing or removing the paywall, however this may cause a problem for those academics, publishers and websites that rely on that income in order to do their work
- resources published in only one language are de facto “closed” to anyone who cannot read or understand that language; one solution to this problem would be to standardize the translation of resources into multiple languages, however achieving this at scale would involve the coordination and employment of a huge number of skilled translators
- we also discussed the possibility of making all “closed” university resources into “open” educational resources or OER’s (much like our Contemporary Art and Open Learning course), though we agreed that not all courses materials would be easily translatable into a digital format, and that some courses (for example cooking or woodworking) are much more reliant on the direct (or in-person) communication of tacit knowledge
