It is a bit delayed but I wanted to respond to the week 9 discussion thread which highlighted the impact of the digital divide on the ‘openness’ of education.
https://www.moodle.is.ed.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=21126
The aims of open education which were nicely outlined by Edwards are indeed worthy goals;
“Extensive positive claims are made for extending the openness of educational opportunities, including their capacity to overcome barriers to access to education, and to provide opportunities for people distributed by geography and income to become connected to learning.” (Edwards 2015)
He goes onto explain that the provision of electricity and bandwidth are an integral part of these educational endeavours. If simply reading this was not enough to enlighten me, nature blessed me with a submersive learning experience. Cyclones in Mozambique took out power supply lines that feed Eskom (our government (mis)managed electricity provider). And so it was that we began a week of rolling blackouts, our neighbourhood was without electricity from 04:00-06:30, 12:00-14:30 and 20:00-22:30 everyday. No electricity meant no wifi and as the week wore on, no mobile data either because the cell phone tower batteries were unable to charge sufficiently in between power outages.
Whilst it was a deeply frustrating experience for me trying to work on my assignment on a google doc that would not allow me to work offline (administrator issues) I found a way to get things done. Resourcefulness is the South African way, in fact there is an often quoted Afrikaans expression ‘boer maak a plan’ – a farmer makes a plan.
There are varied challenges to claims inherent in the label ‘open’ education. Edwards problematises the ‘selectiveness and exclusions inherent in all curricula and pedagogic approaches’ and the exclusions that result from the implementation of ‘inscrutable’ digital technologies to deliver ‘open’ education.(Edwards 2015) The digital divide is yet another challenge to the meaning of ‘openness’ in education. For me it illustrates the limitations of negative liberty in the open education space (Knox 2013). ‘Open’ education breaks down certain barriers to education; geographical, institutional and (some) financial; the removal of those obstructions are designed to promote the free will of the student. However at the same time ‘open’ education is closed to those who can’t access it, those without the economic and infrastructural means and the prerequisite knowledge and skills.
The critical appraisal of ‘openness’ in education is, to me, reminiscent of the question of what is means to live in a ‘democratic’ South Africa. It is absolutely necessary to interrogate the claims inherent in the use of those labels, which does not equate to questioning the value of openness or democracy for that matter. The primary school teacher in me loves to use concrete examples and what follows illustrates how negative liberties alone fail to democratise South Africa just as they fail to fully ‘open’ education.
Apartheid laws of the past, racially segregated every strata of South African society. People of colour were forcibly removed from cities and towns, they were housed in townships far from economic centres, were given a limited education and were denied access to certain jobs. Racial divides were entrenched by laws that denied interracial marriages and laws that afforded citizens rights on a sliding scale depending on the racial group to which they belonged.
The first democratic elections in 1994 brought an end to Aparthied laws and ‘opened’ South Africa to all of her citizens. Living in post-Apartheid South Africa it is ‘common sense’ to interrogate the notion of democracy, one only needs to spend time here to see that segregation still exists as an economic and cultural legacy of Apartheid.
Cape Town has many beautiful beaches which under apartheid laws were racially segregated. The pristine beaches of the Atlantic Seaboard were restricted to whites only. When the legal barriers to access were removed, the legacy of the economic and cultural divisions of aparthied imposed other less explicit barriers. The majority of people of colour, displaced during Apartheid, live far from the city’s beaches and rely on public transport which is prohibitively expensive. By law the beaches are open to all, but in reality the previously ‘whites only’ beaches are still frequented predominantly by white people. (Rogerson 2017)
Perhaps the negative liberties of ‘open’ education are similar to the negative liberties in a ‘democratic’ South Africa. They hold the promise of equality, they may even alleviate the guilt of privilege but in reality don’t do enough to change the status quo.
