Scholars can no longer seek refuge in an ivory tower.
Today, to mark Open Education week, I began looking at the readings for the Open University’s h817 Open Education course .
I started with an article by Martin Weller entitled ‘The openness-creativity cycle in education’ and published in the Journal of Interactive Media Education (JiME).
In this paper, Weller notes that the concept of openness in education is now taken for granted and that few talk in terms of resources being ‘closed’ or limited solely to an elite (paying) group of users.
He quotes from Gideon Burton’s article on the ‘Open Scholar’ : “In the digital age, the traditional barriers to accessing scholars and scholarships are unnecessary, but persist for institutional reasons”.
This begs the question as to how long these institutionalised barriers can resist to pressure from the digital networks in which Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming the norm.
With sharing being the default position the million dollar question as to how this actually improves the learning process. Continue reading
