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Let me start by stating that “open” is a term that is now essentially meaningless. Apparently Twitter is open. So is Blackboard. And Facebook.

Richard Stallman has been somewhat replaced by, or even written out of, the open source movement. Stallman was (and still is) an uncompromising radical. Or at least that is how the well established proprietary software field sees him. The open source movement developed in response to what others perceived as Stallman’s unpalatable views for mainstreaming openness.

(If you’re interested, I explored this in a bit more detail in Free and Open Source Movements, part 1 and part 2 (somewhat related: Why we should share learning resources).)

But we first need a Stallman in open education before we can even begin to marginalize him. We need an idealist that sets the stage for thinking and debate around openness.

By not criticizing gradient views of openness, by failing to establish a solid foundation on which to discuss openness, we are providing an ideology for our generation, not one that serves as a future-focused movement. Openness is a hard topic to discuss ideologically because it’s important. Yes, pragmatics are easier. But pragmatics have a short life span.

Openness is an ideology along the lines of democracy. It is worthy of theoretical discussion. And various modes of implementation should be subject to debate and criticism.

Just like the “green movement”. I’m sick of commercials with new cars driving through lush forests, suggesting that if only I buy their vehicle the world will be greener. Green is treated as a utility to sell vehicles. For many companies in the educational field, open is the new green: use it to sell your product.

When it was necessary for education to be performed face to face, a number of services were bundled together. When it becomes digital and online, this may no longer be the case, as we have seen in most content industries, such as music and newspapers (education has some similarities with content and also some significant differences). The first round of learning tools replicated the centralised model, but as the tools have become easier to use, and the methods for integrating them simpler, so this centralised approach seems less applicable. Clay Shirky (2008) argues that the ‘cost’ of organising people has collapsed, which makes informal groupings more likely to occur and often more successful:"By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort"Part of the function of universities is to provide this organisation, for example by grouping individuals together to form a student cohort who are interested in the same subject. But as this grouping becomes easier to do online, it becomes less of a valued function of the university - ie you don’t need to go to a university to find like minded people. Education then faces the same challenges regarding the cost of organisation that, say, the Encyclopedia Brittanica faced from wikipedia. Returning to the theme of this paper, Shirky’s argument can also be applied to technology, namely that the ‘cost’ of integrating technology has drastically reduced, meaning it is now feasible for individuals to do this, thus alleviating the need for centrally provided pre-integrated solutions. For example, we could reword the above quote to read:By making it easier for tools to (self) assemble and for applications to contribute to the environment without requiring integration, these approaches have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of any individual to create their own environmentProjects such as SocialLearn, illustrate that the conceptualisation of a learning environment goes beyond technical, or even pedagogical considerations. In a digital society it comes to represent the institutional response to changes in the nature of knowledge creation, sharing, and participation, in short to the nature of education itself. Shirky argues that ‘when we change the way we communicate, we change society’, and the new socially based technologies we have today are doing this in fundamental ways. It is only by exploring their potential that universities can remain relevant to the society they are helping to shape.