“The deceptively simple term open hides a great deal of complexity, much of which depends on the particular context within which open practice is considered. Thus it is imperative to move beyond open-versus-closed dichotomies and even beyond unified conceptions of openness. Openness requires a critical approach” (Cronin 2017, emphasis added).
This quote is rather useful to summarise this week devoted to discussing openness in education and learning. In particular, although quite obvious, the “complexity” of the topic has been like a refrain on all occasions (during the PBL meetings as well as during the webinar with Maha Bali). It is a technical, technological, organizational, institutional, social, cultural complexity or, in a word, it is an "infrastructural" complexity. At least this is how I would call it, by drawing on my area of expertise.
It is not "infrastructural" in a purely technical/technological meaning. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leight Star (1999), in their book Sorting things out, propose to use this term – infrastructure - for describing a set of interrelated social, organizational, and technical/technological components. I see here the possibility to apply the term to open education and learning to describe the above-mentioned complexity that is not exclusively related to the tools or platforms that are used but rather it is a complexity related to them in interconnection with an ecology of various “actors” that, all together, concur to generate what we broadly call “open education”. Still, it doesn’t mean that – by saying this – I’ve unpacked the complexity but it is rather a way for me to approach that complexity and know how to deal with it by acknowledging the multiplicity in it.
Like all infrastructures, also the one linked to open education lives through practices (of designing, using, interacting, etc…) that contribute to innovating/maintaining/reproducing it - including its bias and flaws. Here, I think that the webinar with Maha Bali was key to reminding us that just because we are using the qualifier "open", we are not talking about something necessarily good. Instead, what Maha Bali brought to the forum was attention to the relationship between open education/learning and a social justice perspective.
Back to the concept of infra-structure, a social justice perspective pushes us to interrogate what falls in between, “infra” the different layers of the “structure”, what is put at the margins; similarly, the ecological approach - in its ethical root - invites to look at the infrastructure overall from a “marginal” perspective to see what is deemed to matter but also, if not above all, what risks to be overlooked and left aside.
A lot to think about here … and I’ll keep thinking. For now, I’m trying to apply my analytical lens to translate the topic into my own language.
References
Cronin, C. (2017). Open Education, Open Questions. EDUCAUSE Review 52, no. 6 (November/December 2017)
Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MA and London, The MIT Press.
Photo credit Pan Yumbo (https://unsplash.com/photos/EgL0EtzL0Wc)