Cormac’s blog

I was taken by the Wikipedia article on popular education (I had actually never properly read it before), with its mentioning of a number of initiatives, such as Ciph, an open university founded by Jacques Derrida and others, to be explicitly “liberated” from the government or “the university”. I don’t know exactly what “the university” means in this context - my experience of universities is to have a largely independent, and often provocative role within the state structure (even though they are of course dependent on funding), and that individuals within universities are similarly free to pursue their own agendas, as long as they continue to publish articles, and show that their students meet required standards. Yes, there are a lot of constraining features in that model, but I would argue that it is naive to imagine that there will never be any constraining features within a given social context (for example, there will always be inherent issues of power and participation). However, what “the university” is may be being redefined, and it was in this light that I reread Teemu’s paper for Wikimania last year: Wikiversity:Free education and free school? I now want to explore more of these initiatives - for example Summerhill in the UK, or even the Irish hedge schools, set up illegally under British rule. (In fact, it’s very interesting to reflect on the conditions under which various alternative public models of education have evolved.)

So, to the enlightenment, which gave us, amongst other things, the scientific method - to base our theories on empirical observation, and to make transparent the process by which we make these observations and develop these theories. It is transparency which is so vital in research - to be able to see how the research is constructed, in order to enable others to critique it from a particular perspective, or critique a particular part of its methodology. Similarly, I think it is transparency which is so important to the development of such a learning context (or perhaps “meta-university”) as Wikiversity. This is truly “open source education” - making the process explicit, in order to see how learning is constructed, in just the same way as open source code is readable, and modifiable.

In the OER movement, we have set ourselves the challenge of creating multiple and distributed repositories of free content, which people can not only access, but modify, adapt, recontextualise, redistribute. I know it’s too early for this to be an actual problem yet, but I do think that sheer quantity will actually pose a threat to this movement - unless it is made findable and meaningful through processes like social tagging. This is where I think Google scholar’s use of the slogan “stand on the shoulders of giants” is a tad on the arrogant and misleading side - my own personal experience of Google scholar is often to “drown in the grey literature of academic hopefuls” (”grey literature” being typically non-peer reviewed papers). The more we enable wide and meaningful searching of OERs, the more flexibility people will have in taking ‘a bit of this, and a bit of that’ for their own needs. Because, at the end of the day, we cannot simply hand someone a proscribed class to download and print off - everyone learns and teaches in their own particular way.