I’m at #oer13 today and tomorrow and I’ve been doing a bit of live-blogging and monitoring Twitter activity. A pretty interesting resource just cam around on Twitter and I thought I should share it here for the benefit of the rest of the team…
To defend, sustain, develop Open Education, we need more negativity. Where are the critiques? zotero.org/groups/151255/ #OER13
— Joss Winn (@josswinn) March 26, 2013
The link takes you through to a Zotero library of papers which are critical of open education. I haven’t had time to look through them, but it looks like a pretty good place to start thinking critically. I’ve been aware of the ways in which the OER movement is characterised by advocacy and passion ever since I worked on OLnet and started to attend these kinds of events. But sometimes it can be hard to hear truly critical voices because they often aren’t part of the same conversation.
We need to understand the strength of such critiques so that we can engage, formulate responses as well as ascertain when they have validity. This is not the same as understanding the challenges for open education, which assumes that openness is a good thing. This kind of thing is often divisive, but many on the conservative side of the argument overlook the fact that our education systems are changing so radically.
Leave a Reply