Opening Education Beyond the Property Relation: From Commons to Communism
A paper for the Open Education 2010 conference. Comments and criticism are encouraged. Thank you.
Introduction
The opening of education beyond the property relation is distinguished by two terms that are often used interchangeably, yet retain subtle differences: Open Education and Open Educational Resources.
Open Education refers to recent efforts by individuals and organisations across the world to use the Internet to share knowledge, ideas, teaching practices, infrastructure, tools and resources, inside and outside formal educational settings. Through collaboration and experimentation, new pedagogies and curricula are emerging. Although the term Open Education has been used since the 1960s, the current dominant use of the term refers to co-ordinated efforts during the past decade to exploit the growing availability of personal computers and increasingly ubiquitous high speed networks.
Open Educational Resources (OER) refers to both the worldwide community effort to create an educational commons and the actual “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute” (Wikipedia). Typically, those resources are made available under a Creative Commons license and include both learning resources and tools by which those resources are created, managed and disseminated. As both a means of protecting and liberating research, teaching and learning materials, OER relies heavily on the use of open licenses, all of which are in one way or another derived from the General Public License (GPL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licenses first created in 1989. Since the 1990s, software has been created and distributed using such licenses and it is widely acknowledged that Creative Commons was inspired by, and drew experience from, the use of open licenses in the world of software.
In just ten years, a relatively small number of educators have created a discernible movement that has attracted millions of pounds from philanthropic and state funding. This movement, growing out of hundreds of universities, colleges, schools and other organisations, has produced tens of thousands of educational resources, often entire course materials, that can be accessed by anyone with access to the Internet. Today, there are international consortia, conferences, NGOs and government reports that promote the opening up of education, to which Open Education and OERs are central.
Open Education is a pragmatic response by educators and researchers to the growth of the Internet, using a widespread technology to undertake what its advocates see as both a public good and to exploit an opportunity to effect educational reform. The question remains open as to whether Open Education and OER constitute a revolution in teaching and learning, as their proponents claim (Cape Town Open Education Declaration).
OpenEd 2010 conference paper accepted
Opening Education beyond the property relation: from commons to communism.
We contend that Marx’s mature theory against capitalist work provides the substantial intellectual basis on which to theorise Open Education as a revolutionary practice.
