Open Education: Precursors

=Defining Open Education= Open Education: "forms of education in which knowledge, ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared freely over the internet." (Wikipedia Entry for Open Education)

This definition indicates that there are three essential components to Open Education:
 * 1) teaching and learning (educational) processes
 * 2) technology and technological infrastructure
 * 3) open or free access to these processes

The Venn diagram, right, shows how these three components interrelated. Conceptually, Open Education is located in the green triangle at the centre of the diagram, where the three circles overlap.

Open Education is a term that has recently gained currency, and whose meaning is changing along with the contexts of its use.

Open education echoes other open endeavors:
 * Open Source Software
 * Open Access (Publishing; e.g., see an overview by Peter Surber)
 * Open Educational Resources (e.g., see OECD Report

Open Education is also associated with a number of organizations, declarations, and documents; e.g:
 * The Centre for Open and Sustainable Learning
 * Cape Town Open Education Declaration
 * Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

=Historical & Conceptual Background of Open Education=

There are few documents discussing the background and the precursors of Open Education. The few that do exist only go back as far as the development of open source software. E.g.:


 * Raymonds (1997) Cathedral and Bazaar as historical and conceptual background OER Handbook for Educators
 * Brief Background History of Open Education

Each of the precursors discussed below makes an important contribution to "Open Education," specifically on progressive, political grounds:


 * 1) Antionio Gramsci: asserts that teaching and learning (educational) processes are politically necessary --and necessarily political
 * 2) Walter Benjamin: sees new media technologies as presenting new educational potential
 * 3) Paulo Friere: describes open or free access to education as a practice both politically motivated and technologically-mediated
 * 4) Popular Education: combines openness with political motivation in actual institutions that exist in France, Scandinavia and elsewhere.

=Antonio Gramsci=

Overview
 * Italy (1891 – 1937)
 * Founding member of Communist Party in Italy
 * Imprisoned by Mussolini; most famous writings from prison (notebooks)
 * Provides the basis for open education as politically necessary and necessarily political
 * Keywords:
 * Ideology; Hegemony
 * Organic Intellectuals

Culture: “exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects” (Gramsci, 1985, 23) Hegemony & Ideology: "shared ideas or beliefs which serve to justify the interests of dominant groups"  (A. Giddens 1997) "spontaneous consent" of the populace through intellectual leadership or authority

Everyone: "carries on some form of intellectual activity participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought"

Importance for Open Education:
 * knowledge is a tool for oppression and emancipation
 * everyone is (potentially) an intellecual, an participant in knowledge
 * education and knowledge are about changing the world

=Walter Benjamin=



Overview
 * Germany (1892-1940)
 * associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory
 * sociological & cultural critic
 * Most famous essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”

Summary of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
 * Mechanical reproduction of art means that its “aura” “withers:” “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”
 * This is not bad, but good: "For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.“
 * Sees new forms in film of the late 1920’s and 1930’s as illustrative of this emancipation from ritual and heritage (e.g., Bunuel, Riefenstahl - see media, below)
 * This kind of art is “received” in a state of “distraction”
 * Benjamin sees this distracted reception as enabling a the “convergence of educational value and consumer value in a new kind of learning” (Eiland, 2005)
 * “The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art [means that] new tasks have become soluble by apperception.” (W. Benjamin)

Importance for Open Education:
 * Aesthetic characteristics of new technical media can present both potential and challenges for learning
 * This is politically relevant; not as direct emancipation from earlier constraints and limitations, but through the development of new modes of “reception;” new sensibilities
 * Technology as cultural in its educational significance

Debate: Paulo Freire vs. Seymour Papert on computer technology and the future of the school
Educational technologist Seymour Papert and Paolo Freire participated in this discussion or debate in São Paulo, Brazil during the late 1980s. It is titled "The Future of the School: the	impact of new media on the model of school today" (O Futuro da escola: impacto dos novos meios de comunicacao no modelo de escola atual). It was sponsored by Pontifícia Universidade Católica, the Catholic University of São Paulo; and the Afternoon Journal TV show. It was broadcast in Brazil by TV PUC São Paulo and KTV Solucoes. It is available in four parts:
 * a complete English transcript of the interview is available at papert.org
 * all four parts can be downloaded at the Brazil-based Biblioteca Digital Paulo Friere

The transcript below is a portion of the interview, spanning parts one and two of the video (a slightly extended version is available from Google video). It captures Freire's response to a central point in Papert's thought that is still controversial today: the idea that computer technology and media will spell the "end of the school."

Papert's argument is explicit and can be summarized as:
 * the end of school is not a proposal or a suggestion, it is inevitable
 * it is inevitable because of the humans are "born to learn" (as revealed by Jean Piaget's and Papert's own understandings of 3 or more developmental stages)
 * the end of school it is inevitable because of computer technology can act as a tool for enabling natural, exploratory learning
 * students will no longer need the organization of school to learn; they will do so spontaneously with computers

Freire's argument is more implicit and can be interpreted as:
 * no social change is inevitable; it occurs through human labour and struggle
 * technology is important to education not so much as a tool, but as an example that is ontological (in terms of its being; the way that it is):
 * it embodies a "technological truth of the world" that is to be overcome
 * it shows how we can shape the world and ourselves, pointing to "a new being [that can be] as actual as technology itself"
 * Freire also speaks of schooling later in this debate as follows: "My problem is the following: How do we do the essential transition from the common knowledge and common sense to the more methodically rigorous knowledge of the sciences without the proper organization provided by an entity specialized in this matter?"


 * See "The Schools of the Future" (Sawyer, 2006) and "After How Comes What" (Papert, 2006), to see how the issues raised in this debate have retained their relevance up to the present time (both are chapters from The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences).

=Popular Education= Popular education may be defined as an educational technique designed to raise the consciousness of its participants and allow them to become more aware of how an individual's personal experiences are connected to larger societal problems. Participants are empowered to act to effect change on the problems that affect them. (This definition and the first three points provided below are from Wikipedia)


 * The Vincennes University (today located in Saint-Denis) was first a "Experimental University Center," with an interest in reshaping relations between students and teachers.
 * the courses were focused on Freudo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, cinema, theater, urbanism or artificial intelligence.
 * Vincennes had no amphitheatres, representatives of the mandarin (teaching class) facing and dominating by his position several hundreds students ...taking notes. It also enforced a strict equality between professors and teaching assistants.
 * to get an impression of the relations between students, student radicals and professors, see this film clip of Lacan giving a presentation (unfortunately not at the Vincennes, but from a guest lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain).

=Lessons from the Past=