I was just listening to an online presentation by Carlos Santos and Luis Pedro from the SapoCampus project in Portugal and they linked to this post about chmod777 education. They are arguing for the core principles of openness, collaboration, participation, and sharing in education – effectively that the walls of your classroom should be torn down and anyone who shares a common interest should be allowed to share resources and join in the conversation. Of course that also means that you can join in other classes. Here’s a presentation that they gave at Salford earlier this year.
So what do you think? Physical classroooms have only so many seats but virtual classrooms have fewer limits
Do you prefer the walled garden of Blackboard? or the semi-open spaces of SiSpace?
Would you benefit more from sticking in your groups at Salford? or do you long to go off an explore the connected web of people and resources?
I’d love to hear your views.
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francesbell
Hi Frances.
Thanks for the reference. I would like to join the discussion
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So following chmod 777 education let me just rm education
flippant, yes, but with open ‘education’ comes the risk of open ‘ignorance’. If education is open, it as no framework, no structure, and no quality assurance. Students choose open resorces to learn from could equally choose inacurate, misleading, or out of date information and be none the wiser about their mistake.
There can be a place for open education I’m sure, but chmod 777 implies making it completely open, owned by anyone and everyone regardless of their competance or trustworthyness….so very soon, someone will rm education.
Thanks for the comments and retweets. I posted this in the hope it might evoke some comments from students, positive and negative about the openness of our SiSpace environment and was deliberately vague about my own views.
In a post on my other blog, I talk how qualities such as openness should not be absolutes
“With openness of dialogue and resources, I am inclined to paraphrase Einstein’s maxim on simplicity “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” Hence we can make things as open as possible but without surrendering the expressed desire for privacy of the individual.”
http://francesbell.com/2009/11/23/what-is-that-groups-and-networks-argument-all-about/
I think that there is a lot of room for discussion on openness, the first thing being what we mean by openness