Category Archives: Political Economy

Higher Ambitions for whom?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2009

Having just listened to David Lammy’s interview about the new HE Framework, Higher Ambitions, set out by Lord Mandelson yesterday I’m left wondering how I feel, given that I work in a teaching-focused, research active, employer-engaged HEI that is mid-table, but where the focus is on enhancing learning, empowering teaching and framing social and economic opportunities for all. I felt happier when musing on the revised HEFCE strategic plan back in June but then the impact of the economic crisis on the public sector was possibly less well understood. Now I’m more anxious about the impact of those cuts on the visions and blueprints of our HEIs.

Lammy’s interview with the JISC mentioned “vision” for HE, but was very strong on “public sector cuts” and the impact on the public sector as a whole. “Scarcity” was closely tied to a prioritisation of STEM research, scientific research, a need for private investment, and the demand to demonstrate “effectiveness”. Lammy was clear that “a diverse set of funding streams is important if the quality of higher education is to be maintained and improved” as the public funding climate worsens.

Sadly, this focus on the private, on the scientific and on research doesn’t quite connect into the Edgeless University report that Lammy launched back in the summer. In particular, that report focused on affiliations between HEIs and the private, public and voluntary sectors that in-turn might open-up spaces for conversations around social enterprise. These types of affiliations beyond the private sector are missing from the rhetoric around Higher Ambitions, and in the swell of an apparent Governmental, economic agenda [ideology?] for HE.

Lammy focused upon student [not learners – see below] as consumers of information about Universities and programmes, but this demands that they, and other end-users, are able to “read” that information in context. The very real risk is that the consumer-model elides into all institutional services like technology-enhanced learning, without a proper appreciation of what this means for both the offer and actuality of what students get? Would a systems-based approach that focused on the human be more valid and reliable in socio-economic growth than one that is targets-based?

Mary Beard in the TimesOnline highlighted some of the problems with the fact that “The model for this is apparently the new ‘food-labelling system’” She notes the tension between prioritising information about contact hours that suggests a specific pedagogic approach, and the role of independent learning and thinking in HE, which may realise many different and co-existing approaches. Moreover, learners need to transition into and understand these learning cultures over time.

Whilst Lammy does argue that the “challenge… is to develop pedagogy” he doesn’t develop this and nor does the Framework document, so I am left wondering how it then connects into the raft of recent reports and policies. These include: DEMOS Edgeless University Report; Digital Britain; the JISC Report: Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age; the Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies; and the Revised HEFCE Strategy. How and where do these all converge? How is any of this joined up? I guess the answer is at University-level, and maybe the key is a clear, autonomous and grounded vision within HEIs. In that case surely support and academic staff are central? Yet they are the main HE stakeholder missing throughout the reports of the last 24 hours and beyond. Overcoming their neglect is critical.

Lammy prioritises the challenge “to lead in the marketplace, to grow what has begun with the Open University and extend that out there to the world”. Note the mention again of the Open University – he focused on this at the Edgeless University launch, and as he mentioned his work with Microsoft in Seattle I also note that Martin Bean, the VC of the OU is a former Microsoft employee. With the cloud, outsourcing, big business and efficiencies being front-and-centre in HE TEL discourses, this is important.

So the focus is international; it is private and not social enterprise; it is on employers being “more involved in course design and funding of the degrees they want”. Mandelson reiterated a focus on linking science to research in his statement to the Lords: “We have a disproportionate share of the world’s leading research universities. With just 1 per cent of the world’s population, we achieve 12 per cent of the world’s scientific citations.” For others in the sector the key apparently is on training rather than education: “The challenge for the next decade is to offer a wider range of new study opportunities – part-time, work-based, foundation degrees and studying whilst at home – to a greater range of people.”

Whilst Mandelson focused primarily on his perception of the elite universities, it seems apparent that all HEIs are to be asked to help bail out the economy, whilst as Mary Beard notes facing a “bottom line in all this [that] is budget cutting.” Mandelson’s duality of an elite focus and public sector cut is seen throughout: “public expenditure inevitably more constrained. Attracting the best students and researchers will become more competitive. Above all it will be a decade when our top priority is to restore economic growth and our universities need to make an even stronger contribution to this goal” [my emphasis].

So what of social inclusion? What of social enterprise? What of new social and economic ideas rather than restoring those that have failed? Some essence of this shows up in Mandelson’s speech to the Lords as his 5th and last objective: “Universities provide employment, enhance cultural life and offer many amenities to their surrounding communities. They shape and communicate our shared values, including tolerance, freedom of expression and civic engagement. We will support universities in safeguarding these values.”

The only time that the terms “learn” or “learning” or “learner” were mentioned was in terms of “e-learning”. The mentions of “students” was generally [although not in every case] in an economic or consumer-related context. The wordle cloud of Mandelson’s oral statement to the Lords demonstrates his focus: Learning and teaching and teachers are noticeably small or missing. In the word-cloud of the full paper research, students, skills, business, education, funding, skills, Government are my stand-out terms.

So what of technology-enhanced learning? Lammy argued that digital technologies are vital, and then framed that by mention of the cloud, empowering communities and giving global scope. But that was it. The clear focus was on the economy, scarcity and value-for-money. What this means for the provision of institutional resources for technologies, for TEL teams, for pedagogic development, for moving beyond transmissive pedagogies needs addressing. So does the impact of energy costs that are likely to rise and our commitment to green ICT. This work has to be done locally, within HEIs and with partners, but also within the EdTech community.

The full Framework paper mentions “e-learning” four times. On p. 20 it argues that “We will empower our universities to be world leaders in the growing market in transnational education based on e-learning” and the link is to the private sector, “Through HEFCE, we will be prepared to provide seedcorn funding on a competitive basis for university-private sector partnerships”, that may include “The potential to develop international education through partnerships with broadcasters and internet service providers”. Is this for content? For communication? What of pedagogy? What of services that surround learning and teaching? What of work with voluntary organisations or the public sector? Where will the power lie?

On p. 80, “Continuing to strengthen the UK’s reputation as one of the world’s best providers of e-learning, both for those who study here and students based outside the UK” is seen to be a priority. This is picked up on p. 92 in “The continuing development of e-learning is a vital element in supporting improvement of teaching and the student experience and in enabling the personalisation and flexibility that students and employers expect.” So again we see a focus on the global and the private sector, with a limited mention of public sector and none of social enterprise.

On p. 100, Recommendation 31 is that “The Government, working with the Higher Education Funding Council for England, should prioritise investment in e-learning infrastructure to extend the possibilities of remote and online learning.” So I’m left wondering, as someone who works in a teaching-focused, research active, employer-engaged HEI that is mid-table, where the focus is here on enhancing learning, empowering teaching and framing social and economic opportunities for all. Perhaps this is a time for clear leadership within the EdTech community, within institutions, and within communities.


The political economy of openness in HE: or what is the point of it all?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 April 2010

I’ve been quite taken with the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, the creation and management of open educational resources, and the concomitant lack of a discourse around open governance in HEIs. In particular I am interested in why there is a focus on the mechanics, rather than the ideologies, cultures and political economics, of openness, and whether this is a function of educators colluding in their own coercion.

This notion of colluding in coercion, in acting in ways that either overtly or unquestioningly maintain dominant power and economic relationships, exists at several levels: the individual, the discipline, the institution and the sector. One example of such collusion was been picked-up by Joss Winn, who highlighted the place of parallelism through which higher education and its programmes of work set agendas that mirror dominant economic models:

“we collude in our own oppression… [even suggesting that] new autonomous spaces needed to be created apart from the agenda of neo-liberal education… [our] parallelism would still serve the interests of the State by removing the responsibility of funding ‘uneconomic’ subjects. In effect, parallelism would act as a form of efficiency under the neo-liberal agenda.”

Economically inefficient courses or items of content or ways of working risk being cut by institutional managers, even in programmes of openness, because they are working to or in parallel with the core economic values of the State. In the same way, we fund projects that are aligned with the view of those who are qualitatively dominant – *our* values are set by those with power, rather than by way of deliberation with the quantitative majority.

This issue of power is important because it speaks of values, inclusion and justice, and is amplified by the traction within society that openness, in terms of data and government, is gaining. Clearly for some HEIs this is subjugated within a dominant economic paradigm. However, openness is also emerging throughout the practice of higher education, and in programmes of work around open education, like the JISC OER programme. Catalysing a culture and set of values around openness offers spaces for cultural reinvention, which offer opportunities to re-fashion social relationships. Thus, whilst at the moment, for example, the Humanities OER project Humbox, with its wealth of open resources, overtly demonstrates a focus on staff, peers and disciplines, and tends to paint learners as objects who have content made for them, or made available for them, it offers a valuable space or catalyst for the socio-cultural re-invention of higher education. The issue is whether we have the will to do this re-invention.

Joss Winn makes this point in his call for a manifesto for sharing, when he eloquently argues that “sharing doesn’t need institutionalising”. In quoting a paper by David Noble, which argues that universities are responsible for “the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property”, Joss notes “that by institutionalising OERs, we’re producing constraints that go against sharing. Scaling up the production of OERs to an institutional level where sharing is considered in terms of an IP Policy, business case, marketing and ‘best practice’ will kill the potential that already exists to share.” Moreover Joss argues that this is alienating precisely because “[it] is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour.” We collude because we legitimise the role of the institution or the discipline in taking surplus value from our own labour, or that of our students when we co-create.

Debating and fighting for the idea of the University, infused with and by a culture of openness, is vital, and that resistance might usefully be centred on deliberating the social relations that enable learners and tutors to manage disruption, rather than situating OERs within “the adoption of appropriate business models” that may ultimately be alienating. In situating openness as a form of cultural production, a recent EDUCAUSE paper, Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time!, argues that “Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge“. They state that the value produced for students and the control of the mode of production are central elements of a meaningful experience in Universities. The authors quote Charles Vest’s view that “a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms” is central. However, they then focus upon shared course content and connections, rather than negotiated ownership and co-governance.

It is this notion of co-governance that ought to be central to the development of openness and its value in the idea of the twenty-first century University. One proactive example is the Really Open University’s ideologically-driven stance on the need for praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the University as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, lead by students. This aligns with the model for organic intellectual endeavour proposed by Gramsci, in challenging institutional or state-legitimised power and hegemonic ideologies, through an engagement with, and challenging of, values and attitudes. What is required in this view is counter-hegemony, a counter-culture in which we deliberate and re-assert the social, rather than economic, obligations that drive us, and through which we focus upon social rather than economic enterprise.

So, is re-invention of the production of content, by enabling the mechanics of re-use, the key issue? Or rather is it more important to re-think and change the rules of the game? It is clear that established corporate and industrial models dominate the discourses around openness. So we see the Open Data and Open Gov movements colonised by corporates, or those seeking to gain from traditional political economic models, which are generally focused upon re-use of content rather than re-invention of models of power. It is necessary then to fight for the prioritisation of people over organisations or business models, and against the use of open agenda for “online opinion research and consultation”.

More important for me are the legitimation of our social obligations and a move towards the commons, catalysed through acts of sharing and underpinned by a deliberative, shared socio-cultural values or co-governance of the means of production. In an excellent article on Twitter and Copyright Shinen argues that “creators needed incentive to create” and generally Copyright Acts frame this incentivisation financially . But what if incentivisation could be re-shaped as social or cultural, and be defined democratically?

One of the positive outcomes of the angst over the Digital Economy Bill (#debill) might to be a renewing of praxis, framed by shared socio-cultural values, with educators acting as conduits for production and in resistance to the alienation that is enforced through a business model that legitimises domination of production. This would truly align with Raymond Williams’ view of the power of the cultures that are publically defined and fought for, and that enabling social transformation. In the debate on openness we are in danger of losing sight of the interaction between political, economic and cultural forces, and the possibilities that openness can be a site of resistance against established norms that have lead us towards crisis, or which at least seek to oppress.

The ideas both of oppression and control of the value of content and the means of producing and sharing it, can be read into the reaction to the #debill farrago. Mike Butcher noted the telling use of the term “likely to be used” in the Amendment to Clause 8 of the Digital Economy Bill: “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright” will lead to disconnection. The economic model defined by business, rather than one framed by social relations, won out. The language of consumers and industry used by MPs in the Digital Economy Bill, is just the same as the language deployed within HE about the relationships between students and institutions by those in power, which we hope will be socially-constructed but that are increasingly infused with economic determinism.  What hope for co-governance here, especially when the dominant discourse is co-creation or co-production, which risks objectifying students?

In this we should forget the issue of whether access to the internet is a basic human right – this is an incredibly problematic statement and risks diminishing the struggle for true human rights as enshrined in the European Convention and the UN Declaration. However, there is an increasing unease about the possibilities for openness and truly open governance, where societal values clash with those of business, and this stretches beyond #debill. Chris Marsden makes an interesting point around control of the web and net neutrality, arguing that #debill is an affront to that, and when taken with the  recent ruling in favour of Comcast versus the FCC over net neutrality in the US, we might see this as reflecting increasing confrontation over the control of web-based means of production. The Open Rights Group certainly begins to make that case, in arguing for democracy and transparency.

In reclaiming the spaces for openness we might usefully revisit the histories, cultures and values of the Commons. This is important because overcoming disruption and enabling justice lies in shared values, and as Joss Winn argues, we achieve this not through “institutionalising sharing, but by sowing the humanity in sharing; the joy of giving and receiving; the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.” We need to question continually the extent to which we collude in coercion.

One of the drivers for the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, and the creation and management of open educational resources role, should be the socio-cultural praxis around co-governance. This needs to highlight issues of legitmation and alienation, of value and active participation in practical life. We need to move beyond objectifying the student as co-creator or co-producer to celebrating our shared, subjective deliberation of democratic governance. Through such an approach, the idea of the University might come to be re-framed as active, creative, self-aware and socially-constructed. Moreover it might also tap into the joy and passion of mentoring learners, and of developing truly transformative spaces that change lives. Our approach to openness ought to stand against the production of diminished or controlled spaces, impacted by business models and metrics, which in-turn focus instrumental engagements.

In standing against the economic ideology of openness, and in support of our shared, deliberative democratic values, we might consider and add to the manifesto stared by Joss Winn.

  1. A commitment to transformation and solidarity
  2. Learning our own histories and not his-story
  3. Starting from daily reality
  4. Learning together as equals
  5. Getting out of the classroom
  6. Inspiring social change

The momentum being developed around the idea of openness, through resistance to #debill or threats to net neutrality, or the opportunities of OER programmes, offers us sites for resistance and hope. The question is whether we have the energy to deliberate and then fight for our shared values in the idea of the University.


Towards the democratic university: openness and community collections


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 28 May 2010

At the end of a thoughtful piece on the resistance to the closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University, John Protevi, notes that we need to enact “the beginning of the democratic university”. This made me reconsider my blogpost from early April about openness within universities and the nature of the latest technology-enhanced learning project that captures the zeitgeist, open education resources [OERs].

In particular, I am interested in the use of OERs as a means for the legitimation of the production/social value of all actors in the education process, through the ownership of the processes of creation and sharing. This connects into Holloway’s view of the value of “doing” in re-shaping and refining and re-casting the world, and in resisting our alienation from it. He rightfully notes the importance of engaging with issues of power on our place in the world. This matters for OERs in terms of the two forms of power that Holloway writes about: firstly, the power to create, or to do; and, secondly our power over, be that over the productive process or of domination and subjugation, which stifles the power of people to create and act and be. So when we are talking about co-creation or co-production, or the value-for-money of approaches to OERs, we need to see this framed by issues of power, self-concept and legitimation.

These issues were thrown into sharp relief at a recent ANTF symposium, during a session on ‘The Future of Higher Education’. This space enabled senior managers to focus on the recent election and subsequent headline statements about education in the face of proposed cuts. The session highlighted a view that “what we do makes a contribution to the economic strength of other sectors”. It also created a space for the view that HE must “do things differently and stop doing some things”, and that innovation, or doing more with less, was central to HE’s role in 2010. When I hear that “the challenge is demonstrating impact”, I feel that this is a cipher for economic growth/economic value, and not social value, equality or inclusion. As part of this business-focused discourse, the language used was one of homogenisation that could be seen as objectification [“their learning experience”]. This market fundamentalism then shrouds our development of a discourse around sharing and OERs in HE.

This matters more because higher education faces critical times ahead and needs a critical response. The development, deployment and sharing of OERs offers hopeful purpose for an active participation in a practical life, both in stimulating innovation that supports social inclusion and justice, and in resistance to dominant economic models of education that link self-worth to externally-imposed metrics. A key here is academic activism in opening up spaces and places where students can engage in co-governance as much as co-production. Co-governance is vital because it is through engagement with both the theory and practice of negotiating and defining spaces and practices through and in which materials can be produced that individuals can become themselves and respect divergent perspectives. In the homogenisation of HE, in a discourse that only stresses the economy, the markets, value-for-money and STEM, we risk losing our humanity.

Perhaps one central question to which we need to return is “what is this for?” I ask this question not only in terms of HE in 2010, but also the OER project. For me a key outcome is self-determination and personal transformation, so that individually we are able to judge what is good enough for one-self [rather than good or excellent], given our own partial, situated experience. In fact, this partial, fragmented view of the world may be shaken up by an approach to OERs as sharing, which is highlighted by the anti-curriculum tract of the University of Utopia. Anti-curriculum stresses the joy of communal working and sharing beyond borders, and it highlights how engagement in productive sharing brings the curriculum to life, but perhaps also that it brings life to the curriculum. Our view of ourselves, others and the world is enhanced then, through the act of sharing, and this might usefully be the focus of an answer to the question of “what are OERs for?” However, it might also form a strand that enables us to engage with Protevi’s “democratic university”.

This democratic imperative focuses issues of inclusion and community engagement, which are in turn amplified by the possibilities of social media. These possibilities are becoming realised through connections between OERs and the power of community collections like the East London Lives 2012 project and RunCoCo, or community-approaches to research, like the Galaxy Zoo. In each of these cases, the focus is on democratic engagement in the production of digital stories or research, which accepts divergence in ideology, but that is ultimately about sharing artifacts, ideas and identities. These projects are primarily not-for-profit, and focus upon communities or networks or affiliations understanding difference and representing themselves. In framing the spaces that co-workers on a project occupy, a range of voices can be respected, and a range of roles are taken up, from novice, through to agitator, organiser, educator, advocate and more experienced other.

The beauty of these projects, accepting difficulties in licensing, copyright, establishing authorship, overcoming entrenched political positions, and finding ways to engage those with limited power to speak, is their mutuality and their focus on respect, devolved authority and responsibility for governance, creation and sharing. In this way the mix of social media and face-to-face workshops held by Culturenet Cymru and the Community University Partnership Programme offers the hope for community-engaged work that offers equality, and participation-as-partnership. Through these projects we have ways of seeing things differently, and of overcoming fragmentation or disintermediation, whether in the production and sharing of resources, or learning objects or in commenting and critiquing those resources. Promoting the sharing of interactions around an object enriches dialogue about issues, disciplines and ourselves.

Again the key question is what is this for? What is the role of HE in mediating and advocating and sharing? What is its role as a social enterprise working with not-for-profits? How do these types of projects, framed by OERs open up a space for us to challenge the dominant economic discourse around our activity and our very being? In answering these questions, a critical issue is how to enable people to own the process of creation and sharing, and thereby to become archival activists. Perhaps a key role for academics in this democratic process is as Gramscian traditional intellectuals, committed to the cause of personal-emancipation, who are able to advocate for and lead the development of organic intellectuals within communities, associations, student cohorts or networks. The hope is that such organic intellectuals are able to develop ideas that lead to the democratic and collaborative transformation of those communities.

In this context we need to seize each opportunity to widen the space in which we resist the dominating paradigms for HE. As a result, two things strike me as important in thinking about OERs and community collections, framed by co-production and Co-governance. The first is to cherish and support examples like the Really Open University and its focus upon praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the University as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, lead by students. The second is to work with institutionalised structures, for example in defined OER programmes or open access legislation, to use them as levers for enhancing agreed social values. As a result we may be able to enact “the beginning of the democratic university”.


Scoping the relationships between social media and open education in the development of a resilient higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 14 June 2010

With Joss Winn, I have had a paper accepted for the Open Education 2010 conference. This paper begins to open up a space for us to discuss some of the revolutionary possibilities for open education, linked to the production and sharing of socially-useful open educational resources, upon what we might term the academic-social commons. I am pleased to note that the University of Utopia have also had a paper accepted on Opening Education beyond the property relation: from commons to communism. I can feel the unease and shifting in seats at the mention of the ‘c’ word. However, the UoU’s focus is political, based upon a discussion of openness in production and sharing as a site of resistance to individual alienation. The key is to develop a “critical social theory on which to build a really open society”.

Joss and my paper connects into these ideas of the political economy of openness to ask whether open education, or approaches to the production of open educational resources, can enable learners in higher education to overcome disruption. In engaging with this issue I have been reminded of my historical research into the place of commons, commoners and communities in the political world of the early eighteenth century, with a case study of Yorkshire electioneering.

In this, work on common right, enclosure and social change is important because common usage/sharing of resources was a form of social, and potentially political cement within and across communities, based upon local custom and which added to the difficulties and differences of political control. At this time, the commons were crucial for rearing sheep, oxen, horse and pigs, as well as providing thatch, bricks, and sundry extras which bolstered the local economy. Moreover, if the commons were crucial to the psychological and personal well-being of the individual and the community, then its defence was all-important no matter whom the attacker. The commons gave the individual and the community a chance to live of their own and to survive a dearth. They also gave the chance to have an economic independence that underpinned political autonomy.

I view the open education project in a similar light, as giving individuals-in-community a chance to share and to resist dominant and domineering discourses, notably around economic growth and the subservience of higher education’s social values and relationships to the invisible hand of the market. Perhaps its most important role is psychological, as the manufacture and sharing of resources for socially useful ends frames well-being and purposeful living.

Anyway, details of our paper follow…

140-character abstract

HE faces complex disruptions. Can open education and social media enable individuals-in-communities to develop resilience and overcome dislocation?

Proposal

Higher Education faces complex disruptions, from the growing threat of peak oil (The Oil Drum, 2010) and the impact that will have on our ability to consume/produce (Natural Environment Research Council, 2009), and from our need to own the carbon and energy we emit/use, in order to combat climate change. These problems are being amplified by energy availability and costs (The Guardian, 2009), public sector debt and the effects of a zero growth economy (new economics foundation, 2010).

One focus for response is the use of technology and its impact upon approaches to open education, in developing resilience. The Horizon Report 2010 (New Media Consortium, 2010) highlights the importance of openness but argues that learning and teaching practices need to be seen in light of civic engagement and complexity. Facer and Sandford (2010) ask critical questions of inevitable and universal futures, focused upon always-on technology, and participative, inclusive, democratic change. There is an ethical imperative to discuss the impacts of our use of technology on our wider communities and environment, and to define possible solutions.

Educational technology might be used to address some of these issues through the development of shared, humane values that are amplified by specific qualities of open education, including: relationships and power; anxiety and hope; and social enterprise and community-up provision. These areas are impacted by resilience, which is socially- and environmentally-situated, and denotes the ability of individuals and communities to learn and adapt, to mitigate risks, prepare for solutions to problems, respond to risks that are realised, and to recover from dislocations (Hopkins, 2009). This focuses upon defining problems and framing solutions contextually, around our abilities to develop adaptability to work virally and in ways that are open source and self-reliant. This means working at appropriate scale to take civil action, through diversity, modularity and feedback within communities.

The key for any debate on resilience linked to open education is in defining a curriculum that requires institutions to become less managerial and more open to the formation of devolved social enterprises. This demands the encouragement of what Gramsci (1971) called organic intellectuals, who can emerge from within communities to lead action. Learners and tutors may emerge as such organic intellectuals, working openly with communities in light of disruption. An important element here is what Davis (2007) terms “democratic ‘co-governance’” within civil action, but which might usefully be applied to education, in the form of co-governance of educational outputs. One key issue is how open education is (re)claimed by users and communities within specific contexts and curricula, in-line with personal integration and enquiry, within an uncertain world (Futurelab, 2009).

The following questions emerge, catalysed by open education.
1. What sorts of literacies of resilience do people as social agents need?

2. What sorts of knowledge/understanding do these learners need to be effective agents in society?

3. Are our extant modes of designing and delivering curricula meaningful or relevant?

This paper will address these questions by examining whether open education can enable individuals-in-communities to recover from dislocations.

References

The Oil Drum 2010. http://www.theoildrum.com/