Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness




The second topic for this course made a great introduction to the challenges of "sharing and openness". I very much liked David Wiley's TEDx lecture where he explores the features of open learning and education. Here I want to reflect on advantages and disadvantages of open and closed technologies. 

As I see it, there are certainly a lot of benefits of being more open and generous by providing learning material, lectures and slides online. I discovered this a few years ago when Slideshare took off, and i noted how people from all over the world, started to get in touch after seeing my slides. So not only could my material be used by other teachers, it also helped a bit unexpectedly to promote my research. A similar experience was after participating with three 10 min lectures for our MOOC (now translated to Spanish!) "Planetary Boundaries - Can our planet continue to support the current scope of human activity?".

Two major challenges that I see, is the fact that I perceive that many students prefer "safe spaces" for learning. That means that even though it might seem like a good idea to be open in all parts of your education (say, by sharing students' slides and working papers), this might actually be an obstacle to those students who wish to be able to learn and fail, without that being able to be seen by others. So there is a need to balance openness, with safe spaces for learning. 

Another challenge has to do with privacy. This was not an issue a few years ago, but seems to be an issue that has been taking off after numerous privacy scandals such as Cambridge Analytica. This affects what kind of digital platforms students are willing to engage with, and through what means. For example, some students choose to use an alias in social media platforms, or abstain from engaging with tech giants such as Google. The video below is intended as a humorous illustration of this challenge for digital education. 



April 30th 2019, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, makes a joke about privacy - that doesn't go very well... Source: https://twitter.com/alfredwkng/status/1123281388046827520?s=21

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