I am currently attending EDEN 2015 in Barcelona. Today is day 2.
I was very impressed by the keynote speeches of Jim Groom from the US and Martin Weller from the Open University UK. In essence both were dancing around the big question „Will there be a breakthrough? “ and „When will it be?“ and they did it excellently, and with lots of laughing!
It draws back to the issue of the disruptive nature of openness and how it is not compatible with our institutions logic. We seem to face an era in which we all try to adapt in our institutions the notion of openness and now have to understand that there is a systems problem. And yes, we have guessed that a long time. But now we come to realize it seems to be reality…more and more. And clearer and clearer.
So – how do we turn our old traditional institutions into the ones which are leading the development of openness? Will this happen? There was a quote in Martins talk which goes like this „Evolution is a long period of boredom which sometimes is interrupted by panic“. Recapitulating what I heard about openness as game changer in the last years is that yes, we seem to face an evolution. But I feel now that we need to look at the issue more in deTail. We need to make a next step. My fingers start to itch to start a new publication project, writing, collaboration project around it. I am inspired by my experiences here at EDEN 2015 …
What is the core of this inspiration? Questions around…
Where can we see already real open cultures in education? And how do they there manage to walk the shaky institutional regulations with it? How can openness evolve from being a cool idea, a future concept (with all the good potential around the social and the agenda of emancipation and independence) to changing the organizational culture into an open educational organization. To me it seems, this is the real issue.
So lets start to look into it closer. Lets start a new era. Which is beginning with taking our talk REAL serious, not as just another future idea…
Maybe we can connect to some thoughts from this project: open learning cultures
