Presentation for #opened15 Please contribute questions about not-yetness in open education on this Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J2qOvLf5aiWa6a5JEVvX77Vyz4lmfYssn0ceEzIAvz4/edit?usp=sharing

1. For whom, for what? Not-
yetness and challenging the
“stuff” of open education
Amy Collier | Jen Ross
Middlebury College | University of Edinburgh
#notyetness

2. Promises of efficiency and simplicity come at a cost.
How can we resist the ‘politics of complexity reduction’?
https://pixabay.com/en/minimalism-simplicity-detail-white-94803/
value
labor
diversity
pedagogy
power relations
academic freedom
authority & authorship

3. critical perspectives
on openness

4. technologically mediated ‘openness’ is
consistently associated with democratic,
inclusive and radical ideals…. Meanwhile other
educational possibilities are positioned as
conservative, exclusionary or controlling of
learners or knowledge…. The risk with such
polarised accounts is that education is
inevitably bad, because it is and can only ever
be ‘closed’. Arguably, whilst such a position may
work as an ideology, it does not provide the
nuance or discrimination that is needed
analytically or practically to engage with
education in a constructive way.
(Oliver 2015, pp.366-7)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremybrooks/3450585089

5. The effectiveness of OER is frequently articulated in
terms of the ability to ‘reduce the costs associated
with reproducing and maintaining online courses’ ...
this emphasis on replication appears to suggest the
need for uniformity, where a homogeneous
population of learners benefit from identical
resources. (Knox 2013, p.829)
do [OERs] reproduce historically asymmetric power
relations? (Olakulehin & Singh 2013, p.33)

6. openness is not the opposite of closed-ness, nor
is there simply a continuum between the two. ...
all forms of openness entail forms of closed-
ness.
...An important question therefore becomes not
simply whether education is more or less open,
but what forms of openness are worthwhile
and for whom; openness alone is not an
educational virtue. (Edwards 2015, p.255)

7. openness alone
is not an
educational
virtue.
(Edwards 2015, p.255)

8. Not-yetness and open
education

9. not yet fully understood
not yet fully researched in a meaningful way
veletsianos, 2012

10. Lego army by Flickr user Mark Levin, reused with permission of CC-BY 2.0 license
not-yetness emerged as a
response to a dominant
discourse of technology in
education that has been
characterised by rhetoric of
control, efficiency and
enhancement, underplaying
more ‘disruptive, disturbing
and generative dimensions’
(Bayne, 2014, p.3)

11. "Mexico/US Pacific Ocean border fence" by Tony Webster. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.
“Borders are set up to define the spaces that
are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from
them...A borderland is a vague undetermined
place created by the residue of an unnatural
boundary.”
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands / La Frontera

12. "Playground at Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park" by Stephen Oung from Lübeck, Germany. Licensed under
CC BY 2.0 via Commons.
diversity and context
emergence and open-endedness
authority and authorship
risk-taking and encounters

13. what space is there for distinctiveness, diversity, open-endedness?
how much uncertainty can this approach to openness accommodate?
what closures come along with this? what is in the borderlands?