Open Education and Education for Openness

Book excerpt: The essays in this edited collection reflect on the nature of open education resources, where the question on openness for education emerges. What is remarkable today are the ways that teachers and institutions now begin to form part of the processes of global exchange and production of a network of global educational commons. The question about the significance of this development, their limits and the consequences for practitioners and institutions from the perspective of teachers is extremely complex. For example, the policy agenda of institutions, states, and international organizations related to the regulation of new technologies facilitates the existence and viability of those resources. This has consequences for the ways that those resources are used and produced by educators. Contributors to this collection, each on their own way, argue that Open Education involves a commitment to openness and is therefore inevitably a political and social project. This books ends with a challenge for those engaged in exploring the potential impacts and possibilities of open education initiatives. The open education paradigm and its consequences for educators and learners speak of an uneven geography where the access to technological infrastructure does not necessarily imply freedom or openness. In those instances, openness in education related to open education initiatives requires an engagement in research about the ways in which policy, cultural, digital and educational environments facilitate a political commitment to open systems of knowledge production and distribution. One thing is sure, as the essays in this book demonstrated so clearly, these developments promise an implicit paradigm of openness and democratic collaboration in education that remains to be realized.