October 23 - 29, 2023 | Everywhere

Degrees of openness

I picked up an interesting blog post by Laura Czerniewicz, where she argues that it is useful to think about degrees of openness on a continuum, rather than open/closed as a binary. She links to a paper entitled Degrees of Openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Eve Gray. The paper offers a range of attributes associated with the concept of ‘openness’, including social, technical, legal openness and financial openness. Can you identify the degrees of openness of your resources using these attributes?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Maximillian Kaizen on October 9, 2011 at 12:06am

Well posted Derek, and wholehearted support for smaller, practical increments of openness. There's a healthy dimension of semi-permeability as we grow the infrastructure, business models and cultural space that allows for tinkering, creativity and conversation between otherwise polarised worlds. We need the room to negotiate bridges between the 'hippies' and the 'profit-mongerers' if we're to win the cause for our humanity rather than converting a side.

Some easy-to-try gray areas (sorry) allow for a broader range of invitation points for those sharing works to ease into, safely. It needs no zealotry or freedom-fighting for the cause of openness, it becomes about feedback on what actually works.

BTW the link didn't go in the right direction, herewith again >> Degrees of Openness: PDF

Bless the binary, but bring on the human interface between,

011011010110000101111000

RSS

Welcome to
Open Access Week

Sign In