What do we mean by 'open education'?

Socrates must have been one of the most annoying individuals to ever walk the earth. I still don't get why he didn't just leave the city instead of drinking the hemlock at the end of his life. Also, his incessant questioning may well have led to a widely-celebrated 'method' but the dogmatism he displayed over definitions of things beggars belief. Things had definitions and people should act in accordance with objective, but abstract things such as 'justice' and 'virtue'.

I say this by means of introduction, because this is certainly not a post intended to give a single 'definition' of open education, but rather to tease apart its meaning and explore how people use the term. As I mentioned in my doctoral thesis (and related ebook) terms such as 'digital literacy' and 'open education' are examples of zeugmas. In other words, we're never quite sure which part of the phrase on which to place the emphasis: is it 'open education' or 'open education'?

Audrey Watters has already written on this topic and summarises well the problems with considering open education as a prozeugma (i.e. with the emphasis on 'open'):

And it's complicated, of course, by the multiple meanings of that adjective "open." What do we mean when we use the word? Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly-licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration?

The trouble is that it's not just 'open' that's a contested term, but 'education' as well. We tend to conflate 'learning' with 'education' — confusing something that happens inside us with something that happens to us.

A few months ago, as part of the work we were doing at the start of We Are Open Co-op, I asked people within my community what different kinds of 'open' there are in common parlance.

Open as in…

• door (you are free to enter)
• for business (you are invited to buy/sell/trade)
• unlocked (you have access to a thing)
• to ideas (you are willing to change your mind)
• transparency (you can see into the 'inside' of something)
• love (you are willing to be vulnerable to others)
• space (you are free to use this resource)
• amendments (you are happy to take on board other people's suggestions)
• exploring (you can discover new things)
• open-ended (you can keep going, potentially forever)
• flexible (you can change this to your own needs)
• no barriers (you do not have to overcome hurdles to get started)

Some of these obviously overlap and, to be honest, some are just better metaphors than others.

Part of the problem is that we've so many different definitions of 'open' that it's just not a useful term to use. We get 'openwashing' by big corporates, who — consciously or unconsciously — attempt to move a term like 'open' from something that is a basis for creative ambiguity within a community, towards the realm of 'dead metaphors'.

What we need to do, and like many things, this is an identity issue, is to think about what it means for people to identify as an 'open educator'. It's great having a fairly loose definition that appeals to those in the know within the extant community, but it's more than a little confusing for those new to the whole thing.

Ideally, I'd like to see 'open education' move into the realm of what I term productive ambiguity. That is to say, we can do some work with the idea and start growing the movement beyond small pockets here and there.