The open gift

The second of my OER17 posts. Having come down on the side of a loosely defining OEP, a connected strand was the idea of openness as a gift. In Maha Bali’s keynote she mentioned that gift giving can be problematic, we don’t always know that people want that gift, they feel indebted, and it may be inappropriate. In our panel session later, I wondered whether this was applicable to openness in general – we give the gift of open to people, in the assumption they will want it, or it will do them good. Maybe they don’t want it. In that sense maybe it’s like giving someone a dog – now, if it’s me, great, I love dogs, but others don’t and would feel a sense of burden them or it at least might not be appropriate at that stage in their life.

And to riff off another Maha thought, in our joint session about Virtually Connecting she made the analogy with local and maximum optimum from neural networks. This argues that you may think your at an optimum, but there could be a better one further away, but that it requires energy and resources to get out of your current one and reach that one. So for Virtually Connecting, maybe it’s at or near a local optimum for the people it can reach given the current set up. In order to reach another optimum, it might require a lot of resources (more people, funding etc). I wonder if this is true of openness, and OEP, also. We are not near a local optimum yet, but we might get to one that helps a lot educators do beneficial things with their learners, for learners to take control of aspects of their own educational experience, etc. But we’ve been operating under the assumption (I think) that it’s for everyone. Maybe, like the dog gift, it isn’t, or if it is, that is a whole other level of resource and energy required, and we should concentrate on finding the local optimum first.

PS – don’t actually give me a dog as a gift, this chap says no:

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