Open Learning - Sharing and Openness

This two weeks have been a challenge for me and I think also for our whole group. It was hard to find a common understanding of the topic and it was like we started all over every time we met. 

Finally we decided to work in Miro, a digital tool for collaboration, of course free to join. I already had an account and was the one invited the others to a work board. What I did not know was that my Miro somehow was connected to my organisation MS Teams and that there were restrictions for how many boards to use for free. Suddenly when we where almost finished with our board everything were locked and we could not use the board anymore. 

While I had to find a quick solution to submit our group work in time I had to make our presentation in another tool and for some reason I decided to use Microsoft whiteboard, and it was NOT a good chose. After sharing the link to the presentation I got e-mails from my team mates and from the course organizers that the link does not work. When looking into that I found that you can´t share a Microsoft whiteboard with someone outside your organisation without help from the organisation administrator. This is a good example on both the good and the bad with open resources, but also what is bad with closed resources. 

So instead of giving a presentation of our group work in an open digital tool where everyone could follow the links in are work, I had to send in a picture of our presentation. :(

 

Now to my reflections on the topic. First of all I believe in lifelong learning and everyone's right to education. For that, education must be open, easy to access and not always depending on time and space.

I have been active in the maker movement since a long time and as a maker it is natural to share knowledge with others. In a Makerspace everyone is welcome and you have access to a lot of different modern technology, often connected to internet. The technology are easy for everyone to learn and to create with. The philosophy that a Makerspace is for everyone and that sharing knowledge with the other makers makes the Makerspace to a great open educational resource center. 

References:

Maker culture

Makermovment teaches 21th century skills

You can see a maker as a learner who build her or his own personal learning environment, and use a learning network for developing knowledge in different areas. In this network she or he find relevant resources and connections all around the world. 

Reference:

Personal learning environment

In open education you can see the learner both in an individual perspective and in a global perspective and the learner as an editable person in a lifelong perspective.

In the individual perspective the learner actively choose what and when he or she wants to, or need to learn at the time. Then, in a global perspective, the learner choose from who and where this learning will take place.

While working on this topic I have been struggling with the challenges with openness. With openness comes responsibility and the learner must be observant and reflective when choosing educational resources.

I have come to the insight of how important it is for everyone to be a critical thinker and that it is the key to control and master open education and to be a editable person in your lifelong learning.

Reference:

My conclusion anyhow, is that Open education makes it possible for almost everyone to develop. Maybe to get a job or degree, or to change career during life. 

Important for that is that the big IT companies (even though I know that in some how they use me) are working on giving the whole world access to internet, let us use part of their digital tools for free and make digital services and tools easy to use. 

Why not open education to everyone? 

Because still not everyone has internet, phones or computers and in some countries for examples girls are not allowed to take part in education. But still openness give greater inclusion and social diversity in education.

Next topic in the ONL course "Learning in communities- networked Collaborative Learning" feels like a natural next step in my journey to learn more about open network learning.