1.1 What does Openness mean to you?
Activity 1: What does openness mean to you? (10 minutes)
As we mentioned in the introduction to this week of the course, the project we are working on examines the impact of open education resources (OERs) that are being used within an educational context. OER are resources which are often available online, can be remixed and repurposed, are available in the public domain and are usually openly licensed. The Hewlett foundation describes OER as:
“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. Open Educational Resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.” (Source)
Openness is not just applicable to research. You can practice openness in lots of different contexts. As you can imagine there are lots of different ways to define openness. What do you think ‘openness’ means? Think of one or two ways you could define ‘openness’ and share these in the Disqus forum below. We’ll return to talk about your ideas in Thursday’s Google hangout.
If you are interested in finding our more about debates around the meaning of openness, check out another School of Open course Why Open?