Openness has won – now what? | Impact of Social Sciences

"As we start the new year and survey the open education landscape, it’s hard not to conclude that openness has prevailed. The victory may not be absolute, but the trend is all one way now – we’ll never go back to closed systems in academia anymore than we will return to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Whether it’s open access publishing, open data, MOOCs, OERs, open source or open scholarship – the openness battle has largely been won. Time to rejoice! But, of course, it’s never that simple. When it was simply open vs closed it was a clear distinction. Openness was good, closed was bad. As the victory bells sound though it doesn’t take much examination to reveal that it has become a more complex picture now. This is completely natural (it’s not a failing). I always used to wonder what happened after the credits rolled in big good vs evil films (where good had been triumphant naturally). In Star Wars, the Empire is destroyed, the Rebels have won! Now what? Well, my guess is you’d go back ten years later and find bickering amongst former allies, that trade wars had arisen, political struggles for power were in place and differences which had been set aside during the great struggle were now coming to the fore. The same with Lord of the Rings. You think the elves, dwarves, hobbits and humans were all still chums 20 years after Sauron had been defeated? Oh no. In both cases things were better than the dark days, but they wouldn’t be simple sweetness either. People (and aliens, and dwarves, and elves) have a tendency to find forms of conflict and disagreement ... We replace open vs closed with a set of more complex, nuanced debates, which are, to be honest, a bit boring for many. For example: [1] xMOOCs vs cMOOCs  [2] CC-By vs CC-NC  [3] Gold vs Green OA [4] Self-hosted vs Third party services ... But that’s the nature of these things – after the grand struggle comes the hard work of the peace. This isn’t sexy work, it’s about drafting policies, agreements, processes. All of which consolidate the peace and move things forward. It’s interesting that history teaches us that often the people who were the leaders and pioneers in the war, aren’t the same people you need for the peace. I wonder if the same is true in ed tech?"