[1152 words]

I’m still pondering the relationship between openness and connection. There are significant ways in which the two concepts align well with each other in the domain of learning, even if they do not overlap semantically. That is, open learning is generally going to be characterized by a relative ease of connection in many forms. Connecting new information or concepts to previous learning. Facility of connecting reflective insights to hard data, or old writing to new writing through easy access to stores of data or to the archive. Connections between learners in different regions or different time zones. Connection and collaboration over great distances.

There are also significant ways in which one can also see some tension or opposition. One of those lies in the disciplinary rules for knowledge development and in the parameters and institutions that have evolved for verification and control of that intellectual work. Let me offer a brief historical sketch. As humanist intellectual traditions emerged from the Renaissance and evolved through the Enlightenment, the development of ideas, the formulation and verification of models was a relatively open process. Anyone who felt qualified and able to do so could contribute to the enterprise, which was constructed around sharing information, theories and arguments through print media, mostly books. Those media were “accessible” more widely than manuscripts and personal letters and notes had been. However, that “openness” was quite relative. Very few persons, almost exclusively men, could afford to make the steep climb toward access to that free exchange of ideas. One had to be literate and one had to have the resources to buy or borrow books, assemble a personal library or be in a position to access someone else’s personal library; additionally, one needed leisure time to read and reflect; finally, one needed a modicum of social-intellectual reputation to publish or the support and influence of an influential patron or a printer. Generally speaking, there was no such profession as “scholar” or “researcher.” One could, however, be an erudite writer, like Voltaire or Samuel Johnson and live by one’s pen and by one’s reputation. In the eighteenth century, writers often survived thanks to patronage, but increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, writers were able to earn a living directly from their writing. That said, even with growing access in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to literacy, coupled with the power of publishing one’s thoughts, theories or research, only those with a certain education and a certain socio-economic standing had access to books and to the “connected” conversation of the erudite.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, knowledge production, teaching and learning evolved significantly. The influence of religion in education (and as a moral authority) waned somewhat and secular education gained significant in infuence. At the same time, thinkers increasing channeled critical inquiry and publishing into disciplinary channels. Areas of knowledge that that had previously been pursued and developed by amateurs and by men of leisure and intellectual inclination came to be formalized as history, philosophy, mathematics, physics. Openness continued to exist in the form of a relatively accessible channels of publication and distribution, school and public libraries and through increasingly rapid personal communication. To assure the validity and reliability of information and conclusions developed within those increasingly well-defined areas of knowledge, persons (mostly men) who recognized each other as experts inthe domain applied rules and criteria to the relatively open discussion of hypotheses, methods, experiments, reflections and conclusions. Over time, scholars and arbiters of publication further clarified and formalized those rules and criteria. The authority of postsecondary institutions rose and the production of knowledge under their aegis came to be highly regularized. Disciplines and disciplinary academic publications (journals and presses) structured , validated and assured the quality of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. By the late twentieth century, though, it seems to me that that pendulum had swung a bit far in the direction of verification and control (especially control). Disciplinary structure overshadowed much of learning and it influenced even the relative standing and level of power of sectors within universities.

What is more, discipline-focused publication became an industry unto itself. The very profitability of that enterprise spurred the rise of aggressively for-profit institutions (publishers, disseminators), who took advantage of the publish-or-perish incentives of academia to harness both relatively inexpensive peer-review labor and large streams of unpaid-for content. Institutional dependence on peer-reviewed publication to evaluate scholars and academics’ need to appear in print (or to bolster their h-index or other metrics) as a demonstration of “productivity” undergird that economic model. Organizations like Elsevier (“Empowering Knowledge / Knowledge Uncovered“) depend on essentially free academic labor and content, on the one hand, and, on the other, scholars’ need to consult scholarly publication, some of which is available only in exchange for a costly (in some cases, exorbitant) subscription or per-use fee.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, intellectual work and the production of knowledge is far more democratic and more widely shared in the twenty-first century than it was in the 1750s. Additionally, modalities of communication have arisen that make the sharing of ideas and communication almost instantaneous. The internet has greatly facilitated connection and shared understandings among scholars. There is greater openness and greater communication. On the other hand, there has been a significant trend moving knowledge production in the direction of closure and restriction. The rise of disciplines and the enforcement of disciplinary standards in academic publishing has, in large measure, discouraged cognitive exchange and erected barriers to communication between disciplines. There are countertrends, of course, but the gist of the evolution has been toward ostensible “rigor” in the the genre and style of writing in peer-reviewed journals and a restrictive monodisciplinary focus of particular journals. Additionally, the economic model that makes access to journals extremely costly restricts functional openness.

Reaction to copyright and DRM restrictions and constraints and high fees led to various openness or open access movements, statements or trends, like the BOAI, Creative Commons and SPARC and various open science initiatives. If there is a liberation in these efforts at openness, it is not only relief from high-cost access to scholarly work, but it is also in the way in which open online scholarship has rekindled connection across disciplinary lines. Digital humanities, for example, often blends over into statistics or information science or data visualization. The work of sociologists and literary theorists may appear in close contact, inviting comparison. Biologists, geologists and anthropologists may offer converging perspectives on issues like climate change in a single scholarly piece. There are ways in which “open” also invites “connection.”

There will always be a tension between the insistence of some on disciplinary rigor and discipline-specific doctrine and the refusal of other scholars and learners to be contained within a single well-defined box. It is this latter, the pulling together of openness and connection in digitally mediated learning that gives me hope and motivation.

#openlearning17

-rrdaniel2