How do we mediate our place in the open community, aspects of which might conflict with our personal ethics?
This is one of the questions in the #openspaces session at #oer19 this week. I don’t know about you but my open practice is always a bit of a juggling act. Questions of how much can I share, where should I share it constantly running around my brain.
As you know, dear reader, I recently wrote a book (with Keith Smyth and Bill Johnston). Open education is a big part of the book, but the book itself isn’t available openly. I wish it was.
That was, and continues to be a struggle in terms of my own ethics and practice. However, we couldn’t afford to make it open access, we didn’t have research/institutional funding to do that. What we did have was interest from a reputable publisher and that academic pressure (probably self inflicted) to get a decent publication. We do highlight in the book the irony of writing about openness in a non open way, and we are also working on a couple of open access papers right now to make more of our thinking available. In fact, I have decided only to write any follow up articles for open access journals now.
Is that a cop out or just part and parcel of my continuing negotiation with openness? Hopefully something to pick up at the session later this week.
This post is cross posted from the Open Spaces site.
