I have gone for these two. The Weller is clear,
well written and has all the historical perspectives you need, especially with
regard to the OU. Reading page 35 reminded me of how wonderful and how
radical seemed aspects of the dreams of Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle at the
time. If only these ideas were as current:
Access
Equality
Transparency
No exclusions
All the rest is less enthralling. Courmier (2013)
reminds us that even if these dreams originated with the OU, Margaret Thatcher
maintained it because of the potential for ‘lower unit-costs’ in education.
For me this
is the problem with the word. A word that carries the ‘sound’ of the virtuous
and positive but one that we more often come upon as an illusory or ideological
cover for things that are less benign:
Open and free sound like something everyone wants --- but when they are societies (Popper), markets and enterprise, they can be masks for practices entirely describable as
secrecy, exclusion and elitism.
This is explored in 2 books I reviewed on H800:
Tkacz (2015) who talks about the ‘open’ from its use by Popper (‘The Open Society
and Its Enemies’ i.e. communism) and the philosopher ‘film-maker, Astra Taylor.
(The last is a wonderful read. Review is available here. )
Gourlay (2015) makes light work of all these
idealist anti-authoritarian lightweights (described as ‘ideological’ and ‘partisan’)
with a ‘nuanced’ view of the evidence (actually all based on her own department
in UCL – my own alma mater).
Her essay is obviously the more thoughtful and ‘nuanced’
resource but it really isn’t saying much more than: ‘it ain’t that simple!’
What students and teachers engage in we are told is a ‘highly situated
bricolage of micro-practices’ (319) that she symbolises as an ‘oligopticon’, a
version of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ – a prison design in which
surveillance of prisoners situated in open pens in a circular structure takes
place from a tower in the middle.
Jeremy Benthams’s body and separated head continue
to exist (much decayed) in a fridge in UCL. He founded the university and
donated his dead embalmed body to sit in a windowed box in the lobby of the
university – his separated head in a closed box over the larger windowed box.
He must be laughing now to see his creation linked to the idea of an
oligopticon, precisely because he never used images like this this that could
not ever be visualised.
In an oligopticon, we cannot have total
surveillance of everything that happens, ‘we see too little … but see it well’
says Latour (cited 318). The idea of universities as experts in little bits of
knowledge over precisely defined and made to seem more significant on their
own than they are is hardly new. Remember the question exercising some medieval philosophers: 'how many angels can dance on a pinhead?'
The oligopticon is as far as I can see the ‘open society’ in Popper fighting the
good fight against people, like Plato and Hegel (the enemies he picks on before
he goes for Marx), who try to ‘see life whole’.
If we can’t ‘see’ that our open society is not very
open then that does not matter – we might as well see it as ‘open’. That is all
I get from Latour and Gourlay. Meanwhile back in real life whistleblower Edward Snowden is called an enemy to ‘freedom’
and ‘openness’ in the USA and would probably be ensconced in Guantamo Bay now
had he not escaped ‘freedom’.
I don’t want to over-egg my feelings about Gourlay.
This is a great and intelligent essay but its fondness for modernist metaphor (‘bricolage’
straight out of Levi-Strauss), does little to change the world or see beyond its
prettily attached / detached fragments. I loved UCL but I didn’t see it as a
symbol of ‘freedom’, rather it, like all other institutions, is tied into
contradictions – if ‘open’, also ‘closed’ at the same time. In fact that
appears to be what she is saying. Nothing is truly ‘free’ or ‘bound’ but is
both at the same time. Open and closed are merely metaphors for 'a questionable binary' (p. 312).
They don’t describe a world which is much more complex than that! A world of
multiple perspectives that ‘clash in the night’.
[That last bit isn’t meant, by the way, to be a
description of ‘Nahid’s bed’ p. 321 (Nahid is the one of the students who is
studied in the text)]
Week 7 Activity 2: Goulay (2015) on openness.
Choose two of the following resources on open education to read or view:
Gourlay (2015), Open education as a ‘heterotopia of desire’.
Weller (2014), ‘What sort of open?’, Chapter 2 of The Battle for Open
Hi
I have gone for these two. The Weller is clear, well written and has all the historical perspectives you need, especially with regard to the OU. Reading page 35 reminded me of how wonderful and how radical seemed aspects of the dreams of Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle at the time. If only these ideas were as current:
Access
Equality
Transparency
No exclusions
All the rest is less enthralling. Courmier (2013) reminds us that even if these dreams originated with the OU, Margaret Thatcher maintained it because of the potential for ‘lower unit-costs’ in education.
For me this is the problem with the word. A word that carries the ‘sound’ of the virtuous and positive but one that we more often come upon as an illusory or ideological cover for things that are less benign:
Open and free sound like something everyone wants --- but when they are societies (Popper), markets and enterprise, they can be masks for practices entirely describable as secrecy, exclusion and elitism.
This is explored in 2 books I reviewed on H800: Tkacz (2015) who talks about the ‘open’ from its use by Popper (‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ i.e. communism) and the philosopher ‘film-maker, Astra Taylor. (The last is a wonderful read. Review is available here. )
Gourlay (2015) makes light work of all these idealist anti-authoritarian lightweights (described as ‘ideological’ and ‘partisan’) with a ‘nuanced’ view of the evidence (actually all based on her own department in UCL – my own alma mater).
Her essay is obviously the more thoughtful and ‘nuanced’ resource but it really isn’t saying much more than: ‘it ain’t that simple!’ What students and teachers engage in we are told is a ‘highly situated bricolage of micro-practices’ (319) that she symbolises as an ‘oligopticon’, a version of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ – a prison design in which surveillance of prisoners situated in open pens in a circular structure takes place from a tower in the middle.
Jeremy Benthams’s body and separated head continue to exist (much decayed) in a fridge in UCL. He founded the university and donated his dead embalmed body to sit in a windowed box in the lobby of the university – his separated head in a closed box over the larger windowed box. He must be laughing now to see his creation linked to the idea of an oligopticon, precisely because he never used images like this this that could not ever be visualised.
In an oligopticon, we cannot have total surveillance of everything that happens, ‘we see too little … but see it well’ says Latour (cited 318). The idea of universities as experts in little bits of knowledge over precisely defined and made to seem more significant on their own than they are is hardly new. Remember the question exercising some medieval philosophers: 'how many angels can dance on a pinhead?'
The oligopticon is as far as I can see the ‘open society’ in Popper fighting the good fight against people, like Plato and Hegel (the enemies he picks on before he goes for Marx), who try to ‘see life whole’.
If we can’t ‘see’ that our open society is not very open then that does not matter – we might as well see it as ‘open’. That is all I get from Latour and Gourlay. Meanwhile back in real life whistleblower Edward Snowden is called an enemy to ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ in the USA and would probably be ensconced in Guantamo Bay now had he not escaped ‘freedom’.
I don’t want to over-egg my feelings about Gourlay. This is a great and intelligent essay but its fondness for modernist metaphor (‘bricolage’ straight out of Levi-Strauss), does little to change the world or see beyond its prettily attached / detached fragments. I loved UCL but I didn’t see it as a symbol of ‘freedom’, rather it, like all other institutions, is tied into contradictions – if ‘open’, also ‘closed’ at the same time. In fact that appears to be what she is saying. Nothing is truly ‘free’ or ‘bound’ but is both at the same time. Open and closed are merely metaphors for 'a questionable binary' (p. 312). They don’t describe a world which is much more complex than that! A world of multiple perspectives that ‘clash in the night’.
[That last bit isn’t meant, by the way, to be a description of ‘Nahid’s bed’ p. 321 (Nahid is the one of the students who is studied in the text)]