Education of the Future: Openness

Capturing the spirit of open, networked, and participatory communities in our learning environments is something that is rapidly growing around the world today.

OER, or Open Educational Resources, allows for knowledge to be redistributed to others online, where they are able to take the information and remix, revise, reuse, and share it again.

Students are already doing this with their learning, with or without the help of others, but what they could struggle with is separating their personal and professional identities and how much they want to let those two mix together.

Open, in terms of education, is used to mean freely shared. Education is not immune to selfishness, but sharing counter acts this, and benefits not only the students, but other educators as well. Knowledge has the special property where it can be shared from one to another without the person who shares the knowledge loosing anything. This could be really the only thing that doesn't contribute to entropy. When a person shares their knowledge in a tangible form such as a book, there is a limit to how many people can access their information, however when it is shared digitally there is no longer competition for access to that knowledge.

"This advance- to give without giving away- is indescribable." David Wiley

The only adversary to this infinite way to share are policies in place that are put there by outdated thinking that is reinforced by law. You would think with educational resources so available the people with the outdated thinking would be able to teach themselves something new.

With the growing demand for education and the impossibility of creating enough classrooms to satisfy the demand, I see us turning to digital classrooms, where the occupied space would be in the student's head, on their digital device, and possibly in whatever physical form they choose to represent and record their new found knowledge.

If education progresses in this direction, there would be no cost to governments and institutions to give the people what they want, but that also means there wouldn't be any money to be made.

So its hard to say where I see the future of education.