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.
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