Putting Open Educational Practices on the map

The movement for Open Educational Resources (OER) and the wider conversation about Open Educational Practices (OEP) are intended to increase access to knowledge and the transformative benefits of higher education. Although greater “openness” is therefore widely perceived as “a social good”, in practice, it may conflict with national policy objectives and institutional priorities, particularly when market competition and commodification of intellectual property are highly valued. The openness of OER is generally understood as derived primarily through the application of permissive licenses that enable sharing and repurposing of digital content. Yet in discussions of OEP, the nature of openness is more multifaceted and elusive (Havemann, 2016, 2017; Cronin, 2017; and see Pomerantz & Peek, 2016). OEP can be understood to reflect a resistance to the capture of “openness” within the discursive milieu of technology and licensing, and the intention to reconnect it with the deeper tradition of opening education to non-traditional audiences in innovative ways (Havemann, 2016). White and Le Cornu (2011, 2017) have proposed a continuum between ‘visitors’ and ‘residents’ to map individuals’ engagement with various technologies where another axis situates such activities between the personal and the institutional. After an overview of historical and contemporary forms of open practice, workshop participants will be encouraged to use a similar construct to investigate openness in educational contexts and consider how their own practices are, or could be, incorporated into an academic social commons. They will then be invited to analyse microcases illustrating diverse forms of open practice and to map their experiences in order to explore the “other dimension” of openness (Havemann, 2017). The outcomes of this workshop will be combined with the products of previous workshops to inform an “open” definition of OEP that is intended to contribute to a wider conversation about criticality in open education research and which will be openly distributed. References Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 18(5). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3096 Havemann, L. (2016). Open Educational Resources. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Singapore: Springer Singapore. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_218-1 Havemann, L. (2017, September). ‘Yes, we are open’: Exploring definitions of openness in education. Paper presented at Association for Learning Technology Conference, Liverpool, United Kingdom. Pomerantz, J., & Peek, R. (2016). Fifty shades of open. First Monday, 21(5). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/article/view/6360/5460 White, D.S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049 White, D.S., & Le Cornu, A. (2017). Using ‘Visitors and Residents’ to visualise digital practices. First Monday, 22(8). Retrieved from https://www.firstmonday.dk/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7802/6515#autho