This document summarizes a presentation on cultures of openness in higher education. It defines a culture of openness and discusses the technopolitical economy of openness, including the politics, technologies, and economics of openness. It also examines open cultures and education, new architectures of collaboration, and calls for an ontology of openness. The summary critiques some of the major reports on open education and the ideological nature of the concept of an "open society."

1. Cultures of Openness: New
Architectures of Global
Collaboration in Higher Education
Michael A. Peters
UIUC
Faculty of Education
University of Glasgow

2. Structure of Presentation
• Defining a ‘Culture of Openness’
• Technopolitical economy of openness
- Politics of Openness
- Technologies of Openness
- Economics of Openness
• Open Cultures/Open Education
• New Architectures of Collaboration
• Towards an Ontology of Openness

3. The Politics of Openness
• The politics of openness names a version of postwar
liberalism strongly supported by the ‘marriage’ of
Cold War warriors Hayek (on ‘open markets’) and
Popper (on ‘open society’)
- Henri Bergson - The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion (1932)
- Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies
(1945)
- Friedrich Hayek – The Road to Serfdom (1944)
- George Soros – The Open Society Institute, 1994
• Open Government and Official Information Act
• Freedom House on postwar growth of liberal
democracy.

4. Henri Bergson, 1859-1941
Two Sources of Morality and Religion
• Develops from Creative Evolution
(as an engagement with Kant)
• Two sources:
- Closed morality, static religion
- Open morality, dynamic religion
• Open morality is universal (includes
everyone) and aims at peace
• Based on ‘creative emotions’ – the
emotion creates the representation
(rather than vice versa)
• Mystical experience
• Revitalization in Gilles Deleuze

5. Karl Popper, 1902-1994
The Open Societies and its Enemies (1945)
• Critique of historicism (Plato, Hegel,
Marx); defense of liberal democracy as
open society
• Cold war warrior (with Hayek) driven by
state phobia and fear of totalitarianism;
failure of Marxism against fascism
• Against essentialism of conceptual
analysis of early Wittgenstein and for
‘open epistemology’ (Hayek’s
evolutionism) called ‘critical rationalism’
based on falsificationism (as a critique
of logical empiricism [positivism] and
solution of the problem of induction)
• “In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist
society will also be called the closed society, and the
society in which individuals are confronted with
personal decisions, the open society” (Ch. 10)

6. Friedrich von Hayek
• Austrian school political
philosopher – classical liberal
defense of free market
• Road to Serfdom (1944)
• Constitution of Liberty (1960)
• LSE – invited by Lionel Robbins in
1931
• U of Chicago – 1950, joining
Committee on Social Thought
• 1962-68 – U of Frieburg
• Nobel prize in 1974
• Critic of collectivism & demand
economy advocating catallaxy –
‘self-organizing system of
voluntary co-operation’ – and
spontaneous order
• Est. Mt Pelerin Society in 1947
(classical liberalism against
sociolism)
• Invited Popper to LSE 1946

7. George Soros, 1930-
• Studied under Popper at LSE
• Established Open Society Institute in
1994 (named after Popper’s work)
• ‘The Open Society Institute (OSI), a
private operating and grantmaking
foundation, aims to shape public
policy to promote democratic
governance, human rights, and
economic, legal, and social reform.’
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
(2001)
• Europe as a Prototype for a Global
Open Society (2006)
• Open Society: Reforming Global
Capitalism (2000)
• Opening the Soviet System (1990)

8. Open Government
• Roots in Enlightenment thought of
constitution of civil society and in
democratic practice
• Linked to freedom of speech, freedom of
the press and other freedoms that have
become basis for constitutional law
• Strongly linked with passage of freedom
of information law in US (1966), Denmark
& Norway (1970), France & Holland
(1978), Australia, Canada, NZ (1982), UK
(2000), Japan & Mexico (2002), Germany
(2005)
• Norms of openness address
transparency, accountability, official
secrets, public trust
• Linked to open source governance –
application of open source to
democratic principles encouraging
citizen participation in legislative process

9. Freedom House
• Free (green) – 90 countries or 47
per cent
• Partly Free (yellow) – 60
countries or 31 per cent
• Not Free – 43 countries or 41 per
cent
• Increasing from 1977 (43 [28]) to
2007 (90 [47]); from 66 electoral
democracies (1987) to 121
(2007)
http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=395

10. Freedom of Mobility?

11. Technologies of Openness
• Macy Cybernetic group conferences
and concept of the open systems
• Claude Shanon’s mathematical theory
of communication 1948
• Development of Internet, 1992
• Shift from PC to Internet as platform
• Web 2.0 technologies

12. Group Photo, Macy 10th
Conference, 1953
• T.C. Schneirla, Y. Bar-Hillel, Margaret Mead, Warren S. McCulloch, Jan Droogleever-Fortuyn, Yuen Ren Chao, W. Grey-Walter,
Vahe E. Amassian.
• Leonard J. Savage, Janet Freed Lynch, Gerhardt von Bonin, Lawrence S. Kubie, Lawrence K. Frank, Henry Quastler, Donald G.
Marquis, Heinrich Kluver, F.S.C. Northrop.
• Peggy Kubie, Henry Brosin, Gregory Bateson, Frank Fremont-Smith, John R. Bowman, G.E. Hutchinson, Hans Lukas Teuber,
Julian H. Bigelow, Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Heinz von Foerster

13. Wiener, Cybernetics
&Communication

14. A Mathematical Theory of
Communication, 1948
The fundamental problem of communication is that
of reproducing at one point either exactly or
approximately a message selected at another
point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that
is they refer to or are correlated according to some
system with certain physical or conceptual entities.
These semantic aspects of communication are
irrelevant to the engineering problem. The
significant aspect is that the actual message is one
selected from a set of possible messages. The
system must be designed to operate for each
possible selection, not just the one which will
actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time
of design.
• Reprinted with corrections from The Bell System Technical
Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October,
1948.

15. Development of the Internet

16. Web 2.0 Technologies
• New architectures
of participation and
collaboration
• Social media-social
networking
• Wiki-collaborations
• Wisdom of the
crowd
• Web as platform

17. Web 2.0 Mass Customization
• Economics of file-
sharing
• Mass customization
• Personalization of
services
• Co-production of goods
• You as co-designer
• Customer integrated into
value creation process

18. Growing Interconnectedness

19. Economics of Openness
• Knowledge as a global public good
• ‘Weightlessness’ of digital knowledge
goods
• ‘The Economy of Ideas’ - John Perry
Barlow (1994)
• ‘How Social Production Transforms
Freedom and Markets’ – Yochai
Benkler (2006)

20. Knowledge as Global Public Good
• knowledge is non-rivalrous
the stock of knowledge is not depleted by use and in this sense
knowledge is not consumable; sharing with others, use, reuse
and modification may indeed add rather than deplete value;
• knowledge is barely excludable
it is difficult to exclude users and to force them to become
buyers; it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrict distribution of
goods that can be reproduced with no or little cost;
• knowledge is not transparent
knowledge requires some experience of it before one
discovers whether it is worthwhile, relevant or suited to a
particular purpose.
• knowledge at the ideation or immaterial stage considered as
pure ideas operates expansively to defy the law of scarcity.

21. Weightlessness of Digital Goods
Digital information goods approximate pure thought
• Information goods especially in digital forms can be copied cheaply
so there is little or no cost in adding new users.
• Information and knowledge goods typically have an experiential and
participatory element that increasingly requires the active co-
production of the reader/writer, listener, and viewer.
• Digital information goods can be transported, broadcast or shared at
low cost which may approach free transmission across bulk
communication networks.
• Since digital information can be copied exactly and easily shared, it
is never consumed

22. John Perry Barlow
• Information is an activity.
• ‘Information is a verb, not a noun; it is
experienced not possessed; it has to move;
it is conveyed but propagation, not
distribution’.
• Information is a life form.
• ‘Information wants to be free; it replicates
into the cracks of possibility; it wants to
change; it is perishable’.
• Information is a relationship.

23. Yochai Benkler
• Cooperation and Human Systems Design
• Commons-based information production
and exchange
• Freedom, justice, and the organization of
information production on nonproprietary
principles
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
(2006)

24. Open Cultures/Open Education
Emerging Knowledge Ecologies
• MIT adopts OpenCourseWare (2001)
• Budapest OA statement; NIH; ERC.
• The Ithaca Report, University Publishing
In A Digital Age (2007)
• Harvard mandates open archiving
(Feb 14, 2008)

25. Ithaka Report, 2007
• changes in creation, production and consumption
of scholarly resources --‘creation of new formats
made possible by digital technologies, ultimately
allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated
electronic research and publishing environments
that will enable real-time dissemination,
collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and
usage of new media’ (p. 4).
• ‘alternative distribution models (institutional
repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals)
have also arisen with the aim to broaden access,
reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content’
(p. 4)

26. Wider Cultural Changes:
Writer’s strike in Hollywood
‘Cheap production technology, no-barrier-to-entry
distribution, and a Niagara of “product” (65,000
new videos are uploaded on YouTube daily) mean
the entire Hollywood story-development complex is
now in a daily competition with do-it-yourself writers.
Hollywood product itself is remade, reduced to
clips, bites, fractals, and mixes. Sitting through an
entire feature film more and more feels like an
unreasonable commitment. (We use DVRs to fast-
forward, to pause, to hold for some other time—
anything not to have to watch something from
beginning to end.) The narrative is disposable.’
--Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair

27. Open 21st
Century?
• The present decade can be called the ‘open’ decade (open
source, open systems, open standards, open archives, open
everything) just as the 1990s were called the ‘electronic’
decade (e-text, e-learning, e-commerce, e-governance).
Materu, 2004.
• It is more than just a ‘decade’ that follows the electronic
innovations of the 1990s; it is a change of philosophy and
ethos, a set of interrelated and complex changes that
transforms markets and the mode of production, ushering in a
new collection of values based on openness, the ethic of
participation and peer-to-peer collaboration.
• a shift from an underlying metaphysics of production—a
‘productionist’ metaphysics—to a metaphysics of
prosumption creating new forms of creativity and freedom

28. Open Education
‘the open provision of educational
resources, enabled by information and
communication technologies, for
consultation, use and adaptation by a
community of users for noncommercial
purposes’
--UNESCO, 2002

29. The Emerging Open
Education Paradigm
US Committee for Economic Development
• Open Standards, Open Source, and Open
Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness
(April 2006)
• The Digital Economy and Economic Growth (2001)
• Digital Economy: Promoting Competition,
Innovation, and Opportunity (2001)
• Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth: The
Special Problem of Digital Intellectual Property
(2004)
• new collaborative models of open innovation,
originating outside the firm, that results in an
‘architecture of participation’

30. Three Reports on OER
• Giving Knowledge for Free: The
Emergence Of Open Educational
Resources (OECD, 2007)
• Open Educational Practices and
Resources (OLCOS, 2007)
• A Review of the Open Educational
Resources (OER) Movement:
Achievements, Challenges, and New
Opportunities (2007)

31. OECD Report 2007
• ‘An apparently extraordinary trend is
emerging. Although learning resources
are often considered as key
intellectual property in a competitive
higher education world, more and
more institutions and individuals are
sharing digital learning resources over
the Internet openly and without cost,
as open educational resources (OER)’.
(p. 9).

32. OpenCourseWare
• MIT OpenCourseWare has reached 35
million people and another 14 million in
translation
• OpenCourseWare Consortium ‘is a
collaboration of more than 100 higher
education institutions and associated
organizations from around the world
creating a broad and deep body of open
educational content using a shared model.’

33. Global Power/Knowledge
Systems
• Openness seems also to suggest
political transparency, an ethic of
participation, collaboration through
social media and the norms of open
inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself
as both the basis of both the logic of
inquiry, the creation of value and the
dissemination of its results

34. (i) Criticisms of the major reports
on Open Education
(a) Critique of underlying ‘engineering’ concept of
information (as opposed to knowledge) and
therefore also underlying notion of skills;
(b) Problem of ‘structured ignorance,’ ‘information
overload,’ ‘misinformation,’ disinformation’;
(c) Lack of context claims for open education in order
to understand of fundamental changes to liberal
political economy;
(d) Relation of OE to traditional goals of education
policy to notions of freedom, equality, access and
distribution of public goods.

35. (ii) Criticisms of the ideological nature of the
‘open society’
(a) Contextualizing Popper in the Cold War, state
phobia of late 1940s, rise of neoliberalism, links to
Hayek and LSE;
(b) Differences and dangers of ‘openness’: open
society/institutions vs open markets; preservation of
cultural differences; Ameri-English as global lingua
franca; asymmetical power relations; rise of the
‘information utility’ and new forms of ‘information
imperialism’;
(c) ‘Societies of Control’ (Deleuze, 1992) vs Open
Society: 1. Historical, 2. Logic, 3. Program

36. (iii) Criticisms of Benkler and limitations of
liberal political economy
(a) ‘open governance’ in an era of
globalization – ‘openness does not mean
deregulation’
(b) Need to understand system failures – of
closed and open systems
(c) state & corporate surveillance e.g., UK
community cards, House of Lords
(d) the problems of the digital self
(e) issues of privacy
(f) Problems of IP: copyright; WTO & GATS etc.

37. (iv) An ontology of openness?
(a) A specific debate in Web environments – semantic framework &
knowledge representations of a model of reality – see Paola Di
Maio ‘Open Ontology’
(b) Principle of openness: An ontology should be open and available to
be used by all potential users without any constraint, other than (1)
its origin must be acknowledged and (2) it should not to be altered
and subsequently redistributed except under a new name
(c) Cooksey (2005) on Open Source philosophy & Deleuze: Deleuze’s
postion as ‘a radical, non-essentialist realism that encompasses the
virtual as real’ (as opposed to ‘actual’)
(d) Manuel DeLanda’s (2005a,b) development of Deleuze & open
source philosophy
http://opensourcephilosophy.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
(e) Giorgio Agamben, The Open, trans. Kevin Attell, (Stanford: Stanford
University, 2004) – explores difference between humans and
animals, through an investigation of Heidegger.

38. ‘Open To, Open(ness), and the Open as Exposure and
Appearance in the Presence of Dasein’
• The words that surround this concept are many:
gap, space, unconcealed, plainly seen, in public
notice or view, unenclosed, without cover,
opportunity, without obfuscation, free from
obstruction, access or passage, affording
unrestricted access or entry, bare, exposed,
revealed, vulnerable, not finished or completed,
disclose, available, to spread out, expand, unfold.
• the sense of open as the act of opening to
• the quality of being in a state of openness
• the open in which things may emerge (ground for
world)
Source: Cooksey (2005)

39. Open Source as a Philosophical Topic
• Thinking the open in a deeply engaged way
is pressing to the coming century as thinking
liberty was to the eighteenth century in
Europe and the Americas. Its common use in
phrases ranging from “an open mind” to
“being open to” is matched by professional
and academic language such as “open
systems,” “open societies,” “open
development models,” and “open access”
… [and] “open university”
Source: http://opensourcephilosophy.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Philosophy