History Matters

The highlight for me of the recent Open Education conference in Vancouver was Norm Friesen's intellectually engaging exploration of the historical foundations of open education, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Heritage of Open Education. Friesen, who is the Canada Research Chair in E-Learning at Thompson Rivers University, made a powerful argument for why understanding our intellectual heritage will help to inform current discussions around open education as well as educational technology and e-learning.

Friesen suggested that rather than framing discussions of open education in terms of the simplistic, "world is flat" perspectives of writers such as Thomas Friedman, we should be looking to a much broader and more diverse intellectual heritage that includes Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Paulo Friere, and the popular education movement.

"All of these precedents and precursors powerfully illustrate that open education should not be understood principally in terms of new forms of software development or economic competition. Education and its opening-up can be much more than a “mad dash,” as Friedman puts it, to compete with “the flat-world field…of 1.5 billion new workers in the global economic labor force.” Instead of focusing on competition in a world or a game whose parameters are already set, education has the chance to be much more about recognizing and even changing those parameters."

Watch Norm Friesen's presentation: