Activity 2.3 - Researching Openness

This activity asks us to research two areas of openness that are less familiar to us. It referred to a Wordle, which had mainly words that I've heard of and even know something about. So, the first topic, I picked because I wasn't sure what it was. The second, I picked because I'm thinking I might link my project to this area and therefore I figured I should find out more about it.

1. Media repository

I'd never heard this phrase before but once I Googled it, I realised it was pretty obvious. It's basically an online collection of 'stuff'. It can be photos, journals, blogs... practically any kind of data that can be stored, searched, uploaded, downloaded and so on. There are some well known media repositories, such as Flickr and various online libraries. Having got that far, I came to an abrupt halt. I tried to find out who's doing research in this area but it was really difficult to find anything useful. As it's not an area I'm particularly excited about, I stopped there.

2. Innovation

Going from something quite specific, I then picked a topic that is huge! As I've been thinking about ideas for my project, I'm drawn to this as the theme. Innovation is a word that is banded around quite a lot. All teachers who want to become someone, aspire to be innovative. ICT teachers, especially, leap after the latest innovations. But what really is it?

When I was brainstorming ideas in Activity 1.5, I looked up a Google definition of innovation and it was all about new ways of doing established tasks. Again, it was difficult to find definitive information about the big names in innovation through a Google search. Maybe this is too big a topic. I mean there must be hundreds of top researchers, researching innovation!

Narrowing down slightly, I focussed on openness and innovation. I'm interested in where these two areas overlap. In doing this, I found out about the Agency for Open Culture. It's an agency that centres in on humanitarian issues and post-conflict problem solving. Their mantra is "open knowledge for open societies", which sent my thoughts back to that Veletsianos article and the first assumption about Open Scholarship.

There are several big annual conferences which bring together openness and innovation. My personal favourite is the BETT show, which I try to get to most years. Although openness at BETT is variable, there are a lot of speakers, exhibitors and visitors who are really into open education and the whole sharing of resources idea. Another one, that I hadn't heard of is LINQ, (Learning Innovations and Learning Quality). The motto for this year's conference was "The need for change in education: openness as default?"

I also looked for some academic works on this topic and found articles by:

• Norm Friesen & Judith Murray
• George Veletsianos
• Andy Lane & KJ Vandorp
• R John Robertson (JISC)

I don't think the area of innovation/openness in education is something that is particular to a specific time or place. It could be argued that it is new to this generation but I think that is a slightly arrogant view. In one way or another, educators have been coming up with new ideas and sharing them with other teachers since the beginning of time. It's just that now it's all happening online and technology is making it easier and wider-reaching.