OpenEd 2009: Free, open, libre, gratis

The OpenEd 2009 conference is happening at UBC, Canada, in just a few days’ time (August 12 -14). I’m not attending this year, but if I was, I’d want to hear:

• Keynote from Catherine Ngugi (Open Educational Resources Africa)
• Brandon Muramatsu (MIT) on auto-transcription and improving resource discoverability
• Christopher J. Mackie (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) on sustainability

Also worth keeping an eye on the ‘Pitch Page’ on the Unconference wiki to see what interesting ideas bubble up before/during the event.

Teemu Leinonen from the FLOSSE Posse has been writing interestingly about the language of “open education”, as it is used at the conference.

Teemu asks, if the conference title is making an intentional reference to the use of open software (“open” as in “free”), then: “why not then using the word free or libre to make it clear?”.

Now, while I accept that the language we use to describe things has many implications (some of them political in nature), and while I realise that some (many) people care deeply about the precise definitions of terms such as “open education”, I’d like to step back from that particular debate. From my perspective, the last thing the OER community needs is to alienate potential supporters and advocates because of low-level wrangling over terminology. “Libre knowledge” (preferred by Chris Harvey); “free learning” (Stephen Downes); “free and open education” (Teemu Leinonen) – even the differences between these three terms, with their subtle shifts of emphasis, appear basically slight and, in my book, speak more of personal orientation and professional experience than of any fundamental difference of interpretation.

A good term is a good discriminator. We should be aware that it’s perfectly possible to overload a term such as “OER” with more meaning than it can intelligibly carry. How widely understood is any particular term? While “libre” (as used in the acronym, FLOSS) is well-known and well-understood within software developer communities, and to a lesser extent within educational communities, it is still not widely recognised or understood by the public at large. Whereas the term “open” is. The idea of the Open University has, as Teemu points out, an established legacy / role in education. It's true that this legacy does not "traditionally" refer explicitly to the use of OER or free/open source software within education, but increasingly, the two go together. Why not accept that positive legacy, and build on it?

What I really like in Teemu’s post, is his points about language learning and the role of the humanities in contributing to the development of inter-cultural awareness (or “literacy”, another important educational concept that we seem all too ready to bandy around these days). Incidentally, these points seem characteristically European to me. Eminently civilised, too. :-)