Submissions:2017/Understanding Openness: Two Competing Paradigms

Title

Understanding Openness: Two Competing Paradigms

Theme (optional)

Education

Type of submission

presentation

Author

Paola Ricaurte

E-mail address

pricaurt@itesm.mx

Username

Paolaricaurte

Affiliation

Tecnologico de Monterrey

Abstract

Openness has become part of the imaginary of our contemporary technoscapes (Appadurai 1990), a buzzword, and a cause for many social movements and communities. For this reason, we need to approach to the concept of Openness from a critical perspective. On the one hand, openness can be easily adopted by corporate companies as a mechanism to obtain value from data. On the other, can be understood as a critical cultural praxis (Negri 2004, Lessig 2006) where knowledge and information are conceived as commons (Ostrom 1990).

These competing paradigms need to be analyzed and understood by governments, educational institutions and teachers in order to design public policies, education models, incorporate emerging pedagogies and develop competencies among students. If we agree on considering knowledge as commons, as teachers we need to promote an educative culture and pedagogical practices that don't contribute to the concentration of power and capital through knowledge. (Ricaurte 2016)

Wikipedia understands knowledge as commons (Hess & Ostrom 2011) and believes every single person is a potential contributor to enrich this common resource. Our challenge for the next years is to understand how to protect, thrive and share knowledge commons in the digital era. Because of this, we propose through a case study of two learning environments, Wikipedia and Google, to carry out an analysis that allows us to compare these two models of knowledge society materialization and pedagogical decisions. We chose these two learning environments because they constitute the most representative cases of two opposed paradigms in the Internet universe.

This session aims to contribute to the debate about open knowledge production and education. The attendees will gain a) a deep understanding of the main elements of the actual knowledge production system, b) a theoretical framework about knowledge commons, c) insight into learning environments and pedagogical perspectives, d) a practical case study of Wikipedia as part of the paradigm of the Open Knowledge Society.

Length of presentation

15 min

Special requests

Projector

Preferred room size

15

Wikimania submission?

No

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

No

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

1. Add your username here.