Jim Groom in SPAAAAACE. #oer14

Ok, how about this as a proposition:

“Open Education, as we know it, is predicated on the ability to share and use material without constraint – and this is a capacity baked in to the underpinnings of the internet. But the internet is changing.

• In the UK, as in China and in many other parts of the world, the government has the right to define what can and cannot be seen on the internet.
• In the US the demise of Net Neutrality means that this right to filter and constrain is now owned by those who provide your data connection.
• A globalised “national security” industry has been reading and analysing our online activity. Despite our scandalised responses, this is still happening.
• And across the world our ability to define and develop our internet selves as constrained by the actions of the entities that host this information, and even by the shape of the containers we are invited to pour ourselves into.
• Though we once seemed on the point of solving the issue of sharing data between environments, this is again becoming harder. And it is becoming harder by deliberate design.
• All of this, is constrained even more finely by the awakening “corporate internet”, where everything that we share could have repercussions on our ability to work and earn.

The internet is not the same as it once was. And it is likely to become a harsher, less welcoming, less forgiving place.

This session is not a session to make you feel good about sharing your resources, or opening up your courses. We will be looking at the way we as actors entered the online stage, and the actions we have made upon it, throughout our connected lives.

Above all we will be talking about the idea of ownership – a hugely unpopular idea that I still feel a little uncomfortable about. But this is the nature of this workshop. We will be taking a long, hard look at exactly what we are doing. And we may not like the answers we get.

A “domain of one’s own”, in the light of such doommongering, may seem very little. But the idea of using and supporting “space” online, rather than accounts or platforms, is at once an old fashioned idea and a revolutionary one.”

Bloody hell, eh? This is how Jim Groom and I introduced our session on Reclaim Hosting at the OER14 conference in Newcastle at the end of March. At least, that’s how I did it. Jim is such a slacker I had to beam him in via specialised equipment (no Andrew Ng-ing here).

The “ghost of Jim Groom” as delegates dubbed the assembly (in reality a hatstand, tablecloth, poster tube, blue spotlight and cheap lo-res projector) was able to address the session and engage in discussion with me and others.

The session involved various conversations across time (via the gift of Martin Hawksey’s Paleophone*) speaking to a 1994, 2006 and 2014 Jim Groom about the state of online learning at that time. We intercut this with participants talking and thinking about the way that they first experienced interacting with and creating with the internet, and the way that they now construct their digital identity/identities.

What struck me here is the way that the optimism of the early years, which kind of reached a peak in 2006, had been replaced by a caution and a reluctance to experiment. The big difference was between the Jim of ’06 and the (bald!) Jim of ’14.

Open Education has lived through the peak of “Web 2.0” craziness, and the current retreat to the ever-welcoming embrace of the LMS is something that has taken many involved in the movement by surprise. But looked at from a wider cultural perspective (alas, we didn’t have much time to get into this during the session) we can see that the wider emphasis on measurable impact and control within our lives more generally.

There are few arguments more difficult to make to an organisation than the argument for “fast, cheap and out of control”.

What Reclaim Hosting begins to offer is a way to have our own space, were we own and manage (or not) what we want to share. I connect to it via some of the emphasis on individual and team agency above institutional activity that the latter days of UKOER got into. Others may (or may not) agree.

But I’m iterating closer and closer to the Von Hippell model of innovation where “lead users”, or individual agents and small groups, are solving problems under their own initiative. A wise organisation knows to at least permit (and if possible, support) these innovations and help them become generalised as needed. A less wise one buys in tools or practice that look innovative from elsewhere.

As a simple way of bringing an experimental space to organisational academic practice, reclaim hosting is a hugely important move. In open education – a space now rapidly being colonised by organisational interia and being eaten away at the edges by silicon valley, we are more in need of experimentation than ever.

What will you do with your space?