Principles of openness in education
The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto, which beautifully expresses the value of openness in education.
Excerpt from the Manifesto:
“5. The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.
8. The multi-purposing and multiple channeling of humanistic knowledge: no channel excludes the other. This is an abundance based economy, not one based upon scarcity. It values the COPY more highly than ORIGINALS and restores to the word COPY its original meaning of abundance: COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE.
10. Co-creation is one of the founding features of the digital turn in the human sciences, because of the greater complexity. But this collaborative turn doesn’t exclude … perhaps there is a space of hermetic works of the mad individual.
12. Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.
13. Dedefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.
14. Wiki-nomics is the new social, cultural, and economic reality. Technologies and content are mass produced, mass authored, and mass administered. Social media produce culture.
19. Digital humanities promote a flattening of the relationship between masters and disciples. A dedefinition of the roles of professor and student, expert and non-expert.”