There are many efforts to “open” education and scholarship: open access, open data, open educational resources, open licensing, open pedagogy, open scholarship, open science, open source, and more. But why are we opening all these things?
OKP
Opening knowledge practices (OKP) is what we are calling the effort to enable people, when they are engaged in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge as students, teachers, researchers, scholars, and librarians, to develop and demonstrate (agencies) themselves (identities), their understanding (literacies), their skills, and their connections to other people (communities) throughout their lives for their own benefit, for the common good, and to participate in a just and sustainable society.
Learn more about OKP in my inaugural post and in the posts collected below, listed in reverse chronological order.
Who needs digital skills?
Everyone, that’s who.
A central premise of opening knowledge practices (OKP) is that everyone benefits when people augment their literacies, skills, identities and communities with digital practices. I’ll say it again: everyone benefits — not just practicing individuals, but society as a whole. Just like everyone benefits when people learn to read and write.
So OKP is more than yet another call for technology education or job training, it’s a call to open knowledge practices as widely as possible, for people of all ages, in all stages of life or lines of work, whatever their existing literacies, skills, identities and communities.
Opening Knowledge Practices
I’ve become increasingly interested in how I can help empower people to have greater agency in their lives to build a better life for everyone through our mutual engagement in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge, an effort I’m calling “opening knowledge practices” or OKP for short.
Why do I call it “opening knowledge practices”?