This lecture looks at the global context of who produces, designs, shares and researches open educational practices and who they are for and who uses them to prepare for the Week 10 Learning Fair.
The aims of this course can be seen to be directly in line with those often associated with the educational turn, of widening access/broadening participation in art, aims that precede and exceed this 'turn' and relate and/or diverge with wider attempts historically and presently at widening participation in further and higher education globally through the expansion of open learning.
Who is 'opening access' and for whom? What is the context and in what ways is artistic learning closed/narrow that we would seek to broaden participation in it? What is artistic learning?
The impetus to create OER's and open models of education within the context of contemporary art and the educational turn can in part framed, as outlined below from The Curatorial Dictionary, as part of wider attempts to 'democratise access to knowledge.' We can see this desire for the 'democratisation of access to knowledge' in the university within Widening Participation departments, MOOCs, and Public Engagement programmes and the Edinburgh University's Centre for Open Learning courses which are largely fee paying. Within galleries and museums we can see this manifest in the rise of public engagement programming and attempts to engage local communities, with some institutions trying to take on the role of 'part gallery, part community centre, part academy.' (See New Institutionalism) The activity of self organised art schools around the early 00's could similarly be tied to this impetus.
Key concepts to unpick within this are:
OER's and open forms of education tend to go for broad dissimentation as a strategy and ease of (digital) access. In a similar way, public art institutions tend towards this strategy, counting their success based on audience figures and demographics.