Educate the world, don't just feed it

Some of my Twitter buddies have reminded me today of the torrid picture that was taken of me jokingly emulating Edupunk Poster Boy Jim Groom. There's an image of me floating around the web with 'PUNK IT UP' on my knuckles. I guess it's timely, because I travel to Hamburg tomorrow to keynote the German Moodlemoot conference (#mootDE11n) on Thursday, and one of the key themes of my speech will be 'do it yourself' education, the ethos of edupunk. My title is 'The Road Ahead is Open', and I will cover a spectrum of open approaches, including open learning, open educational resources, and the open bricollage approach espoused by Levi Strauss. Ultimately, the entire speech will boil down to a plea for people to adopt an open scholarship approach to their learning and teaching.

Open Scholarship, as I have previously suggested, is much more than a term denoting open practices. Open Scholarship is a way of life, based on the belief that to share your ideas is much better than to hoard them. It's also about opening yourself and your ideas up for constructive criticism, so that in receiving feedback from your PLN, you will learn and grow together. Let me ask you this: What possible purpose is there to hide knowledge away from people who need it to survive and make their lives better? Stephen Heppell, in the 2011 Plymouth e-Learning Conference stunned us all by declaring that around half a billion children in the world (like the ones in the picture above) are outside of education, and don't have a hope of even seeing the inside of textbook, let alone a classroom. And yet all it would take to educate the lot of them would be 5 billion US dollars. It got me thinking. There are a few super-rich people in the world who have this kind of money, and more, in their personal fortunes. Certainly, many of the banks or corporations around the world are rich enough to have this kind of cash to spare. But how many of them would be willing to stump some up to educate our world?

Several years ago, we all gave money to a world wide appeal to feed the starving of the world. The 'Feed the World' campaign was a triumph of compassionate fund raising, but it simply solved a problem in the there and then. Poverty and starvation still exist and although we can't cure it, we can educate people who are in poverty if we simply share the wealth and knowledge about.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you show him how to fish you feed him for life. In many cultures, if you educate a man, he is self sufficient. Yet if you educate a woman, you educate an entire family. How are we going to meet the challenge of this century? The challenge to educate people out of poverty? Open scholarship will go a long way to resolving that one, because if everyone shares what they know, and we don't greedily hoard that knowledge away, or capilulate to the invasion of the edubusinesses, the world will be a far more equitable place.

Educate the world, don't just feed it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.