Open Language

UCNISS submitted an open tender to the Australian Paralympic Committee this week.
We submitted a proposal to produce A History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia, and to establish a repository of media and digitised primary resources to compliment the text.
The tender was written as a Wikiversity page.
The process of becoming open has been a great personal learning experience. I am fortunate to have had Leigh Blackall and James Neill as my guides and to access Stephen Downes’ OLDaily to extend my horizons.
Stephen has presented his ideas on The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning this week. I liked his discussion of a language of open learning:

• We have to stop treating online resources as though they were ‘content’
• The people who actually use them have moved far beyond that
• These artifacts constitute a new language; they are a large, complex, post-linguistic vocabulary
• That’s why they need to be open

Our open tender has received a great deal of interest and comment. The objections to the project we are proposing to the Australian Paralympic Committee underscore for me how important it is to revisit and develop the forms an open language may take.
I am still waiting for the arrival of Stanley Fish’s book in my local bookshop and hope the issues raised there will help me develop my open language and practice.
Advocacy of openness requires many literacies. I am keen to explore how the form of our writing contributes to the flourishing of a sustainable, collaborative approach to the produsing of open educational resources.