Open Learning - Sharing and Openness

I must admit, I am not that open when it comes to my teaching. I do discuss education with colleagues and I do explain my thoughts on how to teach a particular subject. But, I seldom share my actual teaching material with my colleagues. I only give this material to my students.

So, with this in mind I must say that I have totally changed my views during this topic. I listened to David Wiley that argued that without sharing there is no education. And from this I realized that sharing is not only about sharing materials with students. It is also about sharing with colleagues. I personally have a lot of teaching material that I am sure could be of benefit for other teachers. And if it is of benefit for other teachers, then it will benefit more students. So, indirectly more students get access to the things that I am trying to teach. And that would be awesome!

Having realized that I am probably ready to be open I soon also realized some possible issues. First of all, I live in an environment where colleagues do not readily share material with each other. How would my colleagues then react if I suddenly started to share? Another question that came into my mind was the question of reusability? My material is created for a specific context and even though my colleagues teach similar subjects they might have another context. In other words, is it possible to use my material in the settings of another teacher?

Having raised those issues for myself I got really pleased when I read Chapter 6 in The battle for open - How openness won and why it doesn't feel like victory by Martin Weller. It became clear to me that my issues are common issues that others have raised long before me. Cultures with teachers that don´t really want to share is nothing strange. And regarding reusability, Weller refers to something called Wiley's paradox which states that learning material needs to have context in order to be useful for learners. Wiley's paradox also states that learning material should have as little context as possible in order to be reusable. So, we need both context and reusability for our open learning material but, according to Wiley's paradox, context and reusability seems impossible to combine.

In conclusion, I realize that there is a lot of work for me before I am able to share my material effectively. At this time, I don´t know how to do it. But, at least I know that others have struggled before me. Hopefully, I can learn from the stories that they share.