Tools of Technological and Intellectual Change: OER and the Democratization of Knowledge Production

Much has been written about the production of knowledge, the validity or social value of new forms of knowledge, the public debates about the politics and/or (im)proper practices of access to knowledge, and its organization and dissemination within the academic realm. Most famously, Michel Foucault first examined the ways in which the production of knowledge within the human sciences, from the eighteenth century onwards, became bound up with dominant political interests of social control (Foucault, 1977/1995). Based on this bold assertion, the school has been seen as an apparatus that exerts and legitimizes the power and knowledge of the state, while the university has steadily become a complex web of liberties and privileges that, in my view, the majority white population takes for granted. I have no intention here of even trying to review, or unpack for that matter, the multifarious debates about power and knowledge relations within our school system by way of entering into a Foucauldian discourse analysis. The production of knowledge is most commonly understood, in the end, both as an outcome and a process of pedagogical decisions made in a context of technological and intellectual conditions.

Recognizing, however, that the recent efforts to rethink knowledge production by introducing Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption programs will help us better understand, on the one hand, how social exclusion has long been implemented in higher education in the United States, and, on the other, how these same efforts have come to undermine larger exclusionary implications in education by enabling accessibility to the teaching material. Therefore, by widening our scope beyond the value and serious significance of adopting OER in our teaching strategies, I contend that the ethos behind this movement has been to democratize the production of knowledge as a process and outcome. To put it differently, OER not only produces knowledge but also willfully rejects commercialized forms of education, generated by the steadfast permeation of capitalist relations in the U.S. educational system over the past four decades. In this respect, I further argue that OER is an ethical call for, and thus the first important step towards, democratizing education and liberating it from profit-driven conditions that continue to deny access and opportunity to socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

Continue Reading OER and the Democratization of Knowledge Production on the Graduate Center Library Blog.

This is the eleventh in a series of posts by participants in the 2019 Open Pedagogy Fellowship. Fellows will share insight to the process of converting a syllabus to open or zero-cost resources, and/or review a workshop from the Open Educational Resources (OER) Bootcamp held in mid-January. It is also published on our Open Pedagogy blog roll.