'We are all game-changers now': open education - a study in disruption

‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption is being written as part of an ongoing collaboration between Mute Publishing and the Media Department at Coventry School of Art & Design. It has emerged from a shared interest in, among other things, the ability of new forms of networked technologies, open access digital publishing, collaborative web tools and sociable spaces to enhance educational activity.

The background to these are Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media and key theme of Open Media, and Mute Publishing’s explorations of the relationships  between creativity, technology and society since its founding in 1994.  The efforts of these respective organisations include, but are not limited to:

●    Coventry University’s proactive stance on open access and open education, including:
○    A bold, yet critically nuanced, Open Media policy
○    The Media Department’s Open Access mandate – the 3rd Green OA Mandate for a Humanities Department in the World,  1st Nationally, UK's 24th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 92nd
○    The Media Department’s ‘Open’ courses, including  PICBOD, PHONAR, and Creative Media Activism, the longest running of which dates back to January 2010

•    Further Open Media-related initiatives, i.e.
■    Liquid Theory TV
■    The Jisc funded Living Books About Life series
■    The University’s Digital Media Grand Challenge initiative and newly established Centre for Disruptive Media

●    Mute Publishing’s eighteen-year archive of editorial, providing analysis of networked technologies’ effects on culture and society, including:
○    A back catalogue of 6000+ web articles
○    Existing publishing output of 50+ magazines, five books, a range of special projects and filmed live events
●    Mute Publishing’s ongoing experiments with digital publishing, e.g.:
○    changes in the material form of the print magazine (six different formats)
○    exploring the relationship of print issues to online content/archives/user activity
○    developing publishing tools and digital services for audience/community/users
●    Mute Publishing’s open software development under the name ‘OpenMute’

In Spring 2012, Coventry decided to structure the relationship more actively so as to draw out a strategic direction for its collaboration with Mute Publishing. It drew up a commission for Mute Publishing to work with the department’s Open Media Group to produce the following multi-part project, designed as a critical experiment with both collaborative, processual writing and concise, medium-length forms of shared attention:

1.    A collaboratively written book engaging critically with the burgeoning phenomenon of Open Education (OpenCourseWare, MOOCs,  TED, Wikiversity, The Public School et al), co-authored by Coventry’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing.

2.    A public, open access, collaborative research wiki, where an initial, provisional, very much tbc version of this book on Open Education can be made available as it emerges and begins to take shape as part of the Culture Machine Liquid Books series from Open Humanities Press. Publishing an initial version of ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption  on a research wiki  is also designed ensure it is openly available to be read, commented upon, edited, updated, rewritten, reversioned and used in the production of derivative works by the wider community of researchers, teachers and learners. 

The second part of this project, the ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption collaborative research wiki, is available here.

For more on Mute and its history, see Nick Thoburn, ‘Ceci n’est pas un magazine: The Politics of Hybrid Media in Mute Magazine’, New Media and Society, December 5, 2011; and Julian Stallabrass, ‘Digital Partisans: Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net’, New Left Review, 2012.