Books I've Read
Open Education and Education for Openness
Open Education and Education for Openness
Co-edited with Rodrigo Britez
The essays in this edited collection reflect on the nature of open education resources, where the question on openness for education emerges. What is remarkable today are the ways that teachers and institutions now begin to form part of the processes of global exchange and production of a network of global educational commons. The question about the significance of this development, their limits and the consequences for practitioners and institutions from the perspective of teachers is extremely complex. For example, the policy agenda of institutions, states, and international organizations related to the regulation of new technologies facilitates the existence and viability of those resources. This has consequences for the ways that those resources are used and produced by educators. Contributors to this collection, each on their own way, argue that Open Education involves a commitment to openness and is therefore inevitably a political and social project. This books ends with a challenge for those engaged in exploring the potential impacts and possibilities of open education initiatives. The open education paradigm and its consequences for educators and learners speak of an uneven geography where the access to technological infrastructure does not necessarily imply freedom or openness. In those instances, openness in education related to open education initiatives requires an engagement in research about the ways in which policy, cultural, digital and educational environments facilitate a political commitment to open systems of knowledge production and distribution. One thing is sure, as the essays in this book demonstrated so clearly, these developments promise an implicit paradigm of openness and democratic collaboration in education that remains to be realized.
Like (1)Derrida, Politics and Pedagogy: Deconstructing the Humanities.
Derrida, Politics and Pedagogy: Deconstructing the Humanities.
Co-authored with Gert Biesta
Jacques Derrida is, arguably, the foremost philosopher of the humanities and their place in the university. Over his long career he was concerned with the humanities' fate, status, place, and contribution. Through his deconstructive readings and writings, Derrida reinvented the Western tradition by attending closely to those texts which constitute it. He redefined its procedures and protocols, questioning and commenting upon the relationship between commentary and interpretation, the practice of quotation, the delimitation of a work and its singularity, its signature, and its context: the whole form of life of literary culture, together with the textual practices and conventions that shape it. From early in his career, Derrida occupied a marginal in-between space - simultaneously textual, literary, philosophical, and political - a space that permitted him a freedom to question, to speculate, and to draw new limits to humanitas. With an up-to-date synopsis, review, and critique of his writings, this book demonstrates Derrida's almost singular power to reconceptualize and reimagine the humanities, and examines his humanism in relation to politics and pedagogy.