HI Jeffrey – thanks for copying me into your tweet – I have had a quick look at Martin Oliver’s paper, which ironically is in a closed journal 😉 But despite that I agree that openness is more complex than the open/closed binary implies.

Roy Williams and I wrote about this in a paper we published in 2013 –

Williams, R., & Mackness, J. (2013). Open Research and Open Learning. Scientific Journal of Educational Technology, 2(1). http://www.uajournals.com/campusvirtuales/index.php/en/

– where we were exploring our own shift from closed to open researchers and practitioners.

In line with our work on the Footprints of Emergence, we see openness as being on a continuum from closed to open and from prescribed to emergent. Our own development as open researchers has been emergent. This is what we wrote at the end of our paper (p.20/21)

>>>>> Openness is clearly a complicated issue. There are issues of sustainability which have been around in Open Source debates for many years. There are also a whole range of ethical issues on ‘digital rights’, both social and personal, e.g. the questions of privacy and individual’s rights to their own data.

Openness does not mean handing over all your thoughts and writing, co-constructed knowledge etc. for free to some previously unknown private institution – it means a change of attitude (spirit, psychology, becoming, being) at an individual level and a change of culture at an institutional level. Openness therefore needs much more research to fully understand it and this research in itself needs to be more open. In other words, openness and emergence are linked to agency, to developing capabilities, and contributing to a sustainable learning ecology for learning and research.

The development of open learning to be open is an emergent process. <<<<<

This seems to align with Martin Oliver's thinking but is expressed in different terms, I think.