policies. Open source software gives us principles of freedom of use, mutual benefit in sharing resources and the significance of licences. This didn’t spread much beyond the specialised community of software developers. Lastly, web 2.0 provides the cultural context within which the openness becomes widely recognised and expected. A list of general principles inherited from these three strands might be:
- Freedom to reuse
- Open access
- Free cost
- Easy use
- Digital, networked content
- Social, community based approaches
- Ethical arguments for openness
- Openness as an efficient model
These are digital, networked transformations; the nonrivalrous nature of digital content and the easy distribution of content and conversations online, underlies all of them. And while it is possible to think of them as a cluster of interconnecting principles, there are camps, or smaller clusters, within this general grouping. For instance, the notion that content should be free in terms of price was not a driving concern of the open universities or the open source software movement, although open source software often is free. It was with the development of web 2.0 that free became an expectation. One can see the various aspects of openness in education as aligning themselves with some of these principles, but not all of them. For instance, the commercial MOOCs are taking the free cost and open access element, but not necessarily the freedom to reuse. It is because of this blend of principles that I have resisted a simple definition of openness in education
